Universal Credit Roll-out
Debate between Simon Hoare and Debbie Abrahams(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams
As my hon. Friends are saying, it is a loan. I will return to that, but I want to make that important point.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
The hon. Lady nailed it in a remark that she made a moment or so ago. There have been just three sitting days since the Opposition day debate. Were we to presuppose that Her Majesty’s Government would seek to respond to that debate—let us not presume that—would it be fair, in all honesty, to expect them to do so within three sitting days?
Debbie Abrahams
I will come on to that in a moment. The precedent was, unfortunately, set by the current Government.
As I said, the Government have had three sitting days to respond to the legislature. It might be useful to quote the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), who is now First Secretary of State. At the last such defeat for a Government, in 2009, he raised an immediate point of order, in which he asked the then Deputy Speaker:
“In the wake of that devastating vote for the Government, have you had any indication that Ministers intend to come to the House and make an immediate statement about how they propose to change their policy, as the House has now spoken clearly?”—[Official Report, 29 April 2009; Vol. 491, c. 931.]
Within three and a half hours, the then Government made a statement.
The right hon. Gentleman had changed his tune a bit by last Thursday, when he said that all
“governments have to abide by the rules of parliament. We’re a parliamentary democracy,”
but that
“as the Speaker said last night, motions like that are non-binding motions, so they don’t engage government activity particularly.”
He cannot have it both ways.
These events have raised a more fundamental constitutional question, given reports that the Government no longer intend to require Conservative Members to vote against Opposition day motions.
Universal Credit Roll-out
Debate between Simon Hoare and Debbie Abrahams(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams
This is the reality that people are facing; this is happening in the areas my colleagues have mentioned, and our concern is that, as this is rolled out to 55 areas this month, the situation will get even worse.
Simon Hoare
I am most grateful to the hon. Lady, who is being enormously kind with her time. The motion calls for a pause in the roll-out. Is she going to tell us what the Labour party would do during that pause period?
Debbie Abrahams
The hon. Gentleman is pre-empting my speech, but I will happily propose exactly what we would like to do in conjunction with the current Government, whose programme this is.
From the start, there were a number of serious design flaws, which the Work and Pensions Committee, of which I was a member, raised in 2012. They included, first, the fact that UC applications would be “digital by default”; in other words, applications could only be made online. There are still several issues with that, not least the assumption that everyone is computer-literate or has ready access to getting online. We all remember the scene in “I, Daniel Blake” where somebody who had not used a computer before was trying to do so, and we saw the real stress and difficulties he found.