Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

In the short time available, I want to nail a couple of myths that have come up in the debate and give the view from Cannock Chase.

The first myth is that we are giving a tax break to the wealthiest in society. The answer that the shadow Secretary of State would not give earlier is that over a 13-year period, the Labour Government had a 50p tax rate for 37 days. The idea that we are giving the rich a tax cut is just a sixth-form debating point; the Labour party had 13 years to introduce the 50p rate, and they introduced it for 37 days.

Let us nail another myth. Although many people in work get benefits, there is evidence of a culture of worklessness, whatever the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says. If hon. Members do not believe me—[Interruption.] Give me a second. Let me read the House a summary of an interview on LBC radio in December. A man called Paul phoned in to say that it was not his fault that there were no jobs out there. He said:

“Why would you work for low wages, can’t really understand that, what’s the point? I was offered a job two weeks ago; they wanted me in there at 8 am in the morning.”

The presenter said:

“And you didn’t want to do that job?”

Paul replied:

“It’s ridiculous, that time!”

The presenter asked:

“What time would you finish if you started at 8?”

Paul answered:

“Well it finished about 4, but that time in the morning is too early. Most people start at 9 don’t they?”

The presenter, getting angry now, said:

“No, people start work at all hours. If I was in charge and you turned down a job for that reason I would cut your benefits. You lied you said no work out there. There are people out there struggling every single day who would love to get that job, frankly you can’t be fagged can you?”

Paul said that he would love to have the job but he was not willing to start at 8, only at 9.30, to which the presenter replied:

“I am outraged by what you just said.”

Let us not pretend that there are not some people who cannot be bothered to work.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I am not sure whether that anecdote should lead us to any wider conclusion. The only worklessness in the Chamber today is on the Tory Back Benches—there has been an average of only 12 Tory Back Benchers all afternoon.

[Mr Burley]

I have been here since the beginning of the debate, waiting patiently to speak.

I move on to my constituency. The House of Commons Library shows that average wages in Cannock Chase rose by 6% between 2007 and 2012. During that same period, benefits went up by 20%. Where is the fairness in benefits going up by 20% when pay has gone up by only 6%? Do not take my word for it. This is what a local police officer e-mailed me last year when we uprated benefits by 5%:

“Why has the Conservative Government given a recent rise in benefits money…to the unemployed when Nurses, Police Officers, Fire and rescue workers and all other public sector workers have not received a pay rise for over two years?”

It is a fair question, and I do not know the answer. What I do know is that if the rate of inflation is not sufficient to warrant an increase in public sector pay beyond 1% in April this year, it cannot be so high as to require an increase in benefits beyond that either.

This is what another constituent who recently contacted me said:

“I have a friend who has a partner, neither she or he work and have not worked for as long as I can remember. They are both fit and healthy and perfectly able to work they just do not want to. They openly admit there is no point in finding work as they would not have enough money to live on. She stated to me that in order to get close in wages to what they receive in benefits that they would both have to get a job.”

This is the perverse reality of where we are now—that it pays people not to work and they are better off at home on benefits even though they could work and in many cases want to. Tellingly, the constituent went on to say:

“Some time ago she”—

her friend—

“let it slip out that she claimed £500 a week in benefits, I was…astounded and furious and pointed out that it was twice my wages. I am…aware that some people are unable to work and in genuine need…but surely people on benefits who are MORE than capable of working should not be living a life of…luxury and be financially better off than those who…earn a living? These people are playing the system…whilst…genuine hard working people struggle to have a life.”

Those are the real words of a real constituent in an area where the average salary is £22,500, and Labour Members ignore those words at their peril. [Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.

[Mr Burley]

The Opposition have argued that this uprating of 1% will impact on working people and not just those on benefits. Given that the previous Government made 90% of workers eligible as welfare recipients, that is inevitable. Unfortunately, Labour Members make the mistake of taking these measures in isolation. If we take the Government’s measures as a whole, including tax allowances, energy tariff changes and cutting petrol duty, low-income working households will be better off. It is time to end the ridiculous money merry-go-round. Let us take people out of tax and off benefits. Labour used to be the party of the working man; it is now the party of the workless and welfare. I look forward to fighting them on the doorsteps as they take that message to the electorate. [Interruption.]

