Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Bridget Phillipson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claire Coutinho]

I will talk about the things that I already talk about with them: the youth hub and the work coaches that the Department for Work and Pensions has put into my constituency to help people into work, and the jobs that we are creating in the local economy, which are helping people into work.

Secondly, on skills, not only have we introduced the kickstart scheme, which is helping 2,500 young people a week into the quality jobs we want to see them in, but we have introduced a lifetime skills guarantee. We have improved schools during our period in government, going from two thirds of children being in good and outstanding schools to 86% of children. We have increased the number of job coaches and the amount of money going into apprenticeships and traineeships. These will all set people up to have a good job and a good life.

We are also looking at the root causes of poverty. I assume the Labour party would support the national living wage, which is an extra £5,400 going into people’s pockets since 2010. We are doing things like the troubled families programme and the reducing parental conflict programme, about which I am particularly passionate because, unlike some Opposition Members, I think relationships, not just financial benefits, are one of the best ways to help people out of poverty. That is really important.

I also highlight some of the inconsistencies I have heard today, which I find quite troubling. The Labour party would keep the triple lock, with its 8% rise funded by working-age people. [Interruption.] Let me go through what is happening: 2.5% last year, 2.5% or more this year and back to the triple lock next year. The Labour party would keep it at 8%, funded by working-age people—£5 billion out of their pockets.

Let us talk about pay rises for those who helped us during the pandemic, which the Labour party voted against yesterday. Let us talk about taxes.

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

National insurance, there’s one.

[Claire Coutinho]

Yes, a tax that the Labour party raised in 2003. [Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

I thank so many of my hon. Friends for their powerful contributions to today’s important debate. Time is short, so I apologise that I am not able to mention them all personally. I also acknowledge the small number of Conservative Members who called on their own side to think again on this issue.

This debate has been rich in statistics, which reflects both the scale of the mistake the Government are on track to make, and the horror so many of us feel at the simple evidence of the numbers affected and that the impact on each family seems to bear such little weight on the Government’s decision making.

This debate has also been rich in powerful stories about what £20 each week, £100 each month, means to families right across our country. It means enough food to get through the week, it means being able to keep the house warm as the nights grow longer and it means growing children having clothes that fit them properly and warm clothes to see them through the winter.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), in opening the debate, set out powerfully that the cut to universal credit hurts families in work, as well as those out of work. It is no solution to tell people who are about to be clobbered by this cut that they need to go and get a job when so many are already working all the hours God sends. Nor is it any solution for those who, by reason of disability, illness or caring responsibilities, simply cannot work.

This decision to cut the incomes of millions of families is a choice, but it is a choice that sadly fits with so many recent decisions made by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. Last November, the Chancellor chose to put up council tax for the very families we are talking about today. He chose to freeze the pay of millions of frontline workers. In March, he chose to freeze income tax thresholds. Last week, he had a brand new tax on working people and their jobs. And today we are debating cutting universal credit.

Again and again, this Government look first to working people, rather than looking across the piece at our tax system. There was a stamp duty holiday for buy-to-let landlords and second home owners, but they have taken £1,000 a year out of the incomes of working people who are doing all that is asked of them.

The most recent figures show that GDP growth is stalling, and this morning’s inflation figures show us that the weekly shop is getting more expensive. Now is not the time to be sucking demand out of our economy. The Government are taking away £20 each week from budgets that are already stretched and from our high streets and local businesses that are getting back on their feet after a tough 18 months.

When I talk of universal credit as a meal on the table for families, heating for homes and coats for children, it is because I know the difference that the money makes. For me, this is more than political—it is personal. Growing up in the north-east in the 1980s, I was one of those children. Not long after starting school, as the winter drew in, my mam could not afford a new coat for me. She was a single parent, money was tight and we did not always have much. I was kept warm by the generosity of a neighbour, who himself did not have much, who saw me and put some money through our door in an envelope marked, “For Bridget’s coat”. I never forgot that kindness.

I thought, and hoped, that more than 30 years later we had moved on. I thought that as a society we would never again allow children to grow up in poverty, never again allow families like my own to be so dependent on random acts of kindness from others. As I grew up, I saw a Labour Government lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. I saw that poverty is not inevitable: it is about the choices politicians make. Poverty is not about coats or food in and of themselves—it is about the power to make choices for yourself and to have control over your own future. Today, we are seeing a Government about to plunge hundreds of thousands of children back into avoidable poverty.

Today’s debate is not about me. It is about the worried families in my community and across our country starting to think about the same horrible, painful decisions that my family faced all those years ago. At tables across this country, in every constituency, those discussions, those calculations, will be happening this evening and in the weeks to come. They are not decisions I would wish on anyone. They are not decisions Conservative Ministers should be forcing on anyone. That is why I urge all Members to make a different choice this afternoon. I urge Conservative Members to abandon their plans to take away £20 each week from struggling families, and to remember the common decency and compassion that should unite us all. I urge them to support our motion and join us in the Lobby this evening. It is time to cancel the cut.