Universal Credit

Debate between Esther McVey and John Redwood

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

I will continue just a little bit further.

In less than 10 months, my ministerial colleagues and I have met over 500 colleagues, charities and stakeholders. We have come to the House on 56 occasions; visited 46 jobcentres, service centres and pension centres; tabled 34 written ministerial statements; and appeared in front of Select Committees 12 times. My Department has published 637 responses to parliamentary questions, 153 pieces of guidance, 102 statistical releases, 30 research reports, and 23 consultations. We have gone to great lengths to be open.[Official Report, 22 October 2018, Vol. 648, c. 1MC.]

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Ms McVey]

I will indeed.

[John Redwood]

I am very grateful to the Secretary of State, who is doing an excellent job in improving an intrinsically good system and dealing with the little difficulties we need to sort out. Given that it is crucial that there is enough incentive for people to get into work, will she confirm that one of the improvements is to lower the rate of withdrawal so that it is more worth while to work, and will she push for that to be improved further?

[Ms McVey]

My right hon. Friend is quite correct. As he will know—and everybody in the House should know—under the legacy benefits there were punitive tax rates of over 90%. We have now brought that down to 63%. As an advocate of people who want to get into work, he is right: we should aim to get that taper rate down even further.

We also took the unusual step, earlier this year, of publishing a summary of the universal credit business case, which explained the economic case for universal credit, showing that it will help 200,000 more people into work when fully rolled out, and empower people to work 113 million extra hours.

Inherited Social Housing Tenancies

Debate between Esther McVey and John Redwood

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

No. It is something we are having to deliver because of what we inherited from the previous Government, including a benefit, the cost of which had doubled in 10 years, and a policy that had left nearly 2 million people on housing waiting lists and 400,000 in overcrowded houses. It was a skewed policy under which people living in private rented accommodation could have their spare room subsidy removed but people who lived in the social rented sector could not. And as for people giving out wrong numbers, I would remind the hon. Gentleman that, when he plucked numbers from the air in the last debate, St Helens said that he had got his numbers wrong. Now, in response to his citing a figure of 2,100 cases, Birmingham has put up on its website this statement:

“We haven’t finished identifying them at Birmingham so can’t give you an exact number, but the number of possible cases has dropped substantially below the 2,100 that was reported in the papers”.

We have trebled the discretionary housing payments. We have also said that we will cover the differences involved for people who are exempt and that we will help local authorities with the administration charges. We have answered these points and we have voted on them. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman look again at the debate we had on 26 February.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

How many people are affected by this problem?

[Esther McVey]

The number so far, on best records, is about 5,000. However, the cases are having to be manually checked at the moment, because of a change of computer system, and everybody is going through that. Also, a person has to be in continuous receipt of housing benefit and has to have lived in the same home since 1996.