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

My hon. Friend is right—and that statistic is no coincidence, because he, as the local Member of Parliament, has put a huge amount of effort into trying to ensure that more apprenticeship places are provided in Harlow. He deserves a lot of credit for that, as do all Members who are looking for extra apprenticeship opportunities, holding job fairs, setting up job clubs, and making a real difference to their constituents.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

12. What recent progress he has made on the implementation of universal credit.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

We are making good progress towards the delivery of universal credit in 2013, and I have fortnightly progress meetings with officials and weekly reports from my office. I also chair the universal credit senior sponsorship group, which brings together all Government Departments and agencies that are relevant to the delivery of universal credit. Design work is well under way and is being continually tested with staff and claimants, and the development of the necessary IT systems will continue in parallel.

[Mr Burley]

Many of my constituents complain to me that the current benefits system is far too complicated. There are more than 50 different benefits that people can claim, although no one appears to know the exact number, which leads to huge confusion among those who are genuinely in need. Can the Secretary of State confirm that universal credit will reduce that complexity, improve the user experience and, most important, make clear to all claimants that it will always pay to work?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I can confirm that. Universal credit will put together all the benefits that are relevant to people going back to work. Benefits that are not relevant to the Work programme will not be included, but the rest will. That will hugely slim down the complexities, and will ensure that people understand that in every hour for which they work, they are better off in work than out of work. The migration will take place in three phases over four years, and each phase will bring in a new group of claimants of those different benefits until we have finally completed the process and there is a single universal credit.

Welfare Reform Bill

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

We all agree about the importance of the private rented sector in our menu of housing options, but it should be a way of cushioning the impact of unemployment or a drop in wages, and, in parallel, be a means of ensuring that we do not return to the nightmare years of the early 1990s, when the level of homelessness went through the roof. The soaring level of homelessness in those years resulted in the large-scale placement by London local authorities of their homeless households from central London to Birmingham, Coventry and Liverpool, an experience from which many of those households did not recover.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I am following the hon. Lady’s arguments closely. I represent a Birmingham constituency where the average salary of a working family in the private sector is £22,450 a year. Even under the Government’s reforms, such a family could still claim £26,000 a year in benefits, which is more than they would receive by going out and working in a proper job. Does she accept that there is a problem that people in low-paid jobs who want to work see other people getting more and having a better quality of life by choosing not to work and to live on benefits?

[Ms Buck]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point but is mixing lots of different arguments, if he does not mind my saying so. The whole point of local housing allowance, as I was obviously explaining imperfectly, is that it is an in-work benefit. If a household’s income dips and they are in the private rented sector, they are entitled to the allowance, so we cannot compare an out-of-work household and an in-work household in the way he is trying to do. It is intended as a cushion for that household. Similarly—I know that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, would not wish me to be diverted—the overall benefit cap needs to be considered, among other things, in terms of an equivalent household size, and we will no doubt return to that debate because it is much less clear whether the Government’s core argument holds any water at all.

The argument about whether the maximum percentile that a household can claim in the private rented sector should be 50% or 30% of the local market has been and gone, so let us not return to it. All the amendment is arguing is that we must have a statutory mechanism for review to make absolutely sure that, as the CPI uprating bites further into the private rented sector, which it will, 30% of all private rented accommodation in a broad market rental area remains available. That is the Government’s commitment, and without such a mechanism that accommodation simply will not remain available.

We have to be very careful about monitoring that. The rate is to come down from 50% to 30%, but even 30% might not be achieved, because the CPI will further undermine what is available in the sector and landlords will withdraw from it because of the insecurity of the income stream; we are already seeing significant warnings of that. Property will not only be unavailable at 30%, but sometimes it will not be available at all. The projections for 2016 show that in parts of London it will go down to 19% or 16%, and in my borough it could go down to almost nothing—but let us not worry too much about that now. The anxiety is that we must ensure that at least that 30% remains available to people in the private rented sector, because if it does not, when they lose their income or their job they will be cast away from the labour market, from the work they were doing and, on top of that, from the networks of family, friends and connections that the Secretary of State, with great passion—I am absolutely convinced of his sincerity—believes is so important.

We simply cannot argue that we believe in stable communities, in family networks and in connecting people with the workplace if we then take away the very mechanisms that make all that possible. The argument has been developed, with convincing statistical underpinning, by academic experts that there is a real danger of that happening unless we have an adequate review mechanism. No proposal for such a mechanism exists at the moment, although there is a willingness to understand that there could be a problem. In Committee, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) said:

“The Secretary of State will be able to adjust rates to ensure that the housing support available does not become completely out of kilter or out of touch with local rental markets. We will monitor the impact of these measures and make further adjustments if it is right to do so”.––[Official Report, Welfare Reform Public Bill Committee, 3 May 2011; c. 711.]

That willingness to recognise a problem has therefore already been expressed by the Minister.

