Welfare Reform Bill

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I welcome the Bill, which marks a point at which we can send out this message: we cannot continue to spend on welfare as we have previously. Instead, we need to understand that there is no such thing as Government money, free to be given out; there is only hard-earned taxpayers’ money, which in these difficult times needs to be spent with caution and care.

Over the past 13 years, we saw no evidence of that caution, as the total annual expenditure on benefits mushroomed to £152 billion. Every year, £5.2 billion was lost in overpayments, of which £1.5 billion was lost to fraud. Some £3.5 billion was spent annually on administration costs and paperwork alone. As we have heard from the Minister, other benefits rose, with the cost of housing benefit having increased from £11 billion to £20 billion since 1997. That is simply unsustainable and we must act.

I wish to refer to the words of one commentator, who once said that

“we have reached the limits of the public’s willingness simply to fund an unreformed welfare system through ever higher taxes and spending”.—[Official Report, 14 May 1997; Vol. 294, c. 65.]

Those words could have been spoken today by the Minister, but they were spoken by Tony Blair in 1997. In opposition, Blair understood the problem. He understood, even 14 long years ago, that our welfare system prevents people from living independent and fulfilling lives. He understood that it creates a segregated society, which he stated was a “moral and economic evil.” In 1997, Labour’s manifesto promised:

“we will face up to the…issues that confront us. We will be the party of welfare reform.”

I see very little evidence of that, and, tied down by Members on the left, the party did nothing.

In this debate, we are having to deal with the tragedy that that inaction has left us. Millions of people of working age are locked in dependency on state benefits, with little incentive to get off them. They can exploit a system that provides hand-downs, rather than a hand up—a system that has become the engine of social failure and has driven a culture of “work does not pay”. That, in turn, has driven the importation of cheap labour, exacerbating the immigration problem.

I hope that this Bill can mark the turn of the tide and that it will usher in a new era—one that we were promised in 1997 but that was never delivered. I hope this will be an era of reform that will transform this nation. The stakes might be high, but we cannot afford to waver on welfare reform. We must deliver for the health of the nation, and I urge every Member to give the Bill their full support.