Capping Welfare Spending

Debate between Charlie Elphicke and Jonathan Lord

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Charlie Elphicke]

Absolutely. The system needs to be fair, and I hope that in his response Minister will address the important issue my hon. Friend raises.

The average pay packet has not increased much in recent years. The recession was serious and the recovery has been long, hard and extremely choppy, so it is right that welfare benefits should not increase faster than pay packets. It is unfair that benefits have risen twice as fast as average earnings since the financial crisis, which is why the Government are right to introduce a 1% uprating limit. My constituents have told me that that is an important signal about fairness and the fact that work is good. The Government are also right to make work pay, with universal credit and by increasing the income tax personal allowance. At the same time, the Government have sought to be fair and protect the most vulnerable—the disabled, the elderly and the incapacitated.

Benefit capping is about not only fairness, but money. We should remember the country’s debt crisis. Savings of £4.4 billion by 2017 are not trivial, so it is small wonder that more than 60% of people have told pollsters that they support the Government’s measures to restore fairness on benefit uprating. The Government have been prepared to make the most difficult decisions—I will not shirk that issue. Capping housing benefit, so that it is most aligned to housing need, has not been easy. It was a difficult decision. People do want to be told that they will have to pay more for their spare room, but that cap is also about fairness, which is why a clear majority of people tell pollsters that they support the difficult decisions that the Government have taken. There are 1.8 million households on the housing waiting list and 249,000 households live in overcrowded social housing, yet 386,000 households in the social sector are under-occupied. It is important that we take measures to restore the balance, so capping housing benefit is right and fair.

I would like to press the Minister slightly. Will he consider extending the principle of tackling the spare room subsidy, so that the social housing provider takes the burden? I am concerned that too many social housing providers think that they can simply pass the buck when it comes to managing their housing stock fairly and appropriately and making fair allocations. The spare room does not affect them, so why should they care? Too often, they are content to do little or nothing about fair housing allocation. The best incentive to get them to clean up their acts would be for social housing providers to take some or all of the burden for their incompetence in the management of housing allocations over such a long time. I hope that the Minister will consider that proposal, because it is right to send a strong message to social housing providers that indolence in housing management is not an excuse.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Would he particularly welcome the fact that, as of today, 2,500 out-of-work households in London can no longer claim more than the average working family earns? In London, where I was a senior councillor for several years, we have seen some particularly egregious cases of people in houses with equivalent rents of more than £100,000. I agree that that involved a few isolated cases, but it was a real slap in the face for hardworking people in London trying to get by on £10,000, £15,000 or even £20,000. A bit like with Abu Qatada and the human rights law, it crystallised for so many people the inequity and unfairness of things.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. He made that same good point earlier today, in questions to the Prime Minister if I recall rightly. It is a serious point. We need to get a balance of fairness.

If we want to know whether people are affected, we need just to look at the local authority discretionary payments budget. Members can correct me if I am wrong—I am sure that the Minister will—but I believe that the budget has been under-spent, which indicates that the impact has perhaps been understated by some for political purposes, rather than their dealing with the practical effects of restoring fairness. Most of my constituents say, “It’s just not acceptable that anyone should have something for nothing, given the difficult times we live in.”

The Government have raised the issue of the overall cap, which is something I welcome strongly. It needs to be a serious cap, not the sort of nonsense that we have been hearing from the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He does not seem able to say what his cap would be or how he would set it. Labour cannot say what would happen if the cap was breached; all the party seems able to say is that it wants to include the state pension and pensioners in it. We need to limit welfare spending, but it is not right to do it at the expenses of pensioners who have worked hard for so many years and have contributed to the system. It would not be right for any Government to start beating pensioners up and taking their pensions away, considering how much they have put into the system, so Labour is wrong on that. The party is in a total muddle and confusion. It has opposed each of our welfare reforms, which have saved some £83 billion.

When might the Minister be able to set out further details of the Government’s plan for how the welfare cap will work? Labour’s proposals are muddled and confused, and it is right that the Government should take time to get the fine detail of the plan right, rather than shooting from the hip like Labour. Does the Minister agree that it is important to limit the cost of welfare and to build on the measures that the Government are taking to do more to make work pay? I ask him to confirm that this Government will not punish pensioners for having done the right thing in years past by contributing to the system and will not take away or limit the state pension, as the Opposition seem to plan to do.

With your leave, Mr Rosindell, I will end there and allow my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) to take up the cudgels.