Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Steve Webb
The hon. Gentleman is right. When people transfer money from a pension, they must fill in transfer forms. We have established a “scorpion sting in the tail” information campaign, producing very eye-catching literature which people wishing to transfer their money receive before signing on the dotted line. It is a “buyer beware” measure, and is one of a suite of measures that we are taking to crack down on such fraud.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Many participants in pension liberation schemes pay extremely high interest rates on any loans that are taken out, and residual funds are invested at the discretion of the trustees, which can lead to insecure or poor investment decisions. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is in no one’s long-term financial interests?
Steve Webb
My hon. Friend is right. We are warning people to be extremely wary. In general, they should not get their money out before they reach the age of 55, except in the event of, for instance, terminal illness. Trustees need to be wary, and participants need to be wary. Those who spot fraud should report it, and we will continue to crack down on it.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
My right hon. Friend makes a valid point—1.2 million new jobs created. He missed one point, however— 1.2 million new private sector jobs.
Mr Redwood
That is true, and it had to be the case because the public sector had no money left, as the previous Chief Secretary reminded us, and it was inevitable that action had to be taken to rein in the public sector. I remember that just before the Labour Government left office, they enacted proposals to halve the deficit over the next Parliament, so members of their Front-Bench team in office were fully aware that they had overdone it and they were recommending pretty unpalatable cuts to their colleagues. They did not specify the cuts, of course, because that would have been even more unpopular, but they told us in general terms that there had to be very big cuts.
Andrew Bridgen
Does my right hon. Friend agree that if we put benefits up faster in this country, we would make it more attractive for other EU citizens to travel here and take advantage of our generous benefits system?
Mr Redwood
I am rather pleased that our benefits system is a lot more generous than those afforded in eastern Europe, but I also want to make sure that we do not open ourselves up to paying a large number of benefit bills to people from more or less anywhere in the European Union who come here because they have worked out that we have a generous system compared with theirs. That would seem extremely unfair, very tough on British taxpayers and ultimately self-defeating, because people who were working hard and had talent and enterprise would say, “I can’t afford to pay the tax rates in Britain to pay for benefits for everybody else, so I’ll go somewhere else to do my work.”
Caroline Lucas
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman and thank him for his intervention. I think that people do want that to happen, partly because it is what they would want if they themselves fell into difficulties, and it is what they would want for their families and friends, who unfortunately and increasingly are in exactly that position.
Caroline Lucas
I thank the hon. Gentleman, who has encapsulated what I said in my earlier intervention and what I am saying now. Yes, it is strange, and disappointing.
Let me say a few words about RPI and earnings. The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy) and the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) have tabled amendments on earnings that would improve the Bill, and I support them. However, we have a public sector pay freeze, and earnings growth right now is slow; people are experiencing falling living standards as energy bills and food prices rise faster than income. In the longer term, however, earnings are important. Since the second world war, the UK norm has been for earnings to rise faster than prices, with real wages rising in most years, driving living standards higher.
Caroline Lucas
Let me make a bit more progress.
It is worth remembering that benefits were linked to earnings until 1980, when the Thatcher Government changed the link to prices in order to save money. That was a deliberate and aggressive policy to run down benefit levels. In 1980, unemployment benefits were one fifth of average earnings; today, they are one tenth. Earnings are important in the long term, but in the current context, I worry that focusing on earnings when they are so low, without the link to RPI, risks being a smokescreen for existing Government policy. I worry that without the additional protection of a link to prices, the link to earnings will not protect people from inflation risk over the next three years. People must, at the very minimum, be able to keep up with the rising cost of living. My personal view is that benefits should increase either in line with RPI or in line with average earnings, depending on which is higher, but I deliberately tabled a more modest amendment that would just restore the link to RPI because I wanted to press the Committee to provide that minimum protection in the face of this Bill, and hoped that such an amendment would garner more support.
Andrew Bridgen
The hon. Lady stated earlier that a 1% increase in benefits is a very small increase on a very small amount of money. Is she aware that the welfare budget is almost a third of all Government spending and is by no stretch of the imagination a small amount of money?
