Pension Schemes Bill [Lords]

Hywel Williams Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 30th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his words. Throughout his intervention, I was expecting “but” to appear at any moment, and it did not. We can be as one on the matter, and I will seek to improve our responses to future reports of the Committee that he chairs.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State, but—if I may use that word—would he accept that the Bill is a missed opportunity to put right the severe problems in the plumbing and mechanical services industry pension scheme? For example, my constituent Chris Stuhlfelder wants to pass on his business to his employees after a lifetime of work in the industry, but he risks losing the lifetime rewards of that work just in order to secure the pension scheme for liabilities that are not directly his. Will the Minister table amendments to deal with that?

[Damian Green]

I acknowledge the problem faced by the hon. Gentleman’s constituent and others in the same scheme. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Richard Harrington), has met the hon. Gentleman’s constituent. We are looking, with representatives of the employers and the scheme, to see what we can do about the issues that they have raised, and we are exploring alternative methods to help employers in such schemes to manage their employer debt. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that this is a complex area of legislation, so it is important that we get it right. As I hope he knows, we are on the case.

Under-occupancy Charge

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am always delighted to visit Liverpool, but I can only repeat that the Court ruling in five of the seven cases was in favour of the Government. I cannot sensibly draw the conclusions that the hon. Gentleman draws from the judgments.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

My local authority, Cyngor Gwynedd, has used discretionary housing payments year on year, helping about 1,000 of the 1,400 people affected by this charge, many of them disabled, and effectively protecting this Government from the consequences of their own folly. Will the Minister accept that these wasteful churning bail-outs cannot continue indefinitely?

[Damian Green]

As I have said, the use of discretionary housing payments by local authorities is proving successful. Inevitably, some local authorities are using them differently from others but, as the Court confirmed, they are a sensible and practical way to proceed to ensure that those who need help will get it.

Welfare

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. When he uses the figure of 292,000, we should make it absolutely clear that we are talking about 292,000 disabled people who, with lots of support from the different initiatives of this Government, have made that transition back into work. That is a terrific record, but let us not be complacent. There is so much more to do if we are to achieve our manifesto promise of halving the disability employment gap.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment and wish him well. He faces a huge challenge, but he also leaves behind a huge challenge for his colleagues in the Wales Office in respect of the Wales Bill. With one bound he was free—or possibly not. I welcome his commitment to resetting the conversation with disabled people. The abandoned changes to PIP were apparently based on review of just 105 cases of the more than 600,000 people who depend on PIP, supplemented apparently by 400 further reviews after the decision was taken. Will he guarantee that before further changes to welfare are proposed, proper, independent research will be publicly available beforehand?

[Stephen Crabb]

The kind of research that the hon. Gentleman talks about is always published by a Department ahead of any major policy change. There is a duty on Departments to publish impact assessments and to conduct their policy making in an open and transparent way. What I hope he has taken away from my statement today is my personal commitment to ensuring that as we look again at these really challenging long-term issues around disabled people moving into employment, I will be doing so in a way that is transparent, open and based on sound evidence.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was about to move on to the support that is provided for disabled people through Access to Work. Last year, only 36,800 people received such support. Although I support the Disability Confident scheme, we must recognise that, across the country, there are only 112 active employers who support that initiative. How can we encourage and help disabled people who are fit to work into work when such limited measures are on offer? It is all topsy-turvy.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the incidence of disability and the incidence of lack of work opportunities do not go hand in hand, and the problem is not evenly distributed throughout the UK?

[Debbie Abrahams]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very valid point.

The suggestion that working four or five hours a week should recoup the loss of income with the introduction of the so-called living wage has been questioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Disability Benefits Consortium, a coalition of more than 60 disability charities, has said that the proposed cut will push sick and disabled people further away from work and into poverty. It will not help, as the Government have claimed. A recent survey shows the concerns not only of disabled people—seven out of 10 of them think that their condition will deteriorate with the introduction of the ESA WRAG cut—but of the public as well. A Populus poll of 2,000 adults in January revealed that 71% think that cuts to social security will make the UK a worse place for disabled people.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I speak on behalf of Plaid Cymru.

So, we have another round of cuts to social protection and a Government unrestrained by the alleged compromises of coalition. I note that the new leader of the Liberal Democrats has already left us. The Government are unrestrained in slashing the social safety net, shrinking the state and allegedly balancing the books, and doing this, they say, to put the public finances in order—indeed, claiming that it is in the interest of working people. They no longer talk about “hard-working families”; it is just “working families”. The election is over; the election is won; now it is the Government’s turn to be hard.

Government supporters say, “Aha! We have introduced the national living wage.” We saw the jubilation of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when that was announced—his ugly triumphalism at having got one over on the poor old Labour party—except it is not a living wage at all, and when combined with cuts to tax credits and a host of freezes and other cuts, people will be worse off overall, as respected bodies such as the IFS and the Resolution Foundation have made clear. I welcome any rise in the minimum wage, but a genuine living wage would provide a decent living and bring down the in-work benefits bill. What we are getting is the rebranding of the higher minimum wage, while a large chunk of tax credits is cut out—giving with one hand and taking much, much more with the other.

