Universal Credit Roll-out

Albert Owen Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)]

The Speaker is right that the Minister is a courteous man. I have written to the Secretary of State and not yet received a response, and I was hoping to question him today on this very point. Before first coming to this House, I ran a welfare centre. This policy is flawed because it relies from day one on hardship payments. Hardship payments should not be a policy decision. The Secretary of State could do the decent thing now and pause this, or even reduce that period. I ask the Minister to respond directly to that point.

[Damian Hinds]

It is a system that is replacing a deeply flawed system and striving to face up head-on to endemic problems that we have had for decades and that were left in the “too difficult to deal with” tray—an old system, where complexity and bureaucracy had so often served to stifle the independence, limit the choice and constrain the outlook of its claimants.