Caroline Lucas
If the hon. Gentleman made a distinction between the overall benefits bill and pensions, he might find that he had a rather different set of figures before him.
It is not true that the Government are doing this to be fair. The measure is an unnecessary, spiteful and counter-productive attack on the poor. It is unnecessary because it is ludicrous to blame the unemployed and the low-paid for the deficit and to elicit from them the highest price for paying it off when high earners are receiving tax breaks. As the Government well know but conveniently forget, the culprits behind the entire financial crisis were the bankers on their very high incomes, many of whom do very well from over-generous tax relief on pension contributions and will benefit from the tax cut that is being granted to the highest earners with the abolition of the 50p rate. I welcome the Opposition’s amendment on the latter point.
The measure is spiteful because the Government insist on suggesting that it is somehow unfair that benefits have gone up by 20% when they know very well that 20% of very little is very little, and that in cash terms the average annual increase for those on jobseeker’s allowance over the past five years has been just £2.37—that is hardly the life of Riley that Ministers are pretending. Again and again they frame the debate around misleading percentages instead of the reality of hard cash increases that are far lower for people on benefits than for those in work.
Andrew Bridgen
My hon. Friend makes a valid point about those who move from unemployment into temporary work and the complexities involved in re-applying for benefits under the current system. Does he agree that the introduction of universal credit will improve the situation, remove that uncertainty and make it a much bigger incentive for those who are out of work to take temporary work?
Andrew George
I agree with that point and congratulate in particular the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb) on advocating that for many years. He must be pleased. Indeed, I am pleased for him and it is appropriate that that policy is being rolled out. I hope that it will help to iron out the difficulties faced by a lot of people. Having said that, let us see whether it addresses those issues, as I hope it will, when it is rolled out.
If we look back at the principles set out by the Chancellor in the first emergency Budget, we will see that we were clearly told that we were all in it together, that those with the broadest shoulders would bear the greatest burden and that the vulnerable would be protected. Those are the principles against which we must measure the Government. We all have different views on where the lines should be drawn with regard to achieving those objectives, and that is where we get into specifics such as those in the Bill.
It would be a kamikaze mission for me to begin a debate—I am only seven minutes into my speech—by asking my hon. Friend the Minister, for whom I have the highest respect this: what on earth does he know about benefits? He is highly regarded in that sphere. He is respected considerably by people and, indeed, by his political opponents—and rightly so—for what he has achieved. I think we would have ended up with something a great deal worse had he not been in his position.
Toby Perkins
As Members on the Government Benches are fond of reminding us, at one point they thought that the original plans of my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) were not paying off the deficit fast enough. We now see, however, that under those plans we were actually paying off the deficit faster than this Government are doing. The fact that the Labour party was going to make tough decisions is reflected in a whole number of ways, and we supported—with tremendous reluctance—the very small uplift in public sector pay. We heard from the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) a shopping list of things we should be asking for and ways in which she felt we did not go far enough.
The Labour party recognises that tough choices need to be made, and it agreed to a whole raft of things in all the discussions on welfare. When I go back to my local party, the members ask, “Why are we agreeing with these things?” I say, “Look, it is very difficult. We would always like to make certain different decisions but”—
Toby Perkins
Let me just answer the point raised by the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). We would always like to make different decisions, but we are not always in a position to do so. There is a raft of things with which we have agreed that we would not have wanted. We have seen, however, from the policies that the hon. Gentleman has so loyally supported time after time, that when we pursue austerity to the extent that he has been happy to support, demand comes out of the economy. Various retail businesses have gone bust and people are losing their jobs. A huge number of people in the public sector who were consumers are now not spending money, and the level of borrowing that the Government predict is higher than the Labour party proposed under its policies.
Helen Goodman
I am not going to give way to the hon. Gentleman again, because other Members want to speak.
