HL Deb 19 July 2000 vol 615 cc1123-30

9.33 p.m.

Baroness Amos rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st June be approved [23rd Report from the Joint Committee].

The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I beg to move that the draft Social Security Amendment (Students) Regulations 2000, which were laid before this House on 21st June be approved.

The draft regulations before your Lordships today amend existing regulations in three ways. First, they improve the interface between the educational maintenance system and social security provision by introducing new provisions for students who are recovered ill and former carers and who want to resume their studies but are required to wait until the education institution permits them to do so.

Secondly, these draft regulations tighten the definition of full-time student for social security purposes to reinforce the policy intention that in general full-time students are not eligible for benefit.

Thirdly, we are taking the opportunity to introduce a better alignment of definitions across the income related benefits. These changes are technical.

In 1998, seeking to clarify the definition of full-time student for social security purposes, we referred draft regulations to the Social Security Advisory Committee. The committee conducted a public consultation exercise, and recommended that we look again at the provisions for students who, for a number of reasons, interrupt their studies.

The Command Paper before your Lordships today comprises three main elements: first, the original draft regulations which we referred to the Social Security Advisory Committee in 1998; secondly, the report produced by the advisory committee following its public consultation exercise on the draft 1998 regulations; thirdly, our response to the advisory committee's report. In addition, there are the draft regulations before your Lordships today.

Part-time students are eligible to claim social security benefits just like anyone else. But full-time students are in the main not eligible for social security benefits. This is for the very good reason that full-timestudents are supported by the educational maintenance system, which is designed for their needs; social security is not.

We already make an exception to that rule for prescribed vulnerable group full-time students—for example the long-term sick and lone parents—not because they are students but because they are vulnerable people who need additional support. Those vulnerable group full-time students are therefore eligible for social security benefits—typically income support and housing benefit.

The advisory committee's report focused on the interface between social security and educational maintenance provision. As we make clear in our published response to the committee, we are grateful to it for its observations, which we considered carefully. In summary, the committee recommended that we should not proceed with the draft 1998 regulations, but that we should review the interface between social security and educational maintenance provision.

I have already explained that these regulations clarify the policy that in general full-time students are not eligible for social security. I have also reminded noble Lords that we make an exception to that rule for full-time students in vulnerable groups. We now propose to make another exception. Some full-time students have to interrupt their studies because of illness or caring responsibilities. In some of these cases, when they are in a position to resume their studies, their educational establishment may not allow them to do so immediately. They may often have to wait until the beginning of the next academic year. In such circumstances, those "recovered ill" or "former carers" do not receive educational maintenance, nor are they eligible for social security because they have not finished their courses of full-time study.

The draft regulations fill that gap. Because full-time students in that position are expected to make every effort to support themselves—just like other people—these draft regulations provide that they will be eligible to claim Jobseeker's Allowance and, where appropriate, housing benefit, subject to the normal rules. More specifically, the period during which they will be able to claim benefit is from the date of recovery from illness, or the end of their caring duties, until they are able to rejoin their course or the start of the next academic year, whichever is sooner.

The report of the Social Security Advisory Committee made a number of additional points about full-time students who interrupt their studies for other reasons. Your Lordships have copies as part of the Command Paper, but I want to cover some of the detail here. First, as regards sickness, the Government have already acted here: mandatory support from the educational maintenance system has been more than doubled from 28 days to 60 days. If sickness should continue, the relevant education authority has discretion to extend support further. If sickness goes beyond 28 weeks, the student becomes eligible to claim social security benefits as a vulnerable group student as already prescribed in existing regulations.

The committee referred to full-time students who interrupt their studies for other reasons, ranging from academic difficulties to personal or domestic problems. In these cases, support is available from the educational maintenance system at the discretion of the relevant education authority, but officials will continue to keep them under review.

The committee also expressed concern that a full-time student who switched to part time would continue to be treated as a full-time student for social security purposes and therefore would not be eligible to claim benefit. That is not the case in practice. We understand that if a student wishes to change from full-time to part-time study, he or she has to abandon the full-time course. If that happens, the student is eligible to claim social security because our policy is that part-time students are eligible.

The draft regulations respond to a further recommendation by the committee. We originally proposed that, for social security purposes, postgraduates should continue to be treated as engaged on their course full time after the formal part of the course has ended, but while they are writing up a thesis or awaiting an oral examination. The committee asked that we reconsider it, and we have.

We are not proceeding with that amendment.This is not the end of the story. We continue to keep student provision under review. The regulations we are debating today represent positive progress in maintaining the interface between social security and educational maintenance. I commend the regulations to the House. I beg to move.

Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 21st June be approved [23rd Report from the Joint Committee]—(Baroness Amos.)

9.45 p.m.

Earl Russell

My Lords, I must declare an interest in these regulations as a university teacher. They directly affect the interests of no fewer than three students for whom I am responsible at the moment. They affect the interests of students for whom I am responsible every year. These problems take up more time and effort in my working life than any other professional duty I have. I have seen the interface between social security and educational maintenance ruin the lives of large numbers of people who should have had good and successful careers.

These regulations are a missed opportunity. The Minister is a professional and she will not take personally anything that I say. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham, with whose office I have corresponded on many of these cases and on a great many occasions and been received with her usual courtesy and thoroughness.

These regulations were introduced by the Government, in their own words, because court judgments had, cast doubt on whether the present Regulations fully support the Government's stated policy intention: that a full-time student is to be regarded as such unless or until he completes, finally abandons, or is finally dismissed from, his course of study". That sounds fine in theory until one begins to apply it to real cases. Then it becomes a great deal more difficult. One would have thought that it was a basic point of principle that everybody should be entitled either to educational maintenance as a student or to social security maintenance as an ordinary citizen. The problem arises because for a great many people in a great many different anomalous circumstances, that is not the case. Lord Justice Evans, giving judgment in the Webber case in 1997, said that in this case, the statute is sought to be interpreted…in order to create, for no apparent reason, 'an anomalous class of people left to destitution without state support of any kind'. I would require express words of the utmost clarity to persuade me that Parliament intended to produce that disgraceful result". It is my daily responsibility to explain to distressed students that Parliament did intend to produce that result—and it is a very painful process. It brings our political system into disrepute. The trouble is that it was a misconceived policy intention in the first place. When one sets out to clarify a misconceived policy intention, one very often makes confusion worse confounded.

The first misapprehension, as the Minister stated it in 1990, was that students had withdrawn from the labour market. If only they had. The Minister said that students are supported by the educational maintenance system. The case is that they are in part supported by the educational maintenance system, supplemented by a large amount of part-time earnings. The concept of the full-time student is just about dead. The only surviving full-time students I know are those with rich parents, and there are not that many.

The second misapprehension is that student support covers 52 weeks; it does not. They reach their overdraft limits usually around the last week of term. The Minister talked about a concession for sick students of social security becoming available after 28 weeks. They will have been reduced to total destitution well before those 28 weeks are concluded. I think, in particular, of one person; a student estranged from his parents and therefore unable to go home in vacations. He is regularly in my room every June explaining that, unless extra money can be found from somewhere to get him through the long vacation, he has to withdraw immediately.

The Minister will invoke access funds, as she has done. However, access funds are not on a scale to support people through 22 weeks of the year. They are not on a scale to support any student through 28 weeks. I am reminded of the time I was five when I started to feed the hippopotamus at the Philadelphia zoo. I had a bag of peanuts and threw one to him. To my great pride it landed plum in the middle of his tongue. The hippopotamus simply kept his mouth open waiting to be fed. The position here is just about as appropriate to the occasion as that.

The Minister also mentioned discretionary funds from local authorities. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis of Heigham made a study of this subject. She knows how difficult it is to get local authorities to dedicate funds to that purpose. I shall not make a speech about the financial difficulties of local authorities; I think that people are familiar with them.

The next misapprehension is that the boundary between being a student and not being a student is non-porous; it is totally porous, especially since the introduction of modular courses, into which universities have been considerably encouraged by people from within the Government and the Department for Education. When dealing with re-sits, which do happen, people may have to go through the process of preparing for a paper again. It may not be offered for examination until the same time the following year. Obviously, they will not be full-time students all through that year, so there we have a problem.

The Minister has allowed for cases of current sickness. However, in my experience the two most common reasons for students having to take time off are either time lost because of past illness, which is not allowed for, or that their debts have become so great that they need to earn money full-time before they can return. Sadly, that is very common indeed. Neither situation is allowed for.

I have not forgotten one of my own pupils who first discovered the existence of that problem in the summer of 1991 when the disentitlement to social security was only a few weeks old. Early in the long vacation she was found to have a cyst and was told that it had to be operated on. It provoked the same sort of fear it might provoke in anyone. Her father had just gone bankrupt. Her contribution cheque had just bounced. Clearly, she would need to spend her long vacation working. She asked me what money she would have to support her should the lump be malignant. The answer was that she could get support only if she withdraw finally from the college, detached herself from the educational institution totally and gave up hope of taking a degree. That was the situation in 1991. As far as I can see, it will remain the situation after the passage of these regulations.

