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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Stephen Crabb)
It is a pleasure to serve again under your chairmanship, Mr Benton.
I thank the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) for securing this short debate on the important subject of women in Wales and the situation under this Government, or any Government. I thought I was coming in here to listen to a debate in the round on women in Wales, but—I hope she forgives me for saying this—in fact we were treated to a speech that was pretty similar to those we have heard in Westminster Hall and on the Floor of the House numerous times in the past three years: a general attack on cuts and welfare reform, dressed up as a debate about women in Wales. We could have been discussing the role of women in public life, higher education or the legal sector in Wales, or the efforts that we as a Government are making to help women in Wales smash through the glass ceiling and take their place on boards, running companies and being leaders in all spheres of life in Wales. What we actually had was a crude attack, if I may say so, on our welfare reform proposals and our approach to deficit reduction.
Nia Griffith
Does the Minister not accept that the full title of the debate is “Effect of Government policies on women in Wales” and that my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) has cited specific statistics about the situation as it affects women and women in Wales? She made that point a number of times. It is about the actual effect on women in Wales and the lack of an impact assessment or, if there is an impact assessment, the lack of sufficient attention to it, because there has been a disproportionate effect on women.
Stephen Crabb
The danger when looking through any particular demographic lens—we could have been debating the impact of policies on young people, older people, disabled people or people from ethnic minorities—is that we are lured into making generalisations and over-simplifications. We have had a bit of that this afternoon, so hopefully I will inject some balance into the debate.
The starting point, of course, is the economic context and the enormous financial crisis that still faces this country. It is worth putting on record again—I know that Opposition Members will roll their eyeballs at this—that the reason why we are having to take very difficult decisions about public expenditure, and the reason why we are having to restore discipline to our national finances, is the financial mess that the Labour party left after 13 years in government. I will go further: future generations of women and girls would not thank us if we shirked our responsibility now and did not address the deficit and the debt. They would not thank us for the burden of debt that we might hand on to them if we did not take the difficult decisions that we are taking.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
I say with all due respect that we have had three years of this Conservative-led Government, and the record is now wearing a bit thin. It is no longer valid, if it ever was, to blame everything on the previous Government. Surely to goodness the Minister can form a better argument in defence of what he has done.
Stephen Crabb
The context is important, and it is valid. I reject what the hon. Gentleman says.
The Labour party is committed at the moment to cutting £7 out of every £8 that the coalition Government are cutting. The Labour party has said that it is committed to that level of budget cuts. Of course, it will not say where. I listened to the hon. Member for Newport East give a long list of cuts to which she objects, but she will not say what her party would have cut. She is also not saying that her party, if it were in government, would actually increase spending on any of those services. I hope she will forgive me for saying this, but it is a little disingenuous to attack all the efforts that we are making to restore discipline to our national finances without also being up front by saying, “As a party, if we were in government, we would probably be cutting all of these things, too.”
Mrs Siân C. James
Let us move away from cuts and look at job creation. In Swansea East, the most recent figures show that between May 2012 and May 2013 female unemployment rose by 13.5%, yet male unemployment fell by 1.5%. Things are just not working for women, are they? That is really what the debate is all about. My hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) was attempting to say—and I think she said it very succinctly—that it is not working for women. What are this Government going to do on their behalf?
Stephen Crabb
There are communities in Wales in which unemployment among women remains a very serious problem, and I recently spent a day visiting various initiatives in the valleys, looking at job creation schemes and efforts to address long-term unemployment among men and women. I completely recognise the point that the hon. Lady is making, but let us step back and look at the bigger picture.
More women in this country went out to work today than ever before in history. There are now 13.8 million women in employment, which is more than ever before. Female unemployment actually rose under the last Labour Government by 30%. Under this Government, since May 2010, the number of women employed in the UK has increased by more than 350,000; in Wales, the number of women employed has increased by 21,000. The picture is not as gloomy as the hon. Member for Newport East presents. The employment rate in Wales among women is up by 1.2 percentage points, which is good progress. We are not complacent about that, and we need to be ambitious about improving it, but the trajectory is positive.
In the hon. Lady’s constituency of Newport East, there are now 2,400 more women in employment than two years ago. Surely she must welcome that. The employment rate among women in her constituency is up by more than 6%. Some positive things are happening.
Jessica Morden
Does the Minister appreciate that long- term unemployment among women and unemployment among young women have risen?
Stephen Crabb
I do not have the specific statistics to hand, but as I said to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Mrs James), there are certainly communities in which the trends are not as positive as the broader Welsh trend that I have presented here. We need to be more ambitious and redouble our efforts to see unemployment fall across all categories of women in Wales. I hope Members of all parties can agree on that.
