Benefit Cap

Drew Hendry Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

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

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[David Linden]

I will give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady).

[David Linden]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to put that on record, because he is right to identify the point that destitution ultimately comes at a cost to the state. I am incredibly proud that the Scottish Government have a focus on a preventive spending agenda. The Government should realise that if we push people into debt and financial insecurity, we end up with a situation, as my hon. Friend will have seen in Glasgow, where people are essentially made homeless because they do not have enough money, and that then results in a section 5 referral to the local authority and the state still has to pick up the costs as a result. My hon. Friend is exactly right to make that point, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) will be just as eloquent.

[Drew Hendry]

My hon. Friend has been talking about the impact that people face from the benefit cap across the piece, but there is an even greater impact for those who live in rural areas—particularly those off the gas grid—where, for example, petrol costs are higher, travel costs are higher and incomes are often lower across the piece, so families will struggle together. The benefit cap is punishing those people even more than those in cities with lower costs.

[David Linden]

Absolutely, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend on that, because he presented a 10-minute rule Bill on this issue in the Chamber last week. I know it affects his constituents and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara). In a lot of these rural constituencies, people are off-grid, and it means they will have increased energy costs. Having some sort of arbitrary benefit cap in place will not help them, so I ask those on the Treasury Bench to reflect on the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey and to bring forward the opportunity for it to get its Second Reading and for him to give his constituents a voice.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Linden]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend makes that point eloquently. The issue is that the Government are making policy in their ivory towers in Whitehall without any understanding of the real-life impact that it has on many families, including in Kilmarnock.

Some nine out of 10 single parents with children are women, which adds another layer of discrimination to an already incredibly cruel policy. We have heard testimonies from women who have left relationships due to domestic abuse only to find their benefits capped and the threat of financial hardship looming. That is the reality of the policy. Every effort should be made to ensure that those women, who are often fleeing desperate situations, are supported. Instead, the heartless British Government have capped the benefits that they can receive.

On top of that clear discrimination against single parents, specifically single mothers, a 2018 report by the excellent charities One Parent Families Scotland and CPAG in Scotland revealed that most families whose benefits had been capped were unable to seek or undertake work. The report highlighted that almost four in five lone parent households affected by the cap were claiming income support because they had young children and were not expected to seek work. Some one in six were claiming employment and support allowance, which suggests that they had been assessed as not fit for work. Families across Scotland are being pushed into financial hardship when they are not expected, and indeed are not deemed fit, to find work.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that the benefit cap also disproportionately affects minority ethnic households. In England, eight in 20 households affected by the cap are minority ethnic, while minority ethnic households represent only three in 20 of the total. The Poverty Alliance has shown that the benefit cap discriminates against larger families as well, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) said. In Scotland, 96% of capped households have children and of that number, 75% have three or more children.

According to a recent Resolution Foundation report, the low level of core social security benefits, which were affected by the various real-terms cuts to benefit levels in the 2010s, has been exacerbated in the past decade by policy changes such as the benefit cap and the two-child limit and associated rape clause that have undermined the idea that those with extra needs should be supported. That has resulted in rising poverty, particularly among families with three or more children.

The SNP has put forward clear policies to tackle poverty across Scotland. For example, my colleagues, SNP Ministers in Holyrood, have doubled the game-changing Scottish child payment, rolled out 11 new benefits and extended free school meals, and are working to actively reduce poverty and inequality. All the while, this place—Westminster—undermines those efforts.

With limited tax-raising powers, no serious borrowing powers and 85% of welfare spending still controlled in London, however, those policies can only go so far. They are being continually undermined by a Tory Government that Scotland did not elect; indeed, we have not elected a Tory Government since the 1950s. The benefit cap is just another cruel policy implemented by the Tories that leads to the extreme austerity and poverty that blight the lives of far too many of our constituents.

In addition to the benefit cap, the British Government must also scrap other poverty-inducing Tory policies such as the two-child limit and the bedroom tax. We face a perverse situation where the Scottish Government have to use between £60 million and £80 million of their budget every year to mitigate the bedroom tax. Again, devolution is almost being used as a sticking plaster for bad social security policy. Quite simply, I am sick and tired of standing up in this Chamber and making endless pleas to intransigent Tory Ministers while trying to demonstrate how my constituents in Wellhouse, Easthall and Cranhill are suffering from their cruel social security squeeze.

[Drew Hendry]

My hon. Friend is being generous with his time. He is about to make a point about people suffering. Does he agree that either there is no recognition from the Government Benches of the hardship and suffering that people are going through and facing more of, or they are willing to let it happen by not taking the actions that they need to take?

[David Linden]

It is a question on which I find myself reflecting an awful lot. We all come into politics for different reasons. As I outlined at the beginning of this debate, the Minister and I have very different ideological views on the merits of the social security system and perhaps, even in his case, on what role the state should have in people’s lives. We are all constituency MPs, and on Friday morning we will go back to our constituencies and sit in those cold, draughty community centres and talk to people who are impacted by these policies. I find it very difficult to believe that the Minister, who represents Macclesfield, does not have constituents coming to him and saying that the benefit cap is putting them in a very difficult position. This may be a case of Ministers focusing too much on policy, but in this instance I think it is a case of Ministers, and indeed the Government, not focusing enough on their day job or on the correspondence that they receive from their constituents, which overwhelmingly says that the benefit cap must go.