Universal Credit Roll-out

Fiona Onasanya Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

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

Thank you for allowing this debate, Mr Speaker, and for your comments about whether it should be held. I also thank the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) for her efforts in bringing this debate to the Chamber today. She said earlier that we cannot wait, and she is absolutely right. We cannot wait any longer for the Government to listen finally to the pleas that are being made. They ignored Parliament last week, but they have been ignoring calls since the pilot programme was launched in Inverness and the Highland Council in 2013.

Between 2013 and 2017, there have been ministerial meetings, letters, questions and debates pleading for action. The hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) said that the problems were evident before the full service roll-out, which was exactly what we found in Inverness. We have been pleading for action. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) spoke eloquently about the people who come to his constituency surgeries in tears, and I have also had many people turn up in tears—the disabled; single mothers; the low-waged. Last Friday, a constituent turned up to my office crying tears of gratitude for, in her words, “ending her nightmare” with universal credit.

The situation is not just about the wait for payments. This is about missed payments, delayed payments, wrong payments, communication blockages and debt by default. Those who talk about scaremongering or do not want to acknowledge that those things are facts should come and listen to the people who experience them from day to day. There is the humiliation of their being asked to go for a work capability assessment when they are clearly unable to work.

[Fiona Onasanya (Peterborough) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this has a tremendous impact on disabled people? We have asked for the roll-out to be paused and rectified instead of continued at a time when the Government know that the system is not working.

[Drew Hendry]

I completely agree, and I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. I have had constituents whose carers have helped them struggle to my constituency surgeries to tell me about their difficulties with the process. People who are blind or incapable of walking unaided are having to go for work capability assessments. That is humiliating and degrading, and the roll-out should be paused. Those things should be fixed or taken out of the system.