Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Debbie Abrahams Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I am grateful to the hon. Member, who makes two points: first, if the Government believed this level of need was evident during the pandemic, the crisis that people face—whether that is illness or redundancy—does not change whether or not there is a global pandemic; and crucially, yes, he is right that fuel costs are going up. We had the announcement this morning that inflation is over 3%. Anyone who has been to a British supermarket in the last few months knows how much food is going up, so the need is absolutely there. Frankly, the Government’s case that somehow this support was needed in the pandemic and can be taken away has absolutely nothing to it.

That brings me to one more point I want to raise before I talk about the impact on people. I want to highlight again the situation for people on legacy benefits, such as employment and support allowance and jobseeker’s allowance, who never had this uplift to begin with. I believe, and I have said so many times, that these people are the victims of discrimination. Universal credit is the clear successor benefit to these benefits, and the decision to not uprate them was initially presented to this House as a technical problem, rather than a policy choice. The situation they have been put in is grossly unfair, and we will continue to keep raising this. The only reason I did not include those benefits in the wording of this motion today is that I did not want any Conservative MP to be able to cite that as a reason to refuse to back this motion.

It is the impact on people that should be paramount in our minds. I am sure all hon. Members, whichever side they are on, have been inundated with people getting in touch to tell them exactly how much this money means to them. The leaked internal analysis from the Government that appeared in the Financial Times last week described the cut, in the Government’s own term, as “catastrophic”. The human cost of taking this money away cannot be overstated: £20 may not seem like much to some people, but it is makes the difference of having food in the fridge and still being able to put the heating on, or being able to get the kids new school shoes without worrying how to pay for them.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. In Oldham, there are over 11,000 people in work reliant on universal credit with 22,000 children. Is he as concerned as I am that the long-lasting impacts of driving these children into further poverty—as we saw, for example, in the Nuffield Foundation report yesterday—are going to be detrimental not just for those families, but for society as a whole?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

My hon. Friend is my constituency neighbour, and she knows that her constituency is very much like mine. We have seen the impact of the austerity years and what that has meant, not just in terms of the impact on people, but with how much need that has pushed on to other services—the NHS, the police force—and, frankly, with how so many of the preventive services that were once there have had to go from local authorities. The position people are in, as things stand today, is not one in which anyone could reasonably say that there is capacity to further reduce support and take so much money out of local economies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Coffey]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We already had about 640 jobcentres. We are opening a further 200 by the end of the year, recognising that we need to support more people. Of course, work coaches do not just deal with helping people—people with disabilities and a limited capability to work—to get back into work. Work coaches do a wide variety of work to support some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. Again, I thank him for paying tribute to our work coaches. They will play a key role in the time ahead. Perhaps the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth would like to intervene now?

[Debbie Abrahams]

I would be delighted to, although it is not specifically on work coaches. The right hon. Lady is absolutely right that there are winners and losers with universal credit. Last week, the Select Committee heard from four single parents about how they are the losers. I would add that disabled people are also losers. What is the cumulative impact of the cuts to universal credit, the introduction of the new national insurance contributions payment, the rise in food prices and energy bills, and the childcare costs which we have already heard about? What would the impact be on a single parent with two children living on the minimum wage with support from universal credit?

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Lady will know that every individual or household on universal credit has very distinct relationships, which is why we can find households earning up to nearly £40,000 still being recipients of universal credit. It depends on the circumstances. As the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) said the other day, trying to do some kind of analysis by trying to make individual assessments is just not viable. However, we know, and she knows—