Households Below Average Income Statistics

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

I know that the hon. Lady is quite an expert in this area. My colleague the Pensions Minister met StepChange this week. We are committed to ensuring that sufficient advice is available to people who need it, to help them budget. A lot of people come on to universal credit with quite significant debts. One of the issues we have addressed is reducing the debts that people have to repay out of their universal credit from 40% to 30%. We have also set up the Single Financial Guidance Body. We are very aware that people often arrive with debts, and we want to help them manage those debts, so that they have sufficient income to manage on the universal credit they receive.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Successive Chancellors have been lobbied by me and my colleagues to raise the personal allowance, which the Secretary of State alluded to, and that is welcome and good news. The problem now is that it is totally irrelevant to those in part-time employment and on very low pay, because they earn less than the personal allowance. What is she doing to raise the skills level and ensure that small and medium-sized enterprises offer training, to grow the skills base, so that people are not welfare-dependent at all?

[Amber Rudd]

That is a very good question. As the hon. Gentleman said, we have raised the personal allowance, which has been very successful, but I would like us to do more to help people move on in work from a small number of hours or to a higher skills level. I will be looking at that over the next few months. Some provision is available, and some jobcentres do a fantastic job of engaging, to help people into better jobs or more hours, but I would like to look at that, to see what else we can do.