Monthly Archives: November 2010

Ruling curtails debate on cuts bills

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The savings accounts and health in pregnancy grant bill had its first reading in the House of Lords on 23 November. The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled, after the third reading in the Commons, that it was a money bill. This means that out of the 21 cuts to the poverty incomes of welfare claimants proposed by the coalition, any amendments to the three of them proposed by the bill cannot be debated in the House of Lords. This approach could be used to prevent the Lords from discussing other money-related changes in legislation.

The bill has been strangled without thought to the consequences. Our greatest concern is that incomes that in all government and independent measures are substantially below the poverty line will suffer cuts – of which the health in pregnancy grant is one – without any assessment of the impact on the health of women of child-bearing age, their foetus or their offspring; or the cost of the consequential mental and physical ill health to the NHS or the economy at large.

The NHS has announced that mental illness already costs the economy £105bn a year, including days lost at work – far more than heart disease, cancer or obesity. The Government Office for Science has shown there is a relationship between debt and mental ill-health. Cutting poverty incomes creates the need to borrow, normally at high interest, for necessities like food and to pay bills like utilities. Claimants of welfare already owed the state £3bn last year due to errors by them and officials in the delivery of benefits.

Lord Bassam’s motion enabling amendments to the bill to be debated and decided in committee in the House of Lords should be supported by peers on Monday 29 November.

The Guardian, 27 November 2010 by Paul Nicolson, Chairman of Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Polly Toynbee made the below comment in her column of the same date.

And how about this? The Speaker has just declared every bill with a cut in it as a “money bill”, and not eligible for Lords debate, amendment or vote. This week the bill cutting the child trust funds, health in pregnancy grant and the savings gateway for low-income families was deemed as a money bill-although the Lords voted on it when Labour originally introduced it.

As there is no appeal against a Speaker’s diktat, Labour is seeking to protect the right of the Lords to debate and scrunitse these bills that have deep social implications. If they can’t, no cuts stand a chance of scrutiny, and the second chamber becomes virtually redundant when cutting is the government’s business. For the first time, a coalition gives the government a majority in the Lords, yet Cameron is stacking in another 67 on their side. Those Lords resisted an elected chamber had better prove their vaunted independence by kicking up an almighty stink at being denied any voice in the main cuts legislation whizzing through Westminster.

Health of newborn babies is put in jeopardy by women’s stress and debt

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The Health in Pregnancy Grant must be one of the most short-lived welfare provisions ever. First mooted in 2007, it was introduced in April 2009 as a one-off payment to help women cope with the additional costs of having a baby, but the coalition Government now wants to abolish it, writes Paul Nicolson.

Labour MP and former head of the Child Poverty Action Group Kate Green has tabled an amendment to the Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Bill that will give the coalition a chance to stop and think about relationship between the cuts and public health. The bill abolishes the £190 Health in Pregnancy Grant that women can apply for at the twenty-fifth week of their pregnancy. The Sure Start Grant for the second child has already gone.

There is a failure in Whitehall thinking about the negative public-health consequenoes of poverty-level welfare, illustrated in a spat between the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department of Health before the May election, and that now continues with the coalition’s cuts. In 2009 we sent to DWP Ministers research by the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, which has international recognition, showing that poor maternal nutrition increases the risks of permanent developmental brain disorder in the foetus, in low birth weight in babies, and mental and physical ill health during a person’s lifetime. Poor cognitive ability and cerebral palsy were highlighted.

We also sent ministers the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s scientifically researched, and publically supported, minimum-income food standard of £44 a week. We asked the DWP to consider whether the unemployment benefit of a woman aged 18 to 25 of £51.85 a week – it is slightly less per head for a couple – can provide a healthy diet and all other necessities before conception and during pregnancy.

The DWP ministers sent the question to the Department of Health ministers to respond. They replied it would not be appropriate to comment; they forwarded our evidence to the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, which refused to comment on the poverty-level incomes of unemployed women and has now been abolished!

This matters. Professor Baroness Findlay told the House of Lords during a debate on the Child Poverty Bill in January that “it is becoming apparent that low birth weights, of which Britain has the highest rate in Western Europe, are associated with poor cognitive abilities and serious brain disorders such as cerebral palsy. Low birth weights in the UK have increased from 6.6 per cent in 1973 to 7.2 per cent in 2008 in England and Wales. The highest in England are 11 per cent in Liverpool and 12 per cent in the City of London.

When adult unemployment pay was first introduced in 1911 at seven shillings (today worth just under £20) a week, it was 22 per cent of average earnings in manufacturing; by 2008 it was 10.5 per cent as a result of tying increases to the Retail Prine Index which does not increase as fast as real earnings, or as the price of essential items like food and fuel. The inadequacy of the RPI coupled with the coalition’s switch to the Consumer Price Index will reduce the increases by £1 a week every year reaching £I0 a week in the tenth year.

The health of newborn babies is put in further jeopardy by women’s stress and debt. The Government Office for Science has related mental illness to personal debt and notes that mental illness costs the economy £77billion a year, now updated to £105 billion by the Department of Health. But the moment the housing-benefit caps become law, councils will debit about one million household’s rent accounts with arrears, which private landlords have said they will enforce through to eviction. The Treasury has made no exceptions for pregnancy. All pastors will be aware that divorces, losing a job or a home are emotionally stressful in the same way as bereavernent.

Withdrawing welfare from women in deep poverty and imposing debts, while allowing the inadequate buying power of jobseeker’s allowance to drift endlessly downwards is a toxic mix of policies damaging to public health. It cannot be justified by the often repeated mantras about dependency, or appeals to the moral hazards associated with welfare payments that are set too high.

By Paul Nicolson, Chairman of Zacchaeus 2000 Trust
Published in The Tablet, 13 November 2010 pp12-13