I want to address the Minister. When, in the previous Parliament, we introduced the Bill that became the Child Poverty Act 2010, he gave a great deal of evidence from the Family Budgeting Unit in York and the people at Loughborough about the minimum income standard—the minimum income guarantee. He said that what the Labour Government were doing was absolutely shameful and that benefits were not high enough. Now, however, we see that he is prepared to cut benefits in a way that we never did. The testimony to the great success of this Government’s benefit policy is the expansion in the number of food banks: in Durham last year, the food bank fed 4,455 people, of whom 1,390 were children. That is utterly shameful. To demonstrate that it is not possible to live on £22.96 a week, I am going to try to do so during the February recess. Neither I nor, I believe, any other hon. Member seriously believes that they could live on £22.96 a week. We have to look at this in context.
The Bill is unjust because it is simply not fair in the treatment of people in work and those out of work, and the treatment of people on high incomes and people on low incomes. When the dole was introduced in 1912, it was approximately a fifth of average earnings, and so it stayed until 1979, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said. By 1989, it was 15.8% of average earnings; by 1997, according to the House of Commons Library, it was 13.2%; and by 2015, it will be 11.1%. It is absolutely clear that the Government are trying to take it back to the very lowest point at the very bottom of the recession, irrespective of the impact on people’s normal standards of living. Everything the Prime Minister has said about those with the broadest shoulders bearing the biggest burden is seen to be utterly empty and fallacious when the Government introduce such a Bill.
There has been an ugly attempt to divide the poor between the “deserving” and the “undeserving”—taking us back to the 19th century—between sheep and goats, between strivers and shirkers, and between with those with their curtains closed and those with their curtains open. In my constituency, if people’s curtains are closed at 9 o’clock in the morning, it is probably because they are on nights and they are trying to catch up with their sleep. The Churches Regional Commission states that
“of all the words to describe those who depend on welfare, “feckless” has to be the one that rankles most.”
This attempt to divide has failed, however, on the factual ground that two thirds of those affected by the Bill are in work. The housing benefit and tax credit changes will affect far more people.
The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), who unfortunately is no longer present, tried to tell us that these changes will improve work incentives. As the noble Lord Freud said in the other House,
“there is an inevitable trade-off between the level of benefits and incentives to work. Raising benefit levels would undoubtedly hamper the work-incentive”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 October 2011; Vol. 730, c. GC498.]
Obviously, that is setting to one side the fact that in order to work harder the poor must be made poorer, but the rich can be made richer.
Let us look at the impact of the changes and the context. In my constituency, 7,200 people will lose out as a result of the Bill, by an average of £500; that will take £3.5 million out of the local economy. If the International Monetary Fund is correct, the second round effect will be even greater, at £4.5 million, so the net upshot is an £8 million loss to the economy of my constituency. It is no wonder shops are closing and small business are folding. That is absolutely illogical, and it goes against what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said about the need to let the fiscal stabilisers work.
Andrew Bridgen
The hon. Lady talks of her concern for the poor, and it is shared by right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches. The problem is that every time her party gets into office, its policies create more of them. Can she explain why the number of adults out of work for more than 24 months doubled in Labour’s last term in office?
Mr William Bain
This evening’s debate on clause 1 and amendment 12, moved by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), is important because it speaks to more than the £13 billion increase in the welfare budget caused by this Government’s failure on growth since 2010 or even the chronic lack of jobs, in a still depressed economy, faced by so many hundreds of thousands of people in our country. This debate speaks to the very values of our society.
Are we a country that is content to divide socially instead of coming together—jobless and workers, low-paid and middle earners—to defeat again the social evils of worklessness, low pay, slumping living standards and poverty? Are we a country that is content to see the doubling of food banks under this Government since May 2010, as 1.4 million people in work find themselves needing to resort to credit to help to pay the rent or the mortgage each month? Are we a country that will fall for the cynical “divide and rule” tactics of the Chancellor, which treat people as pawns in a squalid political game, amid a campaign of demonising the poor and turning neighbour against neighbour, when a responsible Government would seek to unite people rather than divide the country? This clause is rotten economics, ruinous for weak economic demand up and down the country and rank politics, from a Government who can relaunch as many times as they like, but who will never rediscover any sense of moral purpose while they engage in this basest of agendas of social division.