Look at the Government’s appropriation of the term “living wage”. They steal the language of social justice and talk about full employment, but there is a crisis of under-employment, low wages, insecure employment and precarious self-employment. Without proper measures to tackle those problems and boost the UK’s woeful productivity, the foundation is not firm and a dip in the global economy could swiftly push up unemployment again here and especially in Wales. Outside the headline figures, large areas of the UK still suffer from persistently high unemployment and levels of economic inactivity—areas on the so-called periphery. I live in Caernarfon, which is in no way peripheral to the people who live there, so what does peripheral refer to? It is areas out of the sight and out of the mind of the economic and governing elites. In my constituency of Arfon, the economic inactivity rate is 23.5%—almost a quarter of all people of working age are economically inactive.

The restriction of child tax credits to only two children seems to answer the question so often posed by Government Members: why should parents get support for more than two children when others cannot afford to have more children? However, it fails to answer a more fundamental question: why should any child be denied support through no fault of its own? It is a perverse logic that ignores a child’s inability to control their parents’ reproductive abilities, then punishes them none the less.

[Heidi Allen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hywel Williams]

I will not. The hon. Lady should have been here from the start.

That is the reasoning of the tyrant, from one-child China to Ceausescu’s Romania. Most grim of all are the tortuous complexities involved in demonstrating that the third child is the result of rape.

We sorely need a system that pays a fair wage for a fair day’s work, and a top-up when the Government’s minimum wage policy fails to provide an adequate living for families with children.

Jobcentre Plus

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) on securing this debate.

Jobcentre Plus performs a crucial public service, and I put on record my thanks to the staff who are coping with immense changes to the welfare system. Many Jobcentre Plus staff are doing an excellent job in demanding circumstances and are dedicated to improving the lives of the people they serve. Nevertheless, as we have heard clearly this afternoon, there are undoubtedly concerns about service quality, claimant experience and outcomes. There are also questions about staff morale and whether Jobcentre Plus has the resources and capacity it needs.

The major reforms with which Jobcentre Plus staff are grappling—such as universal credit and Universal Jobmatch—have been beset by systems problems, resulting in poor service to claimants and major delays. Although more people are moving into employment and Ministers like to claim that welfare reforms are the reason, people are not moving into work and out of poverty, and in any event there is considerable dispute about the contribution of welfare reforms to the rising employment rate.

Last year, the then Work and Pensions Committee carried out a review of Jobcentre Plus that looked at some of the major challenges it faces and how it is coping with them. The Committee made a number of suggestions for improvements, on which I hope the Minister will be able to update us today. Perhaps I can start with universal credit, which Ministers have claimed will transform the prospects of those who are out of work. The project is in total disarray. Today, some 65,000 people are on universal credit; when it was first introduced, we were told that 1 million people would be on it by April 2014. That is less than 1%—

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. I am afraid that that is outwith the scope of the debate.

[Kate Green]

I accept your ruling on that, Mr Williams, but universal credit has of course been argued to be the tool by which Jobcentre Plus will be able to move people into employment. Clearly, if the universal credit programme is way behind in the number of claimants it is supporting, it cannot be fulfilling its function and Jobcentre Plus cannot be taking advantage of it in order to move people into work. The problem with universal credit is that it is shrouded in secrecy. We have not seen the business case that would show us whether it is indeed going to be an effective tool for Jobcentre Plus staff to use to fulfil their role of supporting people into work.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has recently written to the Secretary of State with some questions, and I want to ask the Minister the same ones. Will she ask the National Audit Office to publish quarterly progress reports on universal credit, to be laid before Parliament, and will she publish the full business case and plan? Will she also explain how Jobcentre Plus staff are being supported with the roll-out of universal credit?

As we have heard, Jobcentre Plus has the important role of supporting people into employment and, if they are further from the labour market—perhaps they have been out of work for a long time—routing them on to more specialist support programmes. There are a whole range of interventions under the “Get Britain Working” banner, and for the long-term unemployed there is the opportunity to be routed on to the Work programme or, for some disabled people, the Work Choice programme. My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn was right to observe that those programmes have not often performed well for jobseekers and those experiencing long-term or youth unemployment—particularly long-term youth unemployment.

That is why Labour proposed a compulsory jobs guarantee so that every young person who was unemployed for more than a year would be guaranteed a job, education or training, or the opportunity to undertake proper work experience. That would be modelled on the future jobs fund that we introduced in 2008, or the more successful programme in Wales, which, as my hon. Friend highlighted, draws on factors that make for a successful labour market programme: it is commissioned locally; it involves local authorities, specialist local organisations and, crucially, local employers; and it is designed around the needs of the local labour market.

--- Later in debate ---

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is right. We can never stand still on this issue and it is important that we learn the lessons as we go forward. On that basis, I would welcome Members’ views.

To conclude, Mr Williams—

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order.