Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) to his position as I move across to the business brief. From his speech earlier, I am sure the social justice team has a very talented member.

I shall speak to amendments in this group tabled by my colleagues, particularly amendments 53, 54 and 55, which clearly state the SNP’s opposition to the Government’s two-child policy. The SNP wholeheartedly condemns the Tory Government’s intention to restrict tax credits to two children, which by definition excludes many of the poorest children in society from our social security system, going against the very principles for which it was set up. The Government’s proposals also stray into an area of policy making that I never thought I would see suggested by any Government who had a shred of compassion for their people. Hidden away in the Red Book were the words:

“The Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC will develop protections for women who have a third child as the result of rape, or other exceptional circumstances.”

No detail was provided. How much disrespect can this country take?

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is appalling not only that that appeared in the Budget statement, but that during the consideration of the Bill there has been no explanation of how that will work in practice?

[Hannah Bardell]

I could not agree more. The two- child policy will hit more than 872,000 families who receive support for third and subsequent children. The Government’s own national child poverty strategy recognises that the risk of poverty is much more significant in larger families than in smaller ones. Currently a third of children living in poverty live in families with three or more children. Perhaps that is why the Tory Government seek to airbrush child poverty from the statute books.

It is easy for this Tory Government to espouse theories and claim that reducing financial support to just two children will make poorer families rethink their “financial choices”. That is based on the falsehood that all children are planned and that it is possible to financially plan for children. I am sure we are aware that that is not the case. What if a second pregnancy turns out to be twins or even triplets? What about the many families who are supported or led by kinship carers? Perhaps the Tories need a biology lesson, or a simple lesson in humanity.

Such eventualities cannot be planned for, so are we telling families across these nations to stop having children, just in case? I have raised many times in Committee, and many of my colleagues have raised on the Floor of the House, the sensitive issue of children resulting from rape and the insensitive Government plan to make women justify their children in front of DWP caseworkers. Many domestic abuse charities have expressed grave concerns, and Rape Crisis Scotland has warned that the plan is “inherently unworkable”. It has asked how DWP workers will prove whether someone has or has not been raped, and said that many women would find explaining that situation extremely uncomfortable. Many women do not report to the police that they have been raped, or go years without reporting it or speaking about it, so they cannot be expected to explain it to a DWP worker.

What training will a DWP worker have to deal with rape victims? It is clear that this is an unrealistic, ill thought out and unhelpful proposal. In evidence before the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, stakeholders described it as “unpalatable”, and the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) wrote in The Guardian recently:

“A rape test for welfare is a chilling way to save money”.

I could not agree more. It just goes to show that at the height of the Tories’ insensitivity, they will quite literally leave no vulnerable group untouched in their scramble to, as they put it, balance the books. The policy will ultimately result in a complete abuse of rape victims’ privacy, leading to potentially serious emotional damage for children should they become aware that they are a child resulting from a rape. The SNP amendments would see the policy abolished, and we urge the Government to remove the two-child policy from tax credit and universal credit to ensure that no victim or child goes through the torment associated with having to justify a third child due to such an horrific crime being inflicted—