In passing, will the Minister correct one thing she said? She talked about situations in which an educational institution was not willing to take the person back. But if we are dealing with a time in the middle of the long vacation and with somebody who needs regular teaching, in particular with somebody who needs to sit a course which is taught to a class on a regular weekly basis, it would have been a little more relevant to say that the educational institution "was not able" to take them back. When it is individual teaching that is needed, one can easily do it on one's own, and I regularly do. If it is an organised class or an examination, it is not so easy.

I have one final point. These regulations were put before the Social Security Committee in 1998. It made an excellent report, as always, and I thank the committee for that. There was a small cost implication and, because the Government wished to remain within Conservative spending limits, they put off doing anything. I make no comment on that now; it is not germane. But in fact for the first two years this Government had a £3 billion undershoot on Conservative spending limits. Within that £3 billion they could perfectly easily have implemented the small concessions they have now brought in and I do not see why they did not.

Lord Higgins

My Lords, I cannot hope to match the noble Earl's experience in these matters. I have only ever taught at Yale University in America where different circumstances generally prevail, although I did have a number of students who were working their way through college. My best course of action, therefore, is to leave the Minister to reply to the points made by the noble Earl on the basis of his personal experience.

I wish to make just two points. First, can the Minister say, despite the statement in the Secretary of State's reply to the Social Security Advisory Committee that the Government are now seeking to engage in a joined-up approach to these issues between the Secretary of State for Education and Employment and the Department of Social Security, how many students she expects to fall in the gap between the support systems of those two bodies?

My second point echoes a comment made by the noble Earl and relates to paragraph 30 of the conclusion of the Secretary of State's response, which states: The Government acknowledges and regrets the delay in responding to the Report and in proceeding with these Regulations. The Government gave an undertaking to remain within the previous administration's spending plans for the first two years of this Parliament". I find that to be an extraordinary reason. I do not know the precise amount of money involved; but the Government did not give any undertaking to stay within every single sector, broken down, of the previous allocations, and the kind of sums involved would have been well within the margins of error of the financial calculations which existed. At all events, there were clearly other funds available within the limits which the Government set themselves. So If hope that we can hear why a decision was not announced on what the Government proposed to do and whether there was any real justification for the delay which has obviously adversely affected a number of people in the mean time.

10 p.m.

Baroness Amos

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Russell, has always shown a commitment to the welfare of his students; and, indeed, he did so again this evening. Perhaps I may remind him that the main thrust of these regulations is beneficial. The noble Earl asked me a number of questions and mentioned specifically the point that I made in relation to sickness and the mandatory dates and times in terms of support from the educational maintenance system.

In my opening remarks I said that mandatory support from the educational maintenance system has doubled from 28 days to 60 days. If sickness should continue, the relevant education authority has a discretion, at that point, to extend support further. If it goes beyond 28 weeks, that is when the student becomes eligible to claim social security benefits. So there are various points along the way at which the student is eligible for support from the educational maintenance system.

As regards the noble Earl's comments about discretionary funds, I can tell him that we consulted with local authorities. We are concerned that the take-up of discretionary funds has been quite low. So it is clear that we need to improve the flow of information to students. We are also giving further guidance to LEAs in relation to the whole area of discretion. Therefore, we are hoping that the take-up will be much higher. As far as we understand it, the discretion is interpreted sympathetically by most LEAs. On the question of funding. I should stress that the money is not the LEA's own money. The Government give a full specific grant to cover any payments that have been authorised.

The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, asked about the number of students who are falling between the social security system and the education system. Again, the LEAs tell us that very few students approach them for discretionary support. Universities and students need to apply before LEAs can respond. Therefore, I am not able to answer the noble Lord's question in terms of the detail. We are giving students more information about the entitlement. However, if I have any further information in that respect, I shall be happy to write to the noble Lord.

As regards the length of time and the cost involved, the noble Lord talked about our commitment to remain within the spending limits of the previous administration for the first two years of the Parliament. The cost of the concession for "recovered ill" and "former carers" is some £3.5 million. Of course, that has to be considered against other spending priorities. I believe that that point was made in the other place by my honourable friend Angela Eagle who answered these questions last week—

Lord Higgins

Was there not an underspend overall?

Baroness Amos

In looking at any underspend, the noble Lord will understand that we considered a number of different priorities and made our decisions in relation to them. I believe I have answered—

Lord Higgins

Did you still then underspend?

Baroness Amos

I shall be happy to write to the noble Lord further on that matter. However, as I said, we considered a range of other issues and came to conclusions with respect to priorities which I believe we are perfectly entitled to do. On that basis, I commend the regulations to the House.

On Question, Motion agreed to.