Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) has perambulated within the Chamber, but there is no dishonour in that.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

In advance of the imminent urgent question, I want to say that universal credit is due to be imposed on the north of my constituency just before Christmas. I wrote to the Secretary of State’s predecessor twice asking for it to be delayed, if only until the new year. Will the new Secretary of State please look favourably on this request?

[Amber Rudd]

We are not stopping, ceasing or pausing the system, but we always make sure that we change it where it needs to be changed, to ensure that it operates in people’s best interests.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

21. One of the benefits, or non-benefits, that is available is the crisis loan. My constituent, Mr Hayward, has been told by the Minister’s Department that he owes £1,500 in crisis loans taken out 13 years ago. There is just one small problem with that: he did not take out those loans. The Department cannot provide any paperwork to prove that he did so. How can anyone have any faith in anything that happens at the DWP?

[Sarah Newton]

I appreciate the hon. Lady bringing up that really important case. We will take it away and get back to her.

State Pension Age

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend will be aware that a legal challenge is being brought forward. I cannot comment on the outcome of it, but it will be resisted by the Government. We do not believe that it has merit. Clearly that is a matter for Bindmans and the WASPI women, but it will definitely be resisted.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I am afraid that the Minister might have missed the point, never mind the anger of 1950s women. Today, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), there is a city-wide pensions roadshow. So many women are affected by the pension changes that demand has outstripped supply and not everyone can be let in. When will these women have answers and transitional arrangements?

[Guy Opperman]

With respect, this matter was debated at great length in 1995 and in 2007, under the Labour Government, and they could have altered the decision if they wished to do so. At that stage they took the view that the changes were fiscally sensible, and in 2011 the matter was again debated by Parliament and there was a concession of £1.1 billion, after much consideration by this House.

Personal Independence Payments

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock) on securing this important debate and on making a powerful opening speech.

At Prime Minister’s questions a few weeks ago, I asked the Prime Minister whether she agreed that the PIP assessment process was fundamentally flawed, and what action she intended to take to avoid the undue stress and hardship being caused to my constituents and thousands more across the country. It is very clear to hon. Members here and the people whom we represent that the process is not fit for purpose.

The chaos that is being caused is having a cruel impact on thousands of people across the country. The Prime Minister’s reply was that the assessments are being conducted as well as they can be, and that people are getting the awards that they should be getting and are entitled to. She also stated that since the Government introduced the personal independence payment, 8% of cases have been appealed and 4% of the decisions are changed on appeal. In my easy calculation, about 50% of decisions are overturned on appeal, and things are getting worse.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with my view? My constituent, Sarah Hassell, has cystic fibrosis, a degenerative disease. She is 30 and will not see retirement. Not only was she taken to a tribunal, but after that process, she was brought forward again for assessment. Her benefit was taken away, and she tried to kill herself because of this process, which she had already gone through once. The system is simply not working, and the tribunals are not working. When I wrote to the Secretary of State to ask for a response, I was just sent to a civil servant and was not graced with a response. My constituents need much better from this process.

[Gerald Jones]

My hon. Friend outlines a very sad and tragic case. It is one reason among many why the Government have to take note and listen.

The Prime Minister also stated that in the majority of cases, the change at appeal is due to the presentation at appeal of new evidence that was not presented at the original case. However, in the vast majority of cases that are brought to my attention at my constituency office and through Merthyr Tydfil and Caerphilly citizens advice bureaux, no new evidence is presented at appeal. The appeals are agreed, because the appeal panel recognises that constituents are genuinely in need of PIP and it supports the appeal. Furthermore, a growing number of assessments are consistently refused, and people are forced to go to mandatory reassessment and to appeal. I understand that currently about 65% of claims are overturned on appeal at tribunal. The growing number of appeals means that tribunals are taking longer to get to court—in my area, they are taking anything between four and seven months.

Intergenerational Fairness

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Frank Field]

I could not agree more, but I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not follow that up, because one of our colleagues wants to talk about how aspects of education affect intergenerational fairness.

The Committee decided democratically that it would look at the triple lock. However, I was also struck by the difference between my life chances and those of people who are the age that I was when I set out to earn a living after university. When I graduated, I was one of 3%. People might say, “Well, we can see which cohort you belonged to,” and it was a very privileged cohort. I went to university, but I did not pay fees—we expected county scholarships to see us through university, and we did not come away with debt. When we graduated, we interviewed big firms to see whether we wished to work for them, and now graduates are scrambling for jobs, so it is a very different world. I expected to get a job, I expected at least to own a house—if not more than one house—I expected to have savings and I expected to have a pension. One need only look at how privileged my life has been compared with that of people in their 20s who are graduating today to realise, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) said, that the wheel of fortune has turned. Whatever one wants to say about the golden oldies, we are in a very privileged position, and that has been reinforced by the Government. I shall return to that in a moment.