Beyond just the positive signs we are seeing in the employment market, we as a Government absolutely recognise that many, many families face real financial pressure at this time. Many of those families, as the hon. Member for Newport East rightly says, are headed by single women, which is one reason why we are absolutely committed to assisting with the cost of living. We have seen some significant increases in the cost of living, which have placed huge burdens on families in recent years. That is one reason why we are doing one of the most effective things that can be done to put cash back in families’ pockets, which is to take the lowest-paid workers out of income tax altogether. We have now cut income tax for more than 1.1 million working people in Wales by increasing the tax-free personal allowance. By increasing it to £10,000 in 2014, we will lift 130,000 of the lowest-paid workers in Wales out of income tax altogether. Let no one be in any doubt: the majority of those 130,000 people lifted out of income tax—57%—will be women.
The hon. Member for Newport East spoke in great detail about some of our welfare reform measures. The introduction of universal credit is central to our welfare plans. Why are we reforming welfare? First, we cannot begin to think about cutting the deficit and the debt burden unless we are serious about welfare reform. Also, we all have communities in our constituencies where there are people who have not worked a day in their life—we have 200,000 such people in Wales, and worklessness is still a huge problem in many of our communities. If we care about those communities and are bothered by that, we must be serious about welfare reform. We as a Government are certainly bothered by it, which is why we are putting so much energy and focus on welfare reform.
Nia Griffith
As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East said, we support the idea of making work pay, but it seems to us from the figures presented by professional organisations that universal credit may actually provide a disincentive for the second earner in a household to go out to work or take on more hours. Can the Minister take that back as a serious message to his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions and ask them to consider it, so that the introduction of universal credit does not create a disincentive for people to go out to work?
Stephen Crabb
If that is a real concern and there is evidence to back it up, I will certainly take it to my noble Friend Lord Freud, the Minister responsible for welfare reform, and discuss it with him. I sit with him and discuss the impact of welfare reform in Wales, because I am concerned about it. The whole purpose of introducing universal credit is a more simplified system, which we want to incentivise more work. We hope that more women will choose to re-enter the labour market, partly on the back of the introduction of universal credit. Some of them will be in work already, but we want them to take on more hours if they choose to do so. We want people to be able to make the right choices for them in their circumstances at that point in time, and we want a welfare system that supports those choices rather than creating negative incentives that work against the interests of the families and individual women that we are discussing.
Households with single women and couple households will be better off on average after the introduction of universal credit. We are clear that that is what the modelling shows. Single women will receive an average increase in benefits of about £13 a month, and the figure for couple households will be £16 a month.
The impact of child care costs has been mentioned. We recognise that, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) for putting on record some of the measures that we as a Government have taken to assist with child care costs, most notably the introduction of the tax-free child care scheme, which makes child care simpler and more affordable for parents to access. From autumn 2015, working families will be able to claim 20% of child care costs, up to £1,200 per child under 12. We believe that that will contribute significantly to helping women who want to go out to work in Wales by encouraging those who want to do so to get back into the labour market and take the jobs that are being created.
To respond to the point made by Opposition Members, I absolutely agree that more women than men have been affected by public sector job losses, due to the proportion of men and women who work in public services. Nevertheless, it is true—even in Wales, where Opposition critics said that it could not happen, because we were led to believe that the private sector was too weak—that more private sector jobs have been created in Wales to offset public sector job losses. Women are taking up those new jobs. Some of them will need extra skills training, and we are committed to helping provide that, but I genuinely believe that the employment situation is not nearly as grim as Opposition Members say.
Jessica Morden
Does the Minister accept that some of those jobs are lower-paid part-time jobs?
Stephen Crabb
There is a general problem in the economy at the moment that real wages are falling as a consequence of the recession. We are seeing that across sectors. Actually, a great many women want to work part-time. When I go around and talk to unemployed men, one common complaint that I hear is, “A lot of the new jobs being created are much more suited to women with families.” A great many women in Wales have been able to benefit from that structural change in the labour market.
We could also talk about pension reforms such as the introduction of the single-tier pension and tackling the historic inequality between men’s and women’s pension receipt. We could talk about the efforts that this Government are making to tackle domestic gender-based violence, a point raised by Opposition Members. We as a Government are absolutely committed to, and serious about, breaking down the barriers that women face in all spheres of life, so that women can play their fullest role in work and have equality at home, in educational institutions and—
Stephen Crabb
We will try to fix that. The hon. Lady will have to wait and see. On that point, I will end.
Question put and agreed to.