Universal Credit Roll-out

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point because I want to say to Conservative Members that none of us is lying about our experiences. We are not making things up. We are coming to the House with genuine problems that the Government are failing to address.

DWP figures show that around one in four new claimants waits longer than six weeks to be paid—a 25% failure rate: staggeringly alarming given that universal credit is still in its early days. Benefit delays remain a primary reason for the increase in the use of food banks. Citizens Advice has found that, from 52,000 cases, those on universal credit appear to have, on average, less than £4 a month left to pay all their creditors after they have paid essential living costs.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mhairi Black]

I will keep going.

To progress with the roll-out of universal credit as it stands is callous at worst and arrogantly idiotic at best. We have heard multiple times that people can now apply for an advance payment, but the fact is that those advance payments are nothing more than a loan that has to be paid back at a later date. Simply changing the terms of that loan does nothing about the litany of systemic failures throughout the entire process. All it is doing is creating more of a burden on claimants and forcing people to deal with a problem that is not their fault in the first place.

The Government are almost starting to behave like some kind of pious loan shark, except instead of coming through people’s front door, they are coming after their mental health, their physical wellbeing, their stability and their sense of security. That is the experience of all our constituents.

This debate got me thinking about how all this has coincided with seven years of cuts and failures. The Government have failed to rebalance our economy, and they have failed to reach their own fiscal targets. We are not dealing with the national debt; we are simply shifting it on to vulnerable households. We have the worst decade of wage growth in 210 years. To put it in context, that is the length of time since the Napoleonic wars—that is how bad it is just now.

Scratch beneath the surface and we see that things are not as they appear. All we get is clichés about being strong and stable—scratch beneath it, and it is nothing like the truth. We are told that all these cuts are fine because we are introducing a national living wage—scratch beneath the surface, and it is a total lie because the national living wage is 95p below the real living wage.

I have sat in the Chamber and heard over and over again from Tory MPs that the social security reforms have been put in place to incentivise work. That is fair enough, but the Government cannot even incentivise their own Scottish Tory MPs to turn up and miss a football game in Barcelona—don’t dare talk about incentivising. I have heard the Government use that argument time and time again to justify their choosing to keep slashing money for the poor. The argument is used to justify the two-child policy and their sickening rape clause. [Interruption.] Conservative Members should listen for a wee second. I have heard it used to justify the sanctions regime while I have stood in this very Chamber and implored the Government to make it more humane—[Interruption.]

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[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

The principle of simplifying the social security system is a good one, but surely that should mean simplifying it for the people who depend on it, such as my constituent Mhairi, who made 26 entries in her journal without any response before we had to get involved as an MP’s office.

In 2013, Inverness was a pilot area for universal credit. We have a simple view. We thought we would see what the problems were and report them to the Government, who would look at them and fix them. What actually happened was a one-sided arrangement. We were telling them about the problems in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. There were endless ministerial meetings, debates, questions and letters asking—begging—them to sort out the shambles, but nothing was done.

For those who do not think that universal credit is affecting rent arrears, I should say that Highland Council went from tens of thousands of pounds to nearly £2 million in rent arrears. That was entirely down to universal credit. There have been rent arrears, short payments, long delays, lost paperwork, evictions, crushed staff morale, and, until today, a premium rate for phone calls—I commend for my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) for his work on that.

We have 200 cases. There has been humiliation, degradation, desperation. Thank goodness for the support of the citizens advice bureau, the Highland Council support team and the jobcentre staff themselves. We have had single mums going from Christmas through to April without payments and living on food vouchers. Cancer patients have had to go without payments, getting short payments when the time came.

The Prime Minister said that the Government were listening and acting. For four years, that has not been our experience. I lay down this challenge for anybody on the Government Benches: come to Inverness, come to speak to our users, come to our summit on universal credit and hear from the people. I dare them to do that: to listen to the people who are being affected.