Working People’s Finances: Government Policy

Gill Furniss Excerpts

Tuesday 21st September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I would like to thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition for securing this important debate. I also wish to congratulate the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer)—I would if she were in her place—on her maiden speech.

Many of my constituents in Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough are facing a winter of immense financial difficulty, particularly given the cruel £20 a week cut to universal credit that Ministers are pushing through, against the wishes of this House; I welcome this opportunity to bring to light their hardship. After a decade of Tory mismanagement, poverty and inequality run rampant in our country. Council budgets have been cut to within an inch of their lives, leaving local services in tatters. Schools struggle to give kids the education they need and deserve. Emergency services are stretched beyond any reasonable expectation. People have been left to fend for themselves. The same families who have borne the brunt of austerity are set to face a winter in which they choose between heating their homes and putting food on the table.

In Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough, 15,000 families are in receipt of universal credit or working tax credit—that is three in every five families. The planned cut will take £15 million from families that are already struggling to feed themselves. It will bring more hardship for those who are already struggling. It will come in October, just as the furlough scheme ends and the energy price cap is set to rise, which could see prices rise by up to £153 per year. Research by Sheffield citizens advice service has found that 28% of households in which someone received universal credit are behind on their energy bills. That is seven times the rate for those who do not receive that benefit.

Cutting universal credit now shows just how out of touch the Government are with the realities of working people’s lives. Some Government Members like to believe that poverty is a thing of the past—a product of Victorian Britain—but in today’s Tory Britain, the cut will affect 6.2 million families. On top of all that, the Government are now planning to raise taxes on millions of hard-working families. The rise in national insurance is the biggest tax rise on families for 50 years. Already, constituents have been contacting me because they do not know how they are going to be able to afford basic necessities after they are hit by the double whammy of a cut to their universal credit and a rise in their tax bill.

I wish to speak briefly about one of my constituents, whose name is Shaun. Shaun is a young man with serious mental health needs. His single person’s universal credit barely stretches to cover the costs of caring for his four-year-old son. What is Shaun supposed to do when he finds himself with £1,000 less each year? What choices will he be forced to make to get through each month? What will he and his son have to give up to get through each day? Shaun will not get answers to those questions, because Ministers will not look Shaun in the eye and listen to how the cut will plunge him into debt or how he worries about the impact it will have on his mental health.

Let us call these policies what they are: cruel. Labour knows it, the public know it, and dozens of charities and campaign groups know it. I would like to think that, deep down, even some Government Members know it. The cut to universal credit in particular is so cruel that the charity Human Rights Watch has said it would breach the UK’s international human rights obligations.

The Government’s policies are regressive and will hit working families the hardest. They lay bare the reality that the levelling-up agenda is no more than empty rhetoric and a new name slapped on a Government building. We cannot level up by taking money out of the pockets of those who need it the most. Not only that, but their policies are a sucker punch to businesses up and down the country which, after barely staying afloat during covid, will see their revenue streams run dry as consumer spending falls because of the fiscal squeeze. I urge the Government to listen sincerely to the concerns of Members from all parties. I hope they will see sense and reverse these decisions before yet more families are pushed into a never-ending spiral of poverty.