Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Christopher Pincher

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I do not criticise Labour Members for their aspirations. There is nothing ignoble in the positions that they are taking; I just happen to believe that they are wrong. They know that the picture of despair and hopelessness that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State saw in Easterhouse in 2002 was the same picture that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) saw in 1997, when there was an historic opportunity for the then Labour Government to tackle welfare dependency and rebalance work and welfare. Unfortunately, they did not take that action.

People out there are decent; they care and their attitude is, “There but for the grace of God go I.” They do not want to stigmatise people, and nor do Government Members. I accept that there has been some rhetoric on both sides of the House, but people do care. They also care about the dependency culture, and about fairness. In all honesty, they feel that the previous Labour Government tested their patience on this issue.

It is disingenuous to talk about cruelty. I think that it was cruel to park 1,000 of my constituents on invalidity or incapacity benefit for more than 10 years without the opportunity—[Interruption.] I should remind Labour Members that this was in 2010. Those people were given no opportunity to inform anyone of their needs. People suffering from depression or other mental health problems, and people with physical afflictions, were simply parked and forgotten. I am not saying that the Labour Government did that because they were cruel or heartless; they did it because they were incompetent. We are taking the tough decisions that will make work pay, through the Work programme and through apprenticeships that will tackle youth unemployment, which the previous Government doubled. Work is the No. 1 determinant in taking people out of poverty and breaking the cycle of children seeing their parents unemployed, living in a half-life of hopelessness and poverty and lacking ambition. That has been demonstrated across the world.

[Christopher Pincher]

My hon. Friend is quite right to say that work provides the best way out of poverty. Does he agree that the 5.2 million people who were trapped in dependency when the economy was growing in the boom years under Labour are evidence of the previous Government’s structural failure to deal with poverty?