Universal Credit Roll-out
Debate between Chris Stephens and Anna Soubry(7 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) on his maiden speech. He is still to be persuaded on the merits of Scottish independence, and I look forward to debating them with him in the next few years. I thank him for paying a generous tribute to his predecessor, Eilidh Whiteford; I am sure that all Scottish National party Members appreciate that.
As a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, let me start by saying that Glasgow is a city where words often have more than one meaning, and in attempting to sum up this Government’s approach to social security benefits and universal credit, I would use the word “ignorant”. Now, Government Members may not agree with that characterisation. They may even point out that the architect of universal credit, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), made a point of visiting Easterhouse in Glasgow in 2002. But, of course, the Government are closing the jobcentre in Easterhouse this year.
Anna Soubry
I was a member of the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs when we discussed the situation of the Glasgow jobcentres. Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that Glasgow had somewhere in the region of 16 jobcentres and that the DWP’s very excellent proposal—in fact, it was not radical enough, in my view—was to reduce that number to eight? We compared the number of jobcentres in comparable cities in other parts of the country that had comparable employment rates, and they often had two or three jobcentres, as opposed to eight.
