Debate on the Address

Claire Perry Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dame Tessa Jowell]

I will not give way again as many other hon. Members want to speak.

There is much in the Queen’s Speech about welfare and the future of the welfare state. It is not a welfare policy to pop up on television every other Sunday with another bit of tinkering with the welfare state. We have a welfare state which is founded on three principles— the contributory principle, the universal principle and the discretionary principle. Richard Titmuss famously observed—and this is the warning to those who seek to dismantle a universal welfare state that has at different times of our lives relevance for all of us—that services only for the poor are poor services. I challenge Government Members to think of a single service which is used only by the poor that they would be prepared to use at a time of difficulty or trouble.

Remembering the simplicity with which many of the terrible human conditions in which people now find themselves can be resolved, two principles should be upheld: do not hollow out those services that are the practical, direct contact with those individuals, and steer away from a principle for our public services or our welfare state which reduces its scope, making it one that is only for the poor. Stigma follows.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that a fundamental principle of the welfare system should also be that work pays more than welfare? That is the system underpinning universal credit. Does she welcome that?

[Dame Tessa Jowell]

Yes. I sat around the Cabinet table when we discussed precisely putting in place the policies that would ensure that people earned more in work than they would on benefit. That is another change. That is why, incidentally, we introduced the national minimum wage and why our alternative Queen’s Speech lays such emphasis on enforcement of the national minimum wage. That is why there is now an important opportunity to reduce, progressively and systematically, the very large cost of in-work tax credit by linking incentives for employers seeking public contracts to pay a living wage to people right across the country, which is something the best employers are already adopting.

Let me touch briefly on what I think will be one of the most publicly important, and in many respects welcome, announcements in the Queen’s Speech, and that is in relation to social care—but I think we should go further. In Committee we will press hard on the paradox that £800 million is being taken away from local authorities’ ability to fund social care at a time when the responsibilities and burden on families are increasing. It is very hard to find those families who would not prefer their elderly relatives to be loved and looked after in their own homes. Therefore, that should not just be the rhetorical aim of the policy; it should be the organisational and administrative means by which that hope is realised. Again, that is not difficult, but we must start with the individual and their needs and build the structure and organisation of the service around them, rather than, as so many elderly people find is their lot, making their needs conform to predetermined rules that have little to do with their circumstances.

Therefore, it is through the welfare state, and by increasing the responsibility of employers in relation to the living wage and by recognising that good care for people at home means building relationships and relevant support around the individual, that the source of help might begin to match the circumstances of individual families and their needs. That is the only way in which confidence can be rebuilt. I am intensely proud of the efforts of so many Labour councils, in particular, across the country that are pioneering approaches to that. A Queen’s Speech designed for the whole country would learn a lot from some of those beacons of light at an individual and local level. I commend those proposals to the House.