Andrew Bridgen
The hon. Gentleman mentions unity. Does he agree that if people lead their life on welfare, it is not only bad for our economy and for our society but tremendously bad for those people themselves, hugely reducing their life expectancy and seriously damaging their children’s lives and prospects? It should be discouraged; the best way out of poverty is through work.
Mr Bain
On this pleasant occasion, I find that I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Let us hope that that agreement will continue when he contributes to the debate later, and in future debates.
These measures are not pro-growth, as they were included in the analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility in December that further downgraded growth forecasts for this year by 0.8% of gross domestic product. They are not pro-deficit reduction, as unemployment is set to become 340,000 higher than the level predicted by the OBR in 2010, and benefit bills will be £13 billion higher than forecast. They are not pro-equality either, as two thirds of the real-terms cuts introduced by clauses 1 and 2 will hurt women, and three fifths of them will hurt working families.
If the Government believe that they are standing up for fairness in the midst of the longest slump for 140 years, this must be either the most incompetent or the most misguided set of measures since those proposed by the National Government in 1931. On every count, they will increase, not cut, inequality in our country, given that 71% of the households affected are on or below the average income, and that 60% of the total savings from the Bill will come from the poorest third on the income scale. Only 3% will come from the wealthiest third. On no count can these measures be described as fair. How on earth can the Government believe that it is right to introduce a 4% real-terms cut in benefits until 2015 while continuing to pay top-rate pension tax relief to top-rate taxpayers at a rate of 50p in the pound? They are doing that while impoverishing the very poorest people at the same time.
Unemployment in my constituency remains consistently high at more than 4,000, or 12% of the working-age population. Although more than two thirds of jobless people experience only a few months out of work at the most, there are more than 1,300 people there who have been out of work for a year or more. Within that group, some 600 people have been out of work for two years or more. If the Government were serious about welfare reform, they would accept that ending the crushing blow of such long-term joblessness, which saps the human spirit and harms long-term job prospects—as the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) pointed out—should be the first duty of a responsible Government. Instead, they have put this ruinous set of measures before us tonight.
Andrew Bridgen
Given the sense of unity between us, will the hon. Gentleman endorse the coalition Government’s policies that have helped the economy to create 1.2 million new private sector jobs during this Parliament?
Mr Bain
I would not endorse that policy because, as the hon. Gentleman knows, that figure includes the transfer of between 200,000 and 250,000 college staff from the public sector to the private sector. I am not going to endorse that figure; he knows that it is not accurate.
Andrew Bridgen
Does my hon. Friend agree with my argument that what we have heard in this evening’s debate confirms that the parts of the country with the highest levels of unemployment often also have the lowest average wages and so it is important, if we want to make work pay—I believe all right hon. and hon. Members in the Chamber would agree that work must always pay—that we keep that disparity in respect of work and keep the incentive for people to get into jobs?
Kwasi Kwarteng
That is absolutely right.
I shall try to keep my closing remarks brief. The 1% rise in the uprating is surely a temporary measure; I would not want to see this in perpetuity. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham talked about the need to combat inflation. Clearly if inflation is sustained at 3% or 4% over years, that would be very punitive and would make the proposed measures even more difficult for people to bear. So the Government need to keep a firm handle and an eagle eye on the inflation rate. I am absolutely in favour of that, but on the general approach I would not want to see any amendments to this Bill. It is a difficult proposal that we are trying to push through, but many people up and down the country are supporting the Government on it because they feel that the measures we are introducing are encouraging people to get out to work. People also realise—I will close where I started my speech—the appalling fiscal legacy given to us, the incredibly difficult financial circumstances in which the Government found themselves, and the tough and courageous measures we are taking to get us out of the mess.
Richard Graham
I am sorry, but we have no more time for further interventions—
Richard Graham
The hon. Lady will have to wait, and so will my hon. Friend.
