Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill

Gavin Newlands Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 20th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said in his excellent speech from the Front Bench, the UK lags far behind most other industrialised countries when it comes to what its Government spend on its older people and their pensions. Most of the EU spends more. The US spends far more. The vast majority of OECD countries spend more.

It should be clear that that is not an accident of history or just an outcome of circumstances; it is the result of decades of deliberate policy decisions by Governments here, including the current Administration. I must ask the question: what exactly is the point of a triple lock, if at any time the Secretary of State and her Cabinet colleagues can jimmy it open and bust open promises that were made not just once, but multiple times over many years?

Just three months ago the Prime Minister’s official spokesman told us,

“we are committed to the triple lock”,

when asked a direct question about its removal. That pledge existed only for as long as it actually meant anything—as soon as actual expenditure on pensions was involved, those promises disappeared quicker than a Prime Ministerial bridge.

This attack on pensioners’ living standards should not be looked at in isolation. As the families of many pensioners are being hammered by rising energy prices, soaring food prices and shortages, regressive tax raids, the scrapping of free TV licences and the shameful cuts to universal credit, this Bill is just the latest attack on the social contract and the welfare state. Those rising energy prices threaten to put more pensioner households into fuel poverty, and removing the triple lock will magnify that impact. Already more than half of single pensioners live in fuel poverty, while 13% of older households live in extreme fuel poverty. Those numbers will undoubtedly grow if today’s Bill is passed. In a wealthy, energy-rich country such as ours, that is an absolute disgrace.

The Bill is not only a betrayal of older people around the country, but economically illiterate. The Government are reducing the spending power available in our economy at the very time our industries need that consumer spending as part of the recovery from covid. The same argument can be said for the shameful cut in universal credit, which could be happening at scarcely a worse moment for all the reasons I have outlined. Moreover, we know that almost every penny of that uplift went directly into the economy, because people had to keep food on the table, clothe their children, keep the lights on and stay warm. The Government will look back on this moment with deep regret, I guarantee it. The political consequences will only be outweighed by the social and human consequences.

The £4.5 billion that the Government propose to keep from pensioners is money that could be circulating in our economy, supporting jobs and businesses on our high streets, stimulating demand in our producers and manufacturers and supporting the recovery. With this change, that money will be lost from our economy and from the job-creating cycle. Pensioners in this country, as has been outlined already, should know that what is offered by the UK Government, and the system they have created, is far below almost every EU country. This Bill is another attempt to decouple the UK from the European and global mainstream, in social security as in so many other areas of life.

Attacking the welfare state has been this Government’s hallmark since the current Prime Minister came to office, since his predecessor came to office, and since her predecessor came to office. Indeed, one can look through the books of Tory Prime Ministers going back decades and pick out one ideological attack after another, not least the disgraceful way that successive UK Governments have treated the WASPI women. If this cut saw the money saved kept in the DWP budget, the Government could at least argue that they were diverting money to different priorities—I do not accept that that would be necessary, but it would at least have some logic to it. However, that is not what is happening. Instead, the Government’s social security policies, combined with the more general havoc they are wreaking on the economy, will leave millions of pensioner households worse off.

In conclusion, the Bill is more evidence of how the UK’s welfare state is becoming something for the history books, rather than a living system. We are a long, long way from the days of Beveridge and the five giants. It is not a route we in Scotland wish to continue down. The UK is sowing the seeds of its own demise by providing its own contrast between an island that forces pensioners and millions more into deeper and deeper poverty while the fat cats continue to collect the cream, with a Europe where security of retirement is a fundamental right supported by the state. In case you have not got the gist yet, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will be voting for the amendment.