Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Andrew Gwynne and Priti Patel

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

No, I will not give way. I am speaking to Lords amendment 1.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Priti Patel]

I am going to make some progress on Lords amendment 1, and then I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

I turn to why statutory income measures failed. They are flawed as they do not drive the right action to transform children’s lives. It is worth demonstrating that with a few examples. The Government are undertaking crucial reforms to improve people’s life chances, such as introducing the national living wage and increasing the personal allowance for the hardest-pressed families. Those policies will provide support for the hard-working families who need it the most, yet, according to Labour’s failed approach to measuring child poverty, their introduction would have supposedly led to an increase in child poverty. That failed approach incentivised the wrong actions. For example, it led the previous Labour Government to tackle the symptoms of poverty through expensive income transfers, such as spending more than £300 billion on working-age welfare and tax credits between 2003-04 and 2008-09, with very little return. The strategy failed to tackle the root causes of child poverty and did not make a long-term difference to children’s prospects.

[Priti Patel]

I will give way shortly.

The number of children in relative poverty remained broadly unchanged. In short, there are fundamental weaknesses in that system, which the Government are seeking to put right through our life chances measures.

[Andrew Gwynne]

The Minister would perhaps want me to remind her that child poverty fell by 1 million under the Labour Government, which is something we should be proud of. Her own advisers advised against removing the child poverty indicators, so why is she headstrong in ignoring the advice not just of the other place but her own commission, which has said that this is wrong?

[Priti Patel]

We discussed this issue in Committee. I just reiterate that the Government are right in our approach: we are focused on tackling the root causes of poverty. Ultimately, as the Prime Minister said in his recent life chances speech, we are here to make sure we can tackle those long-term root causes. This is not just about measurement. The economy cannot be secure if we spend billions of pounds on picking up the pieces of social failure. Economic reform and social reform are not two separate agendas, they are connected to one another. Therefore, it is imperative that we focus our resources on how we can transform people’s lives, which is through tackling the root causes.

The path I urge the House to take is the one that will incentivise the right action, and the one that the evidence tells us will make the biggest difference to children’s life chances. That is precisely why the Government are seeking to introduce the life chances measures contained in the Bill. The statutory measures on worklessness and educational attainment, combined with the non-statutory measures in the forthcoming life chances strategy—such as family breakdown, problem debt, and drug and alcohol dependency—will drive the right actions to transform children’s lives.

DWP Data

Debate between Andrew Gwynne and Priti Patel

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

We do not place our interpretation on data that my Department publishes, because we are bound by the UK Statistics Authority when it comes to how they are presented. As I have said, these data will be published. Let me also reiterate once again that ours is one of the most transparent Governments ever, in contrast to the hon. Gentleman’s Government.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

The Minister has said that the data will be robust, but I simply do not accept the Government’s narrative that some people in receipt of employment and support allowance or incapacity benefit are not ill, because those are good epidemiological considerations when it comes to public health indicators. Why will the Minister not do the decent thing and publish the data in full today?

[Priti Patel]

I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman was disappointed by my response, but the data will be published. He should remember, when he criticises these schemes, that his Government set them up prior to 2010, and that it is we who are reforming the mess that we inherited.