Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Esther McVey and Rachel Maclean

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

1. What steps the Government are taking to assist disabled entrepreneurs.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Ms Esther McVey)]

Will you indulge me for a moment, Mr Speaker, to allow me to congratulate my fellow Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), on his wedding at the weekend? Some eyes may have been observing events in Windsor; others of us were viewing events in Swindon.

Let me turn now to the question of my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean). Disabled people are more likely than others to be self-employed. Access to Work now has specialist self-employment teams to help disabled entrepreneurs, and the new enterprise allowance schemes help anyone who is claiming eligible benefits to move into self-employment.

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer and join her in congratulating my hon. Friend on his recent wedding.

Disabled people can benefit from self-employment because it provides much-needed flexibility in the workplace. To that end, there is a group in my constituency called Disability Support Project. Will the Secretary of State congratulate it on its recent launch and look at what more can be done to enable other such organisations to offer employment advice?

[Ms McVey]

I will, indeed, congratulate and thank the Disability Support Group in Redditch for its excellent work and for what it does. I also congratulate and thank my hon. Friend for all that she does in assisting disabled people into work and for so passionately pursuing this cause. There is more that we can do. I know that she visited her jobcentre to see how we are working with charities and organisations. I can also assure her that we have never spent more supporting people with disabilities and health conditions—it is now £54 billion a year, up £9 billion since 2010.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Esther McVey and Rachel Maclean

Monday 2nd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising that case. It would be good to meet her. I have surgeries every Monday in the Tea Room, and if she would like to raise a personal case with me, I ask her please to do so. We can go through the case and see exactly what happened.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

May I commend the Secretary of State and convey to her the comments of staff at a jobcentre in Redditch? People who have worked there for decades said that universal credit was the best system that they had seen for 30 years. That is because it is an individualised system based on the “test and learn” approach. What more can the Secretary of State do to ensure that that approach helps our constituents?

[Ms McVey]

My hon. Friend has made a very good point. When we speak to the people who are working with the system day in, day out, they say that it is the best system that they have ever seen, and it is about a “test and learn” process. Listening to what is said in the House, one would not believe that over 3.2 million more people were in work. That is not something that happens by mistake. It is as a result of the hard work of our work coaches and the direction that is being set by the Government.

Universal Credit and Welfare Changes

Debate between Esther McVey and Rachel Maclean

Thursday 21st June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

The hon. Lady says that payments are always late, never on time and not in full, but that is absolutely not correct—[Interruption.] If I did not hear her right and she referred to two thirds of cases, she is still wrong. We need to make sure that people get support, and we know that they do. There is an extra £9 billion of support, whether that is financial support because people need it, or support to get them into work. We know that there are 600,000 more people in work in the last few years, and we are helping even more through Access to Work. Please look sometimes at the positive news and help your constituents a little bit more by focusing them on that additional support.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

May I assure the Secretary of State that I, too, have been to my local jobcentre and spoken to the staff there? I have heard that this is the best system to help people for 30 years—that comes from the horse’s mouth in Redditch.

I used to work in the software industry, and the point about this system is that it is agile. A system on this scale cannot be built in the way that the Opposition suggest; that is not how technology operates. The benefit of this system is that it can learn on an individual basis. The staff in the jobcentre said that there was a different experience for every single claimant, and that is how the system responds. The idea that we should stop it flies in the face of any kind of technology learning—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady, but I want to get everybody in. Questions must be brief.

Private Sector Pensions

Debate between Esther McVey and Rachel Maclean

Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

The Pension Protection Fund is there to do just that: to support pensioners. It does step in and support them where necessary. The hon. Gentleman is quite right: where businesses have not worked responsibly, we should be getting involved, and we did that when we saw the conditions with British Home Stores. What happened there is that anti-avoidance enforcement did take place, and £363 million was got back, so we did not have to use the PPF. Also, a prosecution did take place. All these instances have been different, but the hon. Gentleman is quite right: where there has been an abuse of the system, we will carry out an investigation and bring people to account.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

What action is my right hon. Friend taking in working with the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to look at the conduct of the directors of Carillion in this regard? Specifically, following on from the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), what can be done now to recover any of this money for the people affected?

[Ms McVey]

I thank my hon. Friend. An investigation is going on. Not only is there one that has been initiated by the Business Minister, but the Insolvency Service will also be investigating what went on. If there is any evidence that untoward things have been done, a prosecution will follow. That is what we are about: we want businesses to act responsibly. They employ the majority of people in this country, so it is only right that we support them when they need our support and bring them to account when they are doing things wrong.