Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Afzal Khan Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

It is frustrating once again to have to plead with the Government not to take a key financial lifeline away from my constituents and working families across the country. As so many of today’s contributions have shown, for many hard-working families, the £20 a week universal credit uplift has been the difference between children going hungry and having food on the table, or between turning the electricity off and topping up the meter.

If the Government push ahead with this cut to universal credit, it will affect 6 million families across the country, and it has the potential to push 700,000 more people, including 300,000 children, into crippling poverty. In my constituency of Manchester, Gorton, the cut will directly affect 12,000 children.

This cut will be utterly devastating for my constituents. It will be the single biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the creation of the modern welfare state. Not only that, but for all the Government’s talk of levelling up, the north will bear the brunt of the cut’s impact. This cut is not necessary; it is a choice that this Tory Government are making. They are choosing to take money out of the pockets of working families struggling to make ends meet. It is a disgrace.

If the Government will not listen to me, my colleagues on the Opposition Benches, their own colleagues, six previous Conservative Work and Pensions Secretaries, numerous all-party parliamentary groups, or endless charities and campaign groups, then perhaps they will listen to the powerful words of one of my constituents. He is an NHS worker claiming universal credit to make ends meet, and he wrote:

“My morale has gone, my head has gone, my heart has gone. Ripped out by a system that doesn’t care for those of us who worked so hard to keep the country together during one of its darkest hours.”

He is not the only one to have contacted me; hundreds of constituents have written to me desperate for the uplift to be maintained. The hard-working families of Manchester, Gorton do not want this £20 a week; they need it. Will the Government listen to them?