Also, I think that all three Ministers who are on the Front Bench have told us that the CPI rating will not last for ever, and that the arrangements could be reviewed at the end of the spending review period. However, the wording of the Bill is so wide that CPI or other measures could be used as a basis for setting rents under universal credit, and I think that Ministers are attracted to a permanent shift away from the idea of linking private sector rents to a market-based formula. That would be very dangerous and risky. We want the Government to offer clearer guarantees on how they will prevent an affordability and access crisis, which could in a very short time become even greater than the one that could be created by reducing the maximum percentile for local housing allowance claimants to 30%. We need a statutory assurance that monitoring will take place, and that it will lead to a proper review.

When we discussed child care and other elements of universal credit earlier, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) said that the success of universal credit would rest heavily on child care costs. I hope he does not think that I am disagreeing with him when I say that the treatment of child care and passporting costs will not be the only critical test for millions of people; the treatment of housing costs will be, as well. I am genuinely concerned that an underestimate of the real cost of housing is already feeding through into universal credit, which will lead to a lot of people being disappointed when universal credit fails to deliver on its promises in the way that we want it to.

Amendment 32 deals with under-occupation and adapted properties. The Government are planning to reduce housing benefit payments for 670,000 social housing tenants: one third of all working-age housing benefit claimants living in social housing can expect to see their benefits reduced in 2013. Under the new restricted size criteria, any household deemed to be under-occupying its home by one bedroom would lose 13% of its total housing benefit, while those under-occupying by two or more bedrooms would lose 23% of the total. The average cut across all households would be £676 a year.

We know that only a tiny minority of those affected will be able to downsize to avoid the penalty, due to the shortage of smaller properties and the striking regional imbalance between the level of housing need and under-occupation. That is because of the competing pressures that social landlords are under when it comes to meeting their statutory obligations to house homeless households and other people in priority need. Alarmingly, the Government do not want those affected to move, because if they did move, the Government would not be able to meet their savings targets. We have not so much an incentive scheme as a straightforward cut in income for poor households. When we discussed this in Committee, the Minister was unable to give us any assurance on exactly the true purpose of the benefit cut, as explicitly spelled out in the impact assessment.

I want to concentrate for a moment on disability and adapted properties. Of the 670,000 claimants—

Housing Benefit

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd]

I am talking about the Minister’s policy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) made it clear what a Labour Government would have done. That was clear also from the statements of the then Secretary of State, and it was very different from the current Government’s proposals. The proposed income loss is not something that I recognise from any Labour manifesto.

The income loss will be significant for those in one, two or three-bedroom houses. In my constituency, for example, 8,000 people face an income loss of £12 to £14 a week. That sum may be trivial to a Minister or Secretary of State, but £12 to £14 is a significant part of the disposable income of somebody on housing benefit or on benefits more generally. The House ought not to countenance taking away that amount of money. It penalises the most vulnerable people in our society to prop up the Government’s policies. That is not scaremongering; it is a disgrace. Ministers and their supporters should recognise that.

There is another aspect of the proposals that we should not countenance. The Secretary of State made a long and complicated speech, which gave no comfort whatever to those in my constituency who will lose money. It gave no comfort to those who will potentially lose their homes. It gave no comfort because the right hon. Gentleman is far more concerned with the polemic of his speech than with the reality of human beings who will lose out in respect of both housing and their finances.

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and others on the Government Benches will think again, particularly about some of the most difficult aspects of their proposals. There are parts of them which, with proper care and attention, we could all begin to agree with. The problem, at least in part, is the ridiculous speed of their implementation and the lack of acceptance of the impact that they will have. Were the Secretary of State to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that the Government are prepared to look again at the speed of their implementation, we might have a basis for real debate.

The worry among my constituents is that the proposals are driven, first, by concerns of budgetary restraint—the battle that the Secretary of State fought with the Chancellor and lost—and secondly, although this is a claim that I do not make against the Secretary of State, by the apparent desire among some of his Back Benchers to penalise the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. That rhetoric has come through in some of the debate.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

rose—

[Tony Lloyd]

The hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have a limited amount of time and will lose some if I give way.

The speed of the changes raises real issues. Even if I believed that rents would adjust as the Secretary of State believes, they would not do so at the lightning speed required by his policies. People will not suddenly find their landlords voluntarily reducing their rents by £12, £13 or £14 a week. That will not happen for a number of reasons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Raynsford]

Let me say to the hon. Gentleman what I have said in many previous debates. When we came into government in 1997 we inherited a very serious problem caused by the condition of the existing housing stock, as he knows. He also knows that a great deal of money was put into the decent homes programme to improve the condition of millions of social homes throughout the country. Because that was a priority, perhaps not enough was spent on building new homes, but if he looks at the figures, he will know that during the later years of the previous Government, until the recession hit, there was a rising trend of new house construction in all tenures, including social housing. Had that been sustained, we would now be seeing levels approaching those set out by Kate Barker in her report.