I reject completely the idea of moral divisions. This is not an argument between what the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) called a compassion-bypass Government and an economic-car-crash Government. It is about what is fair for the people who pay the taxes that pay for the services and benefits and what is fair for those who receive them. Many of us will have had letters from constituents who work for not very much money, contrary to what the hon. Member for Chesterfield implied, and who point out that their motivation for working suffers when they realise that those who do not work have received more than double the increase in their wage over the past year.
Measuring social justice entirely by how much we spend of other people’s money to generate a system where we now pay more in interest on our debt than we spend on the entire education budget—that is not moral compassion. It is wrong, and that is why we must make practical decisions that are sometimes tough. One of them is being presented to us this evening and I shall support the Bill.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
That would go without saying—all impacts on various groups will be taken into consideration. The main point I would make is that, no matter what else, if we were to implement such a policy, we would have to take into consideration categories of people who might find it incredibly difficult, such as those described by the hon. Lady. There would not necessarily be carte blanche—there would be nuances and changes. However, as I have said, discussions are ongoing, and as she can see, no policy exists at the moment.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that less than 16% of the 204,300 young people under 25 with children who claimed housing benefit are in a couple?
Mr Duncan Smith
That is obviously a matter for concern, but also for wider change. We want to ensure that couples stay together, and our plans and changes with universal credit will help with that enormously. It is worth reminding ourselves of the situation left by the previous Government. Labour Members go on about our policy, but in the past decade the housing benefit bill doubled from £11 billion to £21 billion. We are reducing the overall rise, but housing benefit under this Government will still rise by around £2 billion, as opposed to the huge sum the previous Government would have instigated.
Jobs and Social Security
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(11 years, 12 months ago)
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Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Byrne
In a moment.
The Government spent something like £63 million closing down the flexible new deal—a programme that was actually getting more people into sustainable jobs than the Work programme and was costing only something like 9.5% more per job outcome. The Government have, in effect, shut down a system that was working, spent an awful long time getting something back up and then overseen a programme that has dramatically failed to hit the target set for it in the first years. It is a catalogue of failure.
Mr Byrne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Glasgow city council has lessons to teach all of us about what it takes to get young people back into work. Despite all the difficult decisions that the council has had to take, it has made it a priority to get young people back into work. The way in which it has built on the future jobs fund is a real lesson for everybody.
Andrew Bridgen
The right hon. Gentleman talks about the Labour Government’s record of getting people into work. Can he explain why the number of households in which no one had ever worked doubled to 350,000 during the 13 years of his Government?
Mr Byrne
The hon. Gentleman should check his facts. The number of people on out-of-work benefits came down by 1 million under Labour, and the out-of-work benefit bill came down by £7.5 billion. That is in sharp contrast to this Government, who have put up welfare spending by £20 billion more than they projected. To pay down that bill, they are now having to cut tax credits from constituents such as those of the hon. Gentleman.
Andrew Bridgen
The right hon. Gentleman did not answer the question. I asked why the number of households in which no one had ever worked doubled to 350,000 under the last Labour Government.
Mr Byrne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: there is a bleak future for many young people in his constituency, where the Work programme has delivered something like 1.3% of people into sustainable jobs, so it is one of the worst figures in the country. When young people in my hon. Friend’s constituency face tuition fees that have trebled, the cancellation of EMA and the shutdown of the future jobs programme, he is right to call in this place for a very different course of action.
Even more worrying for the future, the signs are that when universal credit is introduced, it will not get better for Britain’s strivers and battlers; it will actually get worse. We know that new rules for universal credit will mean taking in-work benefits away from anyone who has managed to squirrel away £16,000, and we know that it locks in cuts to tax credits. Now, in this morning’s Sun, we read that a couple working full time—over a million of them will be in the system—will lose something like £1,200 a year. That is, of course, if it ever happens.
Andrew Bridgen
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I would like to tackle him on the last Government’s record on what he claims was getting people into work. If that were the case, will he explain why the working age welfare budget increased by 40% in real terms during the 13 years of the last Labour Government?
