Housing Benefit

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Sharon Hodgson

Wednesday 26th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

Today is our only opportunity to stop the Government closing the loophole, and to urge them to cancel the bedroom tax altogether. We have a chance this afternoon to walk through the Lobbies and either to stand up for our constituents or to stand against them, as this Government have done repeatedly.

Many of the people who have wrongly paid the bedroom tax have already been forced to move and have fallen into arrears with their rent. Because many local authorities do not have electronic records back to 1996 to allow them easily to identify cases that meet the relevant criteria, they have been forced to spend time and money on manual trawls through paper files to begin to sort out this huge mess. What a waste of time and money, and what a mess caused by this Government’s incompetence. Councils up and down this country have been put in an impossible position, and people in need have been put through needless anxiety and uncertainty. As I have said, money that could have been spent on building houses has been spent on having to sort out this mess. It beggars belief that like universal credit—another of the Government’s flagship welfare reforms—this policy has become mired in chaos, confusion and spiralling costs.

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a magnificent opening speech. Does she agree that we will find that the bedroom tax is costing rather than saving the Exchequer money?

[Rachel Reeves]

Closing the loophole will indeed cost a huge amount of money—borne by local authorities that will have to do the work to sort out this mess.

Even as they seek to close this loophole, the Government do not have any understanding of the number of people affected by it. We asked Ministers on the Floor of the House to tell us how many people have been unlawfully charged the bedroom tax as a result of the loophole. On 13 January, the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), who has responsibility for employment, told us in a written answer:

“This information is not available.”—[Official Report, 13 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 449W.]

On the very same day, the Secretary of State told us in this House that

“the number is likely to be between 3,000 and 5,000”.—[Official Report, 13 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 577.]

The next day, Lord Freud, the Minister for welfare reform, said in another place that

“the numbers involved in this anomaly are small and the amounts are modest.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 January 2014; Vol. 751, c. 106.]

At oral questions this week, the Secretary of State told me that

“some 5,000 people may be affected.”—[Official Report, 24 February 2014; Vol. 576, c. 19.]

Free School Meals

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Sharon Hodgson

Wednesday 30th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend is right, and I will come on to the Hull experiment.

The quality of packed lunches is usually dependent on cost, but do not take my word for that, Mr Weir. Research by Professor Derek Colquhoun of the university of Hull showed that it is not always possible for families to access, let alone afford, fresh food for their children. The alternative of paying for school meals may cost almost £20 a week for a family with two children—money which those still living below the poverty line do not have.

I look forward to hearing more about the success of the Durham and Newham pilots from my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham and for West Ham. Unfortunately, due to the recession, universal free school meals did not make it into our manifesto, but our party gave a commitment in the 2009 pre-Budget report to extend the universal free school meals pilots to at least one in every region and permanently to raise the access threshold everywhere else to £16,190 to enable a further 500,000 children to have a free, hot and healthy lunch every day. That approach would also lift a further 50,000 children out of poverty, which was welcome news as far as my colleagues and I were concerned. Such a measure would also be an important first step on the way to universal entitlement, and I welcome it as still affordable, even during a recession.

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is even more important to extend that entitlement during the recession? In my constituency, the average income is £16,000 a year, which means that the average family is living in poverty. However, if someone works and earns £16,000 a year, their children are not entitled to free school meals. It is harder for those families to go back to work because they lose the entitlement, which for many is equivalent to about £600 a year. If the coalition Government want to get more people back to work—although the forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility showed that their Budget will put 100,000 more people on the dole—one important measure would be to extend the entitlement to free school meals so that parents who go back to work can claim it for their children.

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend raises an issue that I was coming to—I fear that she makes the point better than I would have done. A lot of hon. Members in the coalition Government are not getting that point, but hopefully the contributions that my hon. Friends and I make today will put paid to that.

Confusingly, although the new Government committed themselves to meeting the child poverty targets set by the previous Government, the Secretary of State for Education announced on 9 June that the coalition Government would not be going ahead with the additional pilot schemes, or the extension of schemes to include more low-income families. That is devastating news for the families concerned. The extension would have eased the transition into work for many parents—my hon. Friend has just spoken about that—and supported the Government’s wider drive to improve educational and health outcomes among the least well-off in our society. It seems that the Education Secretary wants to follow in the footsteps of a former Conservative Education Secretary, who became well known—indeed infamous—overnight with the tag of “milk snatcher”. Today’s Education Secretary shall for ever more be known as the “meal snatcher”.

Entitlement to free school meals usually ends when a family moves off benefits and into low-paid employment. That gives rise to an extra cost of around £300 a child per year, just when families are trying to make themselves better off through work. Furthermore, 60% of children in poverty have at least one parent in work, so the majority of children who live in poverty today do not benefit from free school meals. That is a shocking statistic, but it is true.

The decision announced by the Government is spectacularly short-sighted and I urge the Minister to reconsider it as a matter of urgency, particularly considering that the coalition’s stated aim is to decrease the number of people on benefits and increase the number of people in work. That is a laudable goal, but it will never be reached with such poorly thought out policy decisions.

A measure that would have raised 50,000 children above the poverty line has been scrapped, thereby exposing the Government’s claims to promote fairness as nothing but empty rhetoric. How can increasing the number of children living in poverty in 2010 help the Government to meet their 2020 target for eradicating child poverty, especially after a Budget that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows, disproportionately affects the very poorest? I was even more disturbed to see a leaked memo suggesting that money that would have been directed to the poorest families for free school meals is now being redirected to help the middle classes to parachute their children out of mainstream schools and into free schools. That is a particularly galling example of money being directed away from the disadvantaged towards the comfortably off and away from a scheme that would have lifted children out of poverty to one that will do nothing of the sort but will pander to middle-class parents who still bemoan the loss of grammar schools in leafy London boroughs.

Following this debate, and with the successful campaign that is being led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), the Government will choose to reinstate the changes to free school meal provision that were announced by the previous Labour Administration. That would be welcome news, but I would like the Government to go even further and seriously consider the case for universal free school meals. It is all too easy to dismiss the argument by saying, “We haven’t got the money to do it”. Tough spending decisions should be a matter of prioritising, not slashing budgets for ideological reasons.