Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Debate between Geraint Davies and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. Of course, the Labour party is proposing to have a tax on bankers’ bonuses in order to release £1.3 billion for new housing and to spend the 4G licence proceeds on building homes. That is in sharp contrast to the sob story from the Deputy Prime Minister lamenting the fact that the Government cut capital spending too far and too fast.

[Geraint Davies]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that the savings that the Government anticipate and project are gross savings, not net savings? That is because many local authorities will end up with voids without rents and will make losses, so they will not be able to do their repairs, at a time when private sector rents will be pressed up by excess demand, giving returns on buy-to-lets to the private rented sector and increasing housing benefit costs. This does not add up at all.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Secretary of State may truly believe that this policy will save his Department £490 million a year, but his Minister of State was rather less than forthcoming earlier on swearing that that would be the figure. The Secretary of State may genuinely believe that this policy will save £2 billion over the forecast period. If he does genuinely believe that it will save the money set out by the Treasury in Budgets gone by, he is deluding himself, because the evidence is staring him in the face: this policy will cost more than it saves.

Jobs and Social Security

Debate between Geraint Davies and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

Let me give the hon. Gentleman some statistics. If he looked at the amount spent on benefits in 1996-97, he would find that it came to about £51 billion, excluding pensions. By the time we reach 2009-10, that had fallen to £44 billion, so I am afraid that no matter how he looks at it, the truth is that the amount spent on out-of-work benefits over the course of Labour’s period in office fell by £7.5 billion. The hon. Gentleman is a member of a party that has presided over an increase in the projected welfare spend by £20 billion, and there are something like 8,000 families in his constituency that are now seeing their tax credits either frozen or cut to pay for that cost of failure. I wonder how he is going to explain that to his constituents as we get closer to the next election.

It is not simply people in work who are paying the bill. We now know that about 6 million families are working, yet are still in poverty. There is another group of our constituents that we must worry about, too—those constituents who are disabled yet are set to lose something like £6.7 billion of help over the course of this Parliament to help pay for the failure to get Britain back to work. These benefits are being taken away, without any cumulative assessment of their combined impact, and these cuts total more than the Government are taking away from banks. That, I am afraid, is a sorry indictment of this Government’s values.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend will know that growth is at a standstill because of the collapse in consumer demand. Given that poor people spend all their money while rich people can afford to save or hide it away, does he accept that focusing the cuts on the poorest—cutting disablement benefits, the working families tax credit and the like—is completely counter-productive for job growth as it deflates the whole economy?

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right. The Work programme has delivered only about 1% of his constituents into sustainable work. What we will publish this afternoon is an analysis showing that the per capita cuts in councils across the country are biggest where jobs are fewest. Where there is something like £200 a head in cuts, it means two or three times the national average of people chasing every single job. It is not surprising that the Work programme, flawed as it is, is finding it hard work because the Chancellor has throttled the economy and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is cutting back where jobs are fewest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

rose—

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

Disability Benefits and Social Care

Debate between Geraint Davies and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes my point for me. When the reform of ESA and back-to-work programmes such as the Work programme are failing so badly, shutting these factories down without providing real answers about their future will, I am afraid, have terrible consequences in communities all over the country.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend says that Remploy must change, which it must, but in Swansea it has been changing. In fact, the order books are—partly owing to my own engagement with major possible local clients—virtually full with increasing orders from universities, the private sector, health authorities and so forth, even when the Remploy central sales and marketing function has dismally failed. In view of the fact that, given a helping hand, Remploy can succeed, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is outrageous for the Secretary of State to make out that these people do not work and sit around drinking coffee? Should the Secretary of State not at the very least apologise—and if not, resign?

[Mr Byrne]

I very much hope that the Secretary of State will apologise shortly. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. What we need all over the country is leadership, ensuring that work continues in these factories.

Unemployment

Debate between Geraint Davies and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

The Minister says that this is nonsense. I am afraid that he will be giving the House the illusion that he is not taking the figures that we saw this morning seriously enough. He went on the media this morning and said that today’s figures, which show youth unemployment rising to the highest level this country has ever seen, represented a stabilisation in the labour market. When youth unemployment is going up, overall unemployment is going up, and women’s unemployment is going up, that is not stabilisation—it is a tragedy for the people those figures represent, and he should be doing more to get them back into work.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it was a massive strategic error for the Government to announce over a year ago that they were going to get rid of half a million public sector jobs? Public servants spent less because they thought they were going to lose their jobs. Together with two years of a 1% pay freeze, which will reduce real incomes by 17%, and the attempt to dress up a 3% change in income tax as a pension contribution, that has massively deflated the amount of consumption in the economy and given rise to flat lining growth.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The recovery has been clobbered, and as a result the welfare bill is now going through the roof. That is a bill that the rest of us are going to have to pay.

We now have, since we last met, a youth contract on the table. That is a recognition that it was a mistake to get rid of the future jobs fund and to leave instead, for two years, no active programme for getting young people back into work. That was a grave error. The shame is that this contract was paid for by a botched deal between the Deputy Prime Minister and the Chancellor; I do not think that the Secretary of State was even in the room. He should remember that if you are not in the room, it is quite hard to influence the decision. What emerged from the quartet, as I think it is quaintly called, was a shabby settlement that took money off hard-pressed parents with children to pay for this Government’s failure to get young people back to work. In the past, the Secretary of State has talked a lot about the marriage penalty, and there are sympathisers with his argument on both sides of the House. However, he too must now recognise that he is presiding over the biggest parents’ penalty that we have ever seen introduced into the benefits system, with twice the amount of money being taken off children and families than will be taken off the bankers over the course of this Parliament. Surely Government Members cannot be proud of that.

I want to ask a couple of questions about the youth contract to which I hope the Minister will be able to respond. First, will he admit that 53,000 work subsidies this coming year is far too few for the task that we have in hand? That equates to only one opportunity for every 20 young people now unemployed. Secondly, in 2009—this is perhaps of interest to the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Oliver Heald)—Labour introduced a form of work subsidy, but the take-up was not great and the Conservative party attacked it remorselessly. What has accounted for the sudden change of heart over work subsidies? Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly given the Minister’s concern about statistics, when will we find out how many people the youth contract is getting back into work? Will it be Work programme providers who operate the schemes? If so, why do so many of them appear to be completely in the dark about the scheme and its introduction? If the contract proves not to work in short order, will the Government consider reintroducing Labour’s future jobs fund, which was such a success?

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Geraint Davies and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I am grateful for that observation. I say gently that, with five people chasing every job in the economy, if we are serious about getting people back into work—I think that the Government do want to do the right thing—we have to do more to create more jobs. We can pass laws and put in place extra help for unemployed people, but there must also be an economic policy that creates more jobs to absorb the very deep public sector job cuts that we know are coming down the line.

[Geraint Davies]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that the deficit was the price paid to avoid a depression caused by the bankers, and that the best way to get rid of it is to focus on economic growth, make bankers pay their fair share and make sensible savings over time, not to make the poorest pay the most while the richest are lavished with massive bonuses, which is what the Bill is about?

[Mr Byrne]

I will avoid getting into an extended debate about macro-economic policy, although I would happily discuss it all afternoon, but my hon. Friend is right. Under our approach, despite the fact that we faced the worst global crash since the 1930s, unemployment did not go beyond 3 million, as it did not once but twice under the Conservative Administration.