Mr Byrne
Let me give the hon. Gentleman some statistics. If he looked at the amount spent on benefits in 1996-97, he would find that it came to about £51 billion, excluding pensions. By the time we reach 2009-10, that had fallen to £44 billion, so I am afraid that no matter how he looks at it, the truth is that the amount spent on out-of-work benefits over the course of Labour’s period in office fell by £7.5 billion. The hon. Gentleman is a member of a party that has presided over an increase in the projected welfare spend by £20 billion, and there are something like 8,000 families in his constituency that are now seeing their tax credits either frozen or cut to pay for that cost of failure. I wonder how he is going to explain that to his constituents as we get closer to the next election.
It is not simply people in work who are paying the bill. We now know that about 6 million families are working, yet are still in poverty. There is another group of our constituents that we must worry about, too—those constituents who are disabled yet are set to lose something like £6.7 billion of help over the course of this Parliament to help pay for the failure to get Britain back to work. These benefits are being taken away, without any cumulative assessment of their combined impact, and these cuts total more than the Government are taking away from banks. That, I am afraid, is a sorry indictment of this Government’s values.
Geraint Davies
We are seeing the perverse irony that the welfare bill is going up and up, with more people going into dependency, because the environment for job creation is not there. Meanwhile, the Government’s one-string solution is simply to give people less and less, when the focus should be on how to create new jobs, so that we can help people to get and sustain a job.
Another example—other than the targeting of under-25s who tend to have children and the escalation of child poverty into intergenerational poverty—is the empty bedroom tax. This is another horrendous idea whereby poor people—they are poor by definition as they are on housing benefit—who have an empty bedroom will lose about £7.50 a week, or £15 if they have two empty bedrooms. For example, a couple with two children, one of whom wants to go to university or get a job, will clearly have an incentive to say, “Don’t go to university,” or “Don’t leave home to get a job”—“Don’t ‘get on your bike’”, as Lord Tebbit would have it—“because, if you do, we shall end up being taxed £7.50 a week.”
A man who came to my surgery a couple of weeks ago told me that he was receiving disability living allowance, that he had a second bedroom—he used it for painting, as it happens—and that he did not have a job. Indeed, he was not a person who could have got a job. After he had paid his utility bills and all the rest, his disposable income was £20 a week. He will now lose £7.50 as a result of the bedroom tax, and next April the Government will cut the council tax rebate by 20%, which amounts to about £5 a week. His disposable income will then be down to £8 a week, which will have to cover his food, clothing and leisure.
This despicable and, in my view, socially criminal activity generates very little money from those who can least afford it, and one of the by-products will be mass homelessness. I have been a leader of a local authority, and I know that local authorities usually build family-size housing. Someone living in a two-bedroom flat or a three-bedroom house that ceases to be full when the children leave home will lose housing benefit and will then be evicted if he or she goes into arrears. Where do such people go when a local authority has not built enough one-bedroom accommodation because it is supposed to cater for families?
What if a child wants to come back from university, or to visit the family? What if there is a split in the family and the child needs to move from one place to another? The bedroom tax will cause massive disruption to communities in areas like mine throughout the country and disfigure the opportunities for us to create new jobs and get back on a sound track towards economic recovery.
Andrew Bridgen
Will the hon. Gentleman not concede that better utilisation of the social housing stock and an increase in its capacity will give us an opportunity to reduce homelessness?
Geraint Davies
I have been the housing chair for London and for Croydon. I know that it is possible to devise strategies involving incentives to encourage people to move to smaller homes—and, of course, as people die over time, housing is recycled in any case—but the suggestion that a group of people in social housing should be evicted once their children have grown up and that, because suitable housing does not exist in their own communities, they should be moved around is not only despicable but completely counter-productive. It is economically insane as well as socially immoral.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
I share the Secretary of State’s incredulity that the Opposition would choose to debate these issues on an Opposition day, since they have no credibility at all. They snipe from the political sidelines despite the fact that the Government have created more than 1 million private sector jobs in just three years—twice as many as the previous Labour Government produced in 13 years.
