Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Conor McGinn Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

Completely. It is one of the more risible statements I have heard from the Government. It is, once more, a measure of the contempt with which they hold certain sections of the British public that they think they can pull the wool over the eyes of people. They describe themselves, laughably, as the party of labour and the party of the workers, while they are cutting the wages of working people: 3.3 million families will be hit to the tune of £1,300; 200,000 children will be put into poverty next year, and 600,000 children over the period; and 70% of the cuts will fall on working mothers. The tax credit cuts will destroy the “economic miracle” the Tories like to talk about. Some 90% of the cuts will be devastating for the people involved. The statistics speak for themselves. After I have given way to my hon. Friend, I will describe the human impact of the cuts.

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is an inherent contradiction in the Government’s policy? The parents of a young family who came to see me in my constituency last week told me that they work hard, pay their way and are trying to do the right thing to set an example for their children. Should the Government not be supporting them, rather than punishing them?

[Owen Smith]

Indeed they should. I cannot understand how on earth even this Chancellor, who is pretty slipshod on occasion when it comes to analysing the impact of his measures, can have allowed this one to slip through the net. A pasty tax and a caravan tax maybe, but a £4.4 billion hit on the very workers he purports to support is truly extraordinary.

Let us look beyond the statistics for a moment. On Friday, I was out in my constituency in the village of Beddau, a former pit village at the heart of Pontypridd. Entirely by chance, I met a young woman called Kirsten who was bringing her daughter Maisie home from school. Kirsten is a nursery manager in a small private-run nursery just outside the village. She works 21 hours a week. They are all the hours available, as the nursery is open only in the morning and she works all five mornings. She then brings her daughter home from school and looks after her. She earns £611 a month. That is what she earns from her 21 hours of work at £8 an hour. That is well above the minimum wage and well above the new minimum wage we will see next year. She is set to lose £1,300 of her £7,000 earnings as a result of the cuts. That is an enormous drop for her to contemplate. She said to me that she simply did not know how she would manage. She did not understand how, without the £128 she receives in tax credits each month, she will be able to make ends meet.

I sat down with Kirsten and talked through what she needs to pay out for each month: the housing association three-bedroom house she lives in, council tax, insurance, and running her car to get back and forth to the nursery and to pick up her child. There is nothing left over. The £128 she spends from the tax credits she rightly receives pays for food, new clothes and her child’s books for school. It is just beyond the ken of ordinary people that the Government could be asking them to pay the price for the bankers’ recession, which has led to the crisis in our economy and a Tory Government cutting the incomes of working people.