Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. There are 18 minutes left before the debate must end. I trust that no Member will speak for more than two minutes, as a courtesy to other Members.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Playing ping-pong with the other place, or receiving a Lords message, sounds rather genteel and polite, doesn’t it? However, I ask all Members almost to divorce their thinking from the issue on which we shall be voting later. Dare I say to my right hon. Friend the Minister, and indeed to the shadow Minister, that virtually everything they said was an irrelevance? The House has already debated the point, and, as my right hon. Friend the Minister noted, we have voted on it on five occasions and have voted in the affirmative. We are now concerned with a much bigger issue, which should, in my judgment, unite all quarters of the House: the issue of the supremacy of this place as the elected House of Commons. As we know, in the last century the House had exactly the same debate on the people’s Budget.

The Minister was right. The Lords amendments are wrecking amendments, and the unelectable seem to be relying on the unelected to try to frustrate the policies and the position of Her Majesty’s Government, which was well articulated during the general election campaign and has been debated incredibly thoroughly in the House and elsewhere. Last night the House of Lords played a very dangerous game. It said to the democratically accountable House of Parliament in this country, “We know better than you, the electorate; we know better than you, the elected Government.” We are on the cusp—issue apart—of a constitutional conundrum which will not end easily for the upper House. The authority of this place is now under significant and serious challenge. It is time for parties to unite, and for us to exercise and exert our supremacy in a democratic Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have just heard a Government Member pray in aid my right hon. Friend Paul Goggins, who is dead, and try to include him on the Government’s side of the argument. It is terribly wrong to do that.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Thank you. I call Mr Barry Gardiner.

[Barry Gardiner]

The cuts to employment and support allowance will make the lives of disabled people harder, the lives of those with mental, cognitive and behavioural difficulties harder, and the lives of those with progressive or fluctuating conditions harder. There are 9,290 people in receipt of employment and support allowance in my borough, Brent. In 2012 one of my constituents was placed in the WRAG group, fit to work—