The Opposition seem also to have forgotten the terrible legacy that they left, and they should once again be reminded of a few of the facts. For instance, in their 13 years in government in arguably favourable economic conditions—the boom before the inevitable bust—the number of households in which no one has ever been in work doubled to 350,000. That legacy will take many years to rectify, as children in those households will have no working role model and will probably come to believe that not working is the norm and that it is normal to subsist on benefits. As a Member of Parliament, there is nothing more depressing than visiting a school and asking a young child what they want to do when they finish school, only to be told, “I’m going to sit at home and watch television with my dad.” I never want to hear that again; it makes me want to weep.
Almost 2 million children are growing up in homes where nobody works. The UK has one of the highest proportions of workless households in Europe, and as I have pointed out, the working age welfare budget increased by a shocking 40% in real terms in 13 years of Labour government. That is another area where the Opposition failed to fix the roof while the sun was shining. However, we now have a Government who are determined to tackle the welfare dependency that developed under the previous Government and oversee the creation of sustainable, private sector jobs as we work to rebalance our economy. The Opposition do not want to hear the good news about employment statistics, but despite their sniping, real progress has been made. Some 1.2 million jobs have been created; employment is up by a net 750,000; and there are more people in work than ever, including more women employed than at any time in our country’s history.
One statistic that the Government should be particularly proud of is the fact that more than half a million people started an apprenticeship in the past year. In my constituency of North West Leicestershire, there were 420 apprentice starts in 2009-10, but 940 in 2010-11—a growth rate of 124%. I would like to mention the excellent work undertaken by community groups and charities to boost apprentice numbers. In my constituency, Whitwick Community Enterprises has undertaken sterling work, reaching out to young people who are not even classified as not in employment, education or training—they have slipped under the radar altogether—giving them life skills in preparation for their return to full employment. I am delighted that that group has successfully applied for Government grants, which means that even more people in my constituency will be given the opportunity to learn skills for life. It should be extremely proud of that.
Opposition spokespeople have discussed the Work programme, and what they perceive as a lack of success. According to the Employment Related Services Association, the industry has helped 207,831 people back into work since the Work programme was introduced, and 29 in every 100 people who have gone on the programme since June 2011 have been supported into a job. Indeed, every month, more than 20,000 people are finding jobs through the Work programme, and the figures improve month on month, as many of my colleagues have said.
Many people would suggest that the Work programme is the biggest and most ambitious scheme of its type in the world. It is, and we should be positive about it. According to the Employment Related Services Association, the official statistics released by the Government yesterday represent a limited snapshot of performance in the early months of the programme, bearing in mind that it has been running for only a year. For someone to qualify as undertaking fixed employment they have to be on the programme for six months and employed for six months. Very few people fit those criteria, but I am assured by the providers that there is more good news in the pipeline.
The Work programme has helped 64,601 people into work. Over that period, unemployment fell by 49,000, so it is difficult to argue that it has not had an impact in reducing unemployment. I would have liked more time, but it was Labour that proposed the jobs tax—the increase in national insurance—which we reversed. It was under Labour that youth unemployment increased by 40%, and half a million people were left on benefit facing marginal tax rates of over 80% if they found work. The Opposition are as credible on welfare reform as they are on the economy: no apologies, no new ideas, and still nothing to say.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr Vaizey
I met the great lover of the arts’ junior Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr Foster), only yesterday, and my Department has regular communications with the Department for Communities and Local Government. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we managed to keep the cuts to national portfolio organisations down to 15% or less, and we have massively increased the national lottery share for the arts. However, we do, of course, take concerns about local authority funding seriously.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that funding for the arts through the national lottery has vastly increased because of the changes made by this Government?