Obviously there has been a recession in the meantime. It has hit the world—it has hit this country and everywhere else—but given that situation, we want to see policies that will improve prospects rather than make things worse. The problem is that the present Government have managed to destabilise every part of the housing market. House builders are in shock because of the ill-considered planning changes. The private rented sector is in difficulty. Landlords are worried about the proposed changes to housing benefit. The social housing sector has been pulverised by the Government’s proposal to remove security of tenure and to jack up rents to near market levels. That has created a serious problem of anxiety and lack of confidence in all sectors of the market. Not surprisingly, as the hon. Gentleman highlighted, there is therefore a problem with shortage of supply. That is precisely what is driving rent levels.

[Mr Burley]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Raynsford]

No. I have given way once, and I must make a little more progress.

All hon. Members should realise that the Government’s hope that the changes will lead to a reduction in rents is delusional. It will not happen, and the consequence will be that many people who depend on access to private rented housing, and on a degree of housing benefit to support it—many of them are in low-paid work—will find it harder and harder to compete in an increasingly tough market. I am afraid that the Government are making things worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) on her clarification. I am very glad that she has made it.

I heard so much that I disagreed with from the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) that I do not quite know where to start. I should probably take the opportunity to point out to Opposition Members, as I always do, that last year, of the £700 billion that the Government spent in total, only £40 billion went on propping up the banks, which is 6%. They can hardly go around blaming the bankers for the £170 billion deficit that they left us.

[Frank Dobson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Burley]

No, I want to make some progress.

I wish to take head-on the accusation made by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill that this is all about the cuts. Of course, a lot of the changes that we are making to housing benefit, and others matters that we are debating at the moment, are a result of having to make public spending reductions. It is broadly agreed by Members of all parties that we need to reduce public expenditure to pay off the deficit and start paying off the £1.4 trillion debt.

[Mr Tom Clarke]

Can the hon. Gentleman tell the House of one single television debate in which his leader referred to housing benefit cuts?

[Mr Burley]

I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that housing benefit expenditure ballooned from £11 billion in 1999 to £20 billion 10 years later, and is forecast to reach £25 billion by 2015. The Prime Minister would agree with me that the country simply can no longer afford that. We cannot go on like this, spending £25 billion a year on housing benefit.

I wish to leave for a moment the necessity argument and the fact that we have to make these changes. Even if we were in the boom years, they would be necessary purely on the grounds of fairness. They are all about fairness, but the problem with the word “fairness” in political debate is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no single agreed definition of what is fair. Everybody in the House defines it in their own way. For Opposition Members—I respect them for it—it is about redistribution of income. It is about taxing the rich more and throwing more money at the poor. For us, it might be about fairer taxes or rewarding hard work and playing by the rules. Fairness is about being able to keep more of what one earns.

What I wish to add to the debate is what we believe is fair when it comes to housing benefit. I will start with a few basic questions of principle. Is it fair that hard-working individuals and families in this country should subsidise people living in properties that they have no realistic chance of ever affording to live in? Is it fair that when the average salary in this country is £22,000 a year, some people, as we have heard, can claim more than £100,000 a year just for their rent? Is it fair that even under the proposed cap of £20,000 a year, a person would still need to earn about £80,000 just to have that disposable income for their rent? Is it fair that the cap is being set so high? If the average salary in this country is £22,000, the cap should actually be about £7,000 a year.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If the real aim is to reduce the housing benefit bill, will the hon. Gentleman explain why his Government propose to change the way in which houses, for both councils and housing associations, are built? The tenants will be paying for the cost of building houses and rents will rise to 80% of market rents, which will put up the housing benefit bill. If that is the hon. Gentleman’s key objective, how does that help us to reduce the housing benefit bill?

[Mr Burley]

The hon. Lady should have listened to what I said. Our point is that it is not just about reducing the housing benefit bill, but the issue of fairness. We need to go back to the first principles in this debate and decide what is a fair amount for the working majority to pay towards those who do not, cannot or will not work. What is fair? The average annual earnings in my constituency is £25,279 a year.