The Committee wanted to test whether the triple lock was viable for the next Parliament and beyond. If it was not, we wondered whether we could marshal a report on which all of us agreed, and behind which political parties could slowly move before deciding what policy they would stand on in the election, perhaps in 2020. We now see our role as a Select Committee as taking on controversial topics and letting the Government and Opposition judge for themselves what nuclear warfare should be employed against us. Then, if we are still standing to tell the tale, perhaps the Government can be a little more brave than they would otherwise have been.

I am not saying—the whole Committee was united on this—that there are not a number of very poor pensioners in all our constituencies, but the position of pensioner poverty has been transformed over the past 10 to 15 years through Gordon Brown’s pension credits and the coalition Government’s triple lock. If we were having this debate 10 years ago and talking about not making moves to benefit the vast majority of pensioners, we would be laughed out of court, but now the debate has significantly changed. Despite that, I do not want anybody to think that we do not have to rack our brains to think how we can sensitively, but equally effectively, ensure that we continue to deal with poor pensioners. One does not have to be a very bright Member of Parliament to know that we all have some very poor pensioners in our constituencies. However, we also now have a growing number of rich pensioners, thank God.

It was against that background that we considered the whole business of the triple lock. There are four ways in which the Government could deal with this issue. First, they could just ignore it and allow the public finances to let rip, depending on the international money markets to shovel us loans at very low rates of interest forever so that we can continue, right into the sunset, to live beyond our means. I do not think for a minute that the historically low interest rates that we have at the moment will last for very long, let alone that we would have a Government who would commit the next Parliament to the triple lock. I cannot see that our public finances will be secure unless the Government take a deep breath and think very carefully about our report.

I also make a plea to Labour Front Benchers. People are now saying that it is impossible to envisage another Labour Government in anybody’s lifetime, but funny things have happened this year—funnier things than the election of a Labour Government. I therefore would not bank on Labour being unelectable and our party therefore not having to consider how fiscally responsible we have to be as we approach an election.

The second approach to the triple lock would be to say, “We’re going to increase taxation.” If we were to go down that route, we would need to raise the same amount of money that we would otherwise have to borrow, so we would be talking about raising an additional £40 billion in today’s money. That is half the sum that we raise from income tax, so it would mean saying to the country, “We expect to be continuously elected on the basis of putting up your income tax by 50%.” I do not think we would be able to hold that position for very long. If we look at the marginal tax rates paid not by the rich, but by the working poor who draw benefit and then lose it as they work harder, we will see that the idea of putting 10p on the standard rate of tax seems so absurd that there is hardly any point in suggesting it, but that is the second way in which we could square the circle of keeping the triple lock.

The third approach is to continue the policy of not just this Government but previous Governments of favouring pensioners and reducing the living standards of the working population. I do not believe that that is tenable now, but it is what will happen until the end of this Parliament. It is certainly not tenable beyond that point, however, because we are taking resources from the working population and giving them to many pensioners who are well off. People sometimes hear what they want to hear rather than what is being said, so I want to emphasise again that I am not denying that there are not too many poor pensioners. However, the standard of living of the vast majority of pensioners is of a kind that the pensioner population has never experienced before. Thank God for that, but cuts in the living standards of the working poor are already starting to result in people of working age being reduced to destitution.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

It is heart-breaking that 73% of working parents already go without a meal during the school holidays in order to feed their children. Is not that an indictment of exactly where we are going wrong as a country and society?

[Frank Field]

It is, and my hon. Friend’s intervention could not be better timed. Members who followed closely the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas message will know of an example from Feeding Birkenhead. A family would lower their child into a supermarket waste bin to scavenge for food before rescuing them and seeing what food they had. The mother is suffering from cancer. She is now fed by Feeding Birkenhead with food that would otherwise go to the tip, but she says that she has never been better fed. Is this House prepared to continue policies that put so much pressure on working-age families that that example will no longer be exceptional? More and more of us will be troubled by examples of our constituents nobly not feeding themselves, as my hon. Friend says, and it will happen more regularly. Destitution is an issue.

Child Poverty

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Right. If we do sanction someone, the processes before that happens are exhaustive—[Interruption.] Oh yes they are. People continue to be supported through all the child support mechanisms, including child benefit, and the household support that is available as well.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

In my constituency, 31% of the children—more than 6,000 children —are born into poverty, and the parents of 36% of them earn less than the living wage. I have already had people who are working arrive at my surgeries in tears, terrified about what will happen when the Government chop tax credits. What would the Secretary of State like me to tell my constituents?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I should tell them that they should wait, as should the hon. Lady, to see what we bring forward. They may be surprised.