Bill Esterson
Main Page: Bill Esterson (Labour - Sefton Central)Department Debates - View all Bill Esterson's debates with the Leader of the House
(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to Sir Teddy Taylor. I do not agree that the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport was at all confusing yesterday. I heard her say very clearly that, ideally, to address this issue more quickly, we will seek voluntary co-operation from social media organisations, because it takes longer to legislate. It is really important, as the hon. Gentleman quite rightly says, to explore means of reducing the appalling problem of cyber-bullying, which goes on all too frequently.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
The Leader of the House spoke about universal credit just now. I have constituents who have waited more than 20 minutes, many of them more than once, to get through before they can even ask for a call-back. Will she please get a Minister to come to the House as soon as possible and announce the scrapping of the 55p charge? These people are in desperate need of money, which is the only reason why they are having to make the calls in the first place.
Andrea Leadsom
To be clear to the hon. Gentleman, the charge—I am not condoning it at all—is not a Government charge. The Government do not make money from these calls; the charge is made by phone providers, so his remedy of scrapping it is not a matter for the Government. I absolutely take on board his concern that people should not have to hold on for so long on those calls. As I said to the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff), 99% of applications are made online, and there are facilities in jobcentres to help people to log in online. It is absolutely vital that all of us, as constituency MPs, make it clear to our constituents that they can ask for a call-back, which would be free to them.