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

On the subject of fairness, is it not right that Opposition Members persistently forget one of the first principles of fairness, which is the juxtaposition between low-paid hard-working families and those on housing benefit? Housing benefit claimants should not be better off than those who are hard-working and low paid. Is that not a principle of fairness?

[Mr Burley]

That is precisely my point. People in Cannock Chase who earn £25,279 a year would frankly love to have £20,000 to spend on housing from an equivalent annual salary of £80,000, because that is what it equates to. That is dreamland for them. They have never earned £80,000 a year, so why should they be paying out of their hard-earned taxes for some people to have the equivalent of a salary of a quarter of a million pounds so that they can live in parts of London that have some of the most expensive postcodes on Earth.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If the problem is about households with very high rents, why not tackle that problem? Perhaps we could build more affordable houses in London. Why not solve the problem in a phased way? Housing benefit changes will be made all over the country and 30% of housing benefit recipients in my city are at work. Why are they being punished because there is a problem? Why not just solve the problem? The hon. Gentleman has spoken very eloquently on it.

[Mr Burley]

I agree with the hon. Lady on the need for a regional cap. Funnily enough, some of the work that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has done on regional caps for MPs should be considered. In my constituency, the IPSA cap to claim is £700 a month. That is what IPSA thinks is a reasonable rent for an MP and his family to claim to live in Cannock Chase. Yet under the housing benefit rules, a person can claim £1,600 a month, which is more than double what IPSA thinks is fair for an MP. How is that fair?

The charity Shelter, which has been guilty of some terrible scaremongering, has claimed that up to 80,000 people will be made homeless by the plans. It falls to it to redefine its ludicrous definition of homelessness, which includes two teenage children living in the same bedroom. That is hardly the definition of homelessness that most people in this country would understand. For most, homelessness is about someone not having a roof over their head. Even according to Shelter’s own briefing, the average loss in my constituency will be £30 a month—£7.50 a week. The total number of claimants in Cannock Chase is 10,278. Therefore, one eighth of my constituency—it is a very poor working-class constituency that used to have 52 coal mines—will have to adjust their weekly outgoings by less than a tenner. Is that really a reason to speak of weeping children, social cleansing, Highland clearances, or, worst of all, as Polly Toynbee said, a “final solution” for the poor? She somehow compared capping housing benefit to £20,000 a year to the extermination of 6 million Jews. The left has engaged in disgusting language and it should be thoroughly ashamed.

If anything, these reforms do not go far enough for me. Let me finish by saying that as a country we must start to live within our means. We need to even up the benefit that a person gets from working with the benefit that a person gets from the Government. Yes, the changes are about saving money, but they are also about fairness. It is simply not fair that people on low incomes in my constituency, in which the average income is 25 grand a year, should pay their taxes to subsidise those who want to live in some of the richest postcodes in this country, where a person would need a salary of £250,000 to afford them. That is not fair and neither is the Opposition’s motion.

Oral Answers to Questions

Aidan Burley Excerpts

Monday 18th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Clearly, as an Administration we would like employers to move people up the income scale, and for there to be wealth in the country to enable our businesses to do that. Of course, they have big challenges to overcome after the past few years and all the economic problems that were created under the previous Government, but I share the hon. Gentleman’s aspiration. I would like people to move up the income scale, but above all else, we want to ensure that, in all circumstances, work pays. That is why we are introducing the universal credit and the changes that we are making. There should never be a point at which somebody says, “It’s not worth my while going back to work.”

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

12. What programmes his Department operates to deliver equality for disabled people.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

The Government are committed to equality for disabled people and to implementing the UN convention on the rights of disabled people. There is a full programme of work in my Department—and right across government—to deliver on that commitment. We have commenced the majority of the Equality Act 2010 this month, we are improving support for disabled people to enter and stay in employment through the Work programme, Access to Work and Work Choice, and we are piloting the right to control from the end of this year.

[Mr Burley]

I thank the Under-Secretary for that reply. I recently visited the Newlife Foundation, a national charity based in my constituency, and was told about the huge problems faced by families with children with disabilities and terminal conditions. I was concerned to hear that children under three are not entitled to DLA mobility allowance, and about the impact of that on their families. Will the Under-Secretary confirm whether that is the policy and, if so, whether the Department has any plans to reconsider it for the most vulnerable groups?

[Maria Miller]

I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the Newlife Foundation, particularly the work of Sheila Brown in setting up that important local charity. My hon. Friend is right to identify the complexities of the benefit system, particularly the way it can affect children and families. He will know that, in the emergency Budget, the Chancellor announced a review, and I would like to offer to meet the Newlife Foundation and Sheila Brown with my hon. Friend to discuss that matter further.