Business of the House

Emma Hardy Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend will know that the Conservative manifesto committed to trying to set up a cross-party commission with the aim of establishing proposals for social care, and end-of-life care is an important part of that. I hope that when that commission is established, he will make representations to it to ensure that his concerns are fully reflected.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

In yesterday’s debate on homelessness, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government appeared to dismiss the statistics that I gave him, which were that the number of universal credit claimants in council properties who have fallen into rent arrears was 67.4%, and that universal credit claimants are more likely to be evicted by a ratio of 2.9:1. May we have a debate in Government time about the impact of universal credit on the number of evictions and how we can encourage Secretaries of State to stick to the facts?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I was not present for that exchange. We are lucky that in this House, we have a first-class Library service, which is phenomenally good at checking statistics. It may well be worth while asking the Library experts to dig into these statistics to see what the accurate figures are.