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Steve Webb
This is indeed an important issue. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the Pensions Regulator has engaged during the last 12 months, and continues to engage, with more than 1,100 schemes that are linked to overseas employers. Between April 2010 and August 2012, it has exercised its powers on at least 10 occasions in relation to such schemes.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
The Minister is aware of a case in my constituency in which the BMI pension fund was placed in a pension protection fund by Lufthansa. In this case, Lufthansa voluntarily paid over £84 million in compensation to the fundholders. However, under current HMRC rules the money is being treated as income, and the lifetime and annual allowance rules are being applied to the compensation. Does my hon. Friend agree that the position is unfair and should be reviewed by HMRC?
Steve Webb
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that case. I have corresponded with Treasury colleagues about the issue, and, subject to their consent, I shall be happy to share with him the reply that I have just received.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Hoban
The Health and Safety Executive is taking a proactive stance on the issue. It is issuing guidance to stakeholders and others and ensuring that there is a risk-based approach to inspections, focusing on installations likely to cause the highest risk of legionella. We are taking action to tackle the problem and no one’s life will be put at risk as a consequence of the changes that we are making.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is essential for the Health and Safety Executive to work closely with local authorities, as they are the bodies that interact with, and regulate, many of those in the sector that are prone to legionella?
Mr Hoban
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a shared responsibility, and that requires the HSE and local authorities to work closely together. It requires them to identify the risks in their areas and take the right steps, proportionate to those risks, to tackle the risk of legionella.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Chris Grayling
It is obviously very difficult to talk about an individual case, and I am afraid that I make it a matter of policy that Ministers do not become involved in individual cases. What I would say is that it is extremely important that we provide support for all cancer sufferers who can potentially return to work to do so at the earliest opportunity. That is much better for them than being stuck at home on benefits.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
As a result of the Government’s review, will the Minister confirm that there is now much better understanding of cancer treatments, and that many people undergoing oral chemotherapy, for example, will now be placed automatically in a support group, which did not happen previously?
Chris Grayling
It is absolutely our intention to include for the first time people going through oral chemotherapy in the support group. The actual detail will be resolved in the review that is being carried out at the moment. We shall publish the outcome later in the summer. I stress again that this Government have broadened the range of cancer patients in the support group who receive long-term unconditional support until they are potentially able to make a return to work.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
I take this opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that she has been doing on this. She is quite right that it is an important area and it is one that I have asked my Department and the Department for Education to consider together. Under the previous Government, the number of childminders fell quite dramatically. In 1996, there were about 100,000 and in 2011 that number had fallen below 60,000. That is a huge issue. When we took over, we found that the costs of child care in the UK are about the fourth highest in the world. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that there are big issues that we need to deal with and try to resolve so that we can get more people back to work with the support that they need.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
7. What progress he has made on implementing the recommendations of the Löfstedt report on health and safety regulation.
Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
8. What progress he has made on implementing the recommendations of the Löfstedt report on health and safety regulation.
Andrew Bridgen
It was one, Mr Speaker.
I welcome the launch of the mythbusters challenge panel, designed to give quick advice to people affected by ridiculous or disproportionate health and safety decisions. Will my right hon. Friend explain how that panel will work?
Chris Grayling
What we are trying to do is to give people who believe that a decision that has been taken is wrong—such as a decision to cancel an event or to take some other step that will impact on their lives—a chance to go quickly to the HSE and ask whether it is based on a true interpretation. We will seek to give them a clear view within two days of whether the decision is appropriate, so that they can challenge it locally.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrew Bridgen Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Steve Webb
Where employers run defined benefits pension schemes, if they are in deficit and have a recovery plan agreed with the Pensions Regulator, there is no obligation on them to overfund above 100%, and there are Inland Revenue rules that affect surpluses, which are still in place.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that those well-intentioned but misguided individuals who oppose the introduction of a benefits cap are in serious danger of killing with kindness the very people they seek to help, by condemning them to a lifetime of benefits dependency and worklessness, which the benefits cap will seek to reverse?
Mr Duncan Smith
I fully understand those who on every principle and in every regard oppose the cap, but I cannot understand those who say they are in favour of it and then vote against it.