Coronavirus Outbreak: DWP Response

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) for securing this debate. There has been so much criticism of the Government in this place this year, much of it very unfair and political, and much of it fair and necessary in holding the Government to account for things that are going wrong. What we do not hear often from the Opposition, however, is recognition of what has gone right, which is why I note the generous spirit in which the right hon. Gentleman spoke about universal credit, acknowledging it as a “national asset”. That is good description of what has been achieved.

I honour Ministers at the DWP for the tremendous success story of 2020. There have been 3.2 million new UC claimants, a near doubling of the total case load, as I understand it, and yet despite all the protests about UC in recent years, I do not think that there been a squeak of protest in this place about the process of onboarding those claims. In my constituency, we have had nearly 3,000 new UC claims and, having just checked, I have had eight items of casework on UC this year, which represents a fairly small proportion of my total case load. I honour what has been done, and give my thanks to Jobcentre Plus staff and all the staff at the DWP. There are many heroes working behind the scenes in our country this year, and Jobcentre Plus staff are leaders among them.

I also wish to pay tribute to the coalition Government and principally my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for his role in designing and implementing UC. I can only imagine what would have been the case had we stuck with the old system and the myriad benefits, mostly with paper-based administration; it would have been a complete disaster. But we had a digital system, so when millions of people suddenly needed unemployment benefits, the computer said yes.

On that topic, the right hon. Member for East Ham raises the suggestion from his Select Committee in its report earlier this year that people should be able to go back to legacy benefits after being on universal credit. It is certainly true that, despite the significant increases in universal credit, some people appear to be worse off on it, but as we have seen, and as I have just described, UC is a far more agile system and the intention—I think of the whole House—is to replace legacy benefits. I agree with the Government’s position that it would not be right to let people go back. The right hon Gentleman mentions mis-selling: surely that is an exaggeration, but I do wonder whether more can be done to explain to people what joining UC means and to make sure that they are able to check properly whether it is the right move for them.

I also congratulate the DWP and, more particularly, Citizens Advice on its scheme, Help to Claim, which the DWP funds. It is the beginning of the far more substantial system that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green always intended to accompany universal credit. The Government are recruiting 13,500 new work coaches to work in jobcentres, which is tremendous, but people need more than coaches—they need training, professional support and peer support. They might have issues with addiction or debt, or family problems. We need to create the systems that support job coaches and support individual jobseekers, so I urge the Minister to consider what more can be done to deepen Help to Claim beyond the initial period of joining UC to create a system that works with businesses and charities. The gateway system for kickstart potentially offers a model for that.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the future jobs fund. We want to do better than that, because it had quite a high drop-out rate. The opportunity for the kickstart scheme is to sustain those young people in employment, but in order to do that, we need to ensure that they have the right support around them, not simply the job placement itself.

My final point is more strategic and about the principles of welfare. I hope that I will not be thought abstract or even flippant when I make this point. I call in my defence Professor Simon Szreter of Cambridge University, who has made the same point. He said that we need to go back to the principles of the Elizabethan poor law. I am not talking about Victorian poor law—the Dickensian horrors of the workhouse and so on—but the original poor law of 1601. It was the first comprehensive system of social security in this country and, as Professor Szreter explains, it had two elements. First, it was local, it was funded from local taxation and it was paid out to people flexibly according to their needs. Secondly, it encouraged altruism and social responsibility by the wealthy through incentives to create almshouses, colleges and churches.

I do not propose going back to those days, but those are the principles that we need—a more local and more flexible approach and one in which the wealthy, by which I mean businesses in today’s age, play a central role in supporting local communities and helping people into employment. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the need for a more dependable social security system, and I entirely agree. I support everything the Government are doing to help people facing unemployment, and I hope for more substantial reform in due course.