Universal Credit and Child Tax Credit: Two-child Limit

Ged Killen Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) for securing this very important debate and for highlighting the appalling impact of the policy. Her speech was very emotional. She covered the exemptions very well, so I will not touch on those because time is tight, but I want to voice my disgust at the rape clause and echo what she said in her speech about how unfair and unjust the other exemptions are. We agree that the Tory cuts are abhorrent and must be scrapped immediately.

In 2018-19, families with three children will lose up to £2,780 each year per child who does not qualify. I am not sure what impact that would have on some Cabinet members, but for families in my constituency in Midlothian it will have a massive and detrimental impact on their lives. An Institute for Fiscal Studies study from last year estimated that relative child poverty would increase over the next four years by 7%. It highlighted the two-child limit as a major factor in that rise. The Government’s own impact assessment in 2015—there have not been any more recent impact assessments—in the section entitled “Impact on protected groups”, acknowledges that the policy will probably have a disproportionate impact on women, ethnic minorities and people with other protected characteristics, yet there are no measures set out by the Government to mitigate that impact.

We have heard about the retroactive element of the policy. Households with three or more children who make a new claim will be required, as of February 2019, to claim universal credit, so they will be impacted by that and affected by the two-child limit, even if their child was born before April 2017. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central highlighted a letter from a constituent and the absurdity of the impact. Last month, I asked the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how the retrospective implementation of the policy would

“encourage families to reflect carefully on their readiness to support an additional child”,

which is one of the stated aims of the policy, but I was given no coherent answer. Will the Minister answer that for me today? Scottish Labour would scrap the two-child cap in the upcoming Scottish Budget. That what is we will call for.

[Ged Killen (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) is absolutely right to get stuck into the Government over this abhorrent policy? As in the case of the bedroom tax, if there is anything at all that the Scottish Government can do to help, we simply cannot and must not look our constituents in the eye and say, “We can act, but we are not going to because we should not have to.”

[Danielle Rowley]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

I wish I had Andy Gray’s left foot, Mr Streeter. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and to receive that footballing accolade. That was some light relief after a stark debate.

I welcome, congratulate and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), who secured the debate. She has been tenacious, dogged and diligent in her campaigning, and it has been a pleasure to be on the Benches with her as she has gone about that in the past three years, and to provide what support I have been able to give for her work. It has merited awards at all levels, although I know that is not why she does it. She does that work to make the lives of her constituents and of the people up and down these isles better. She recognises injustice when she sees it, and she seeks to tackle it. I commend her campaigning efforts, which continue today.

My hon. Friend’s speech, as ever, was detailed. She highlighted the fact that next year this abominable scheme is set to get even worse, as children will be targeted regardless of when they were born. She is right to challenge people—Ministers in particular—to state the circumstances in which those children will be living for the duration of their childhood and the ways parents should budget for them. I would love to see an 18-year family budget in front of me. She was also right to say that 73,500 households have already been affected, a large proportion of which already include people in work. The apparent principle behind this policy, which is to get more parents into work, is self-defeating as it is already happening. I suspect there is an ulterior motive that the Government do not wish to discuss.

My hon. Friend was right to mention the rape clause exemption, because that despicable, disgusting example of UK Government policy has meant that 190 women have had to note the names of children who were born as a result of rape. That we allow that to continue is a stain on us as a society. I find it extraordinary that the Minister can sit and listen to the stories that my hon. Friend read out and the examples from Turn2Us of people in desperate need of help, and then shrug his shoulders as if this is not an issue and nothing needs to be done. I suggest that he comes to one of our constituencies to hear how this policy is impacting on our constituents. Perhaps he could do a shift at Turn2Us and listen to people in desperate need of help as a result of policies that he continues to support. My hon. Friend was right to say that the children impacted by this policy have no say over events that control their lives. They have been targeted by austerity, which is shameful.

The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) was right to point out how incompatible this policy would have been if the Government had targets to reduce child poverty. No wonder that the new Secretary of State and Ministers were so desperate to attack Philip Alston personally for the initial findings in his report. I think they protest too much, because they know all too well the problems with child poverty that they are causing.

Again, I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central, and thank her for securing this debate. It has been a good, positive and largely consensual debate, not least because no Conservative Member chose to speak. From the Labour Benches, the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) was absolutely right and made an interesting speech, and I welcome her support for my hon. Friend’s campaign. The hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) made another helpful speech, and I commend her work as chair of the all-party group on universal credit. She gave good, if horrible, examples of the traumatic devastation caused by this policy. The hon. Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis) was right to point out the poor choices made by this Government. We made those points clear during a debate on the Budget, and that was reinforced by the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown), who highlighted that between 2017 and 2025, £80 billion will have been spent by the Government on tax giveaways. That should give us all pause for thought.

The hon. Member for Midlothian (Danielle Rowley) was right to say that the policy will have a disproportionate impact on women and people from ethnic minority groups, and the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) was right to point to Labour’s record in government, which I acknowledged, although Labour policy has perhaps been rather sketchy from then until now. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) was right to ask how on earth, when discussing policy around the Cabinet table, nobody stood up and said, “Actually, you know what? I see where this is going. This is a disaster of a policy. This is disgraceful, not just from a social perspective but economically in terms of forcing people, including children, into poverty.” How did nobody round that table, or since then, speak up and say that this is wrong? I find that incredible. My hon. Friend was also right to highlight the religious discrimination at the heart of this policy, and I commend him for that.

This would not be a Westminster Hall debate if I did not sum up a good speech by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). The question why we should make these choices for families was at the heart of his remarks, which is absolutely right. This policy is not about people making choices about being in or out of work, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central so eloquently put it; this is about limiting the choices of people on low incomes and their families, and about how many children they can have and what they do in their circumstances. The hon. Gentleman was also right to highlight evidence from Women’s Aid and Refuge. The list of organisations that the Government are ignoring and being tin-eared about could go on.

In conclusion, let me mention the work that the Scottish Government have done since 2010 to mitigate the UK Government’s disastrous austerity policies. Work on the bedroom tax involving more than £100 million a year has been mentioned, but something that is often forgotten about, and one reason why Scotland performs much better than the UK on child poverty levels, is the council tax reduction scheme. That scheme has cost the Scottish Government £1.4 billion in recent years—a substantial investment to ensure that people on low incomes do not suffer the burden of council tax in the same way as other people across the UK, whose council tax reduction scheme has been scrapped by the Government. In Scotland we have also utilised some of the flexibilities available to us for universal credit, which costs another £1 million a year.

[Ged Killen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Neil Gray]

I am just about to conclude my speech and I am conscious of time.

The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government will continue to do all they can to ensure that we do the best possible, and the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) was right in his bipartisan and measured speech. He said that the Scottish Parliament cannot be a Tory mitigation Chamber; it has to be more than that. There must be a limit to saying that the Scottish Government must always paper over cracks that have emerged from Tory policies. We must go after the problem at source. Therefore, rather than having a party political fight with the Labour party—I am not interested in that—I want us to continue with what, for the majority of this debate, was a cross-party attack on the Government’s policies. If Scottish Labour Members continue with that focus, instead of attacking a Scottish Government who are already mitigating the effect and doing what they can to reduce child poverty in Scotland, we will have a fair debate. We must end this two-child cap and the benefit freeze, and ensure that the Government do what they can in terms of work allowances and universal credit. Until that time we will not stop campaigning against this Government, and I hope Labour Members will join us in that.