Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Helen Jones Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Let me give the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) some figures for Scotland, which are worth looking at. Employment in Scotland is up 40,000 on the year and 179,000 since 2010. The employment rate is 74.3%, up 4.5% since 2010. Private sector employment is up 58,000 on the year and 244,000 since 2010. Just 5.2% of workers in Scotland are on temporary contracts and over 80% of those who work part time do so because they say it suits them. Although there is still much more to do, our reforms to lower corporation tax, get people back to work and create more jobs are exactly the route for her constituents to improve their life chances.

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I do not want to intrude on internal fear and loathing among Opposition Members. They will have time for their private argument among themselves about what they should do. I am trying to give a little more time for them to do that, to be fair to the Opposition.

This Bill is an important legislative step in moving Britain from a high welfare, high tax, low pay society to a lower welfare, lower tax and higher pay society. It will ensure that the right support and incentives are in place so that people are always better off in work rather than trapped on welfare. Yes, there are difficult decisions, but it would be wrong to turn a blind eye, as the Opposition did for so many years, and not face up to these difficulties. The Bill puts work first and puts welfare spending on a more sustainable footing for the future, while protecting the vulnerable and those most in need. I commend the Bill to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I listened with great interest to the Secretary of State’s attempt to reinvent himself as the workers’ friend. In fact, the Bill contains hugely regressive measures that will make many working families much poorer. It is no wonder that they include measures that will effectively repeal the Child Poverty Act 2010. From now on, there will be no income-based measure of child poverty; instead, the Secretary of State will have to report on worklessness and educational attainment, although two thirds of the children who are in poverty come from families who are in work. The problems to which the Secretary of State has referred, such as family breakdown and addiction, are indicators of poverty, but they are not a measure of it. Those problems can occur across the whole income spectrum.

As for educational attainment, the Secretary of State knows, or ought to know, that the biggest predictor of failure in education is poverty. It is not family breakdown, addiction or anything else; it is pure, material poverty. He should not confuse indicators and measurements.

Secondly, this Bill will make many working families much poorer. We have already heard that the increased minimum wage that the Chancellor is introducing is not a living wage, and many people will be excluded even from that increased wage: 21 to 25-year-olds. These people are adults and may have families, but under this Government they will pay a penalty for being poor and working. Where is the incentive to work in that?

As a result of this Bill’s measures, 13 million families will lose £260 a year or £5 a week. That might not sound much to those on the Government Benches, but for families on the margins it is the difference between getting through to the end of the week and not getting through.

The measures to restrict child tax credits and the child element of universal credit to two children are based on the assumption that people are always on tax credits or on benefit, whereas in fact there is a revolving door.

[Richard Graham]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Helen Jones]

No, I am afraid I do not have the time.

Life does not proceed in a straight line. Let us take the example of a family with three children. They are doing all right; they can afford it. Then one partner falls ill or dies. The other partner might have to work, and take a part-time or low-wage job. Under this Government’s proposals that third child becomes superfluous—one that they should not have had. Not every child matters under this Government.

Let us say a family improve their prospects and get more hours or get a better job. If that job lasts for more than six months and they have to make another claim, that is treated as a fresh claim and they lose the credits for their third child. Where on earth is the incentive to work in that?

We have also heard about what might happen in cases of rape, and I hope the Minister will be able to answer that point when she sums up. Many women do not report rape for reasons that we understand. When they do report it, the prosecution rate is very low and the conviction rate is even lower. What will be taken as proof—reporting, prosecution or conviction? How will a DWP official, not trained in investigation or used to dealing with rape cases, decide on that? Not since Mao Tse Tung has there been a proposal to limit families that is more degrading to women.

This Bill is a purely regressive Bill. It will make millions of families in this country worse off. That is why I will not support it in the Lobby tonight.

--- Later in debate ---

[Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

In 2003 the former Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath was spending 0.9% of GDP on tax credits. Under his stewardship that rose to 1.9% of GDP in 2010. By 2020, this Government will have brought that down again to 1.2%, which will still be one third more than the highest levels of spending on tax credits under Labour from 1997 to 2003.

I support the Government’s desire to focus our welfare spending on those who are particularly vulnerable, and to make the system encourage work and people doing better at work. Welfare should be a safety net, not a net that ensnares those it is meant to help. People understand that welfare must be reformed, and even some Labour Members know that the system needs to change and that Gordon Brown’s attempt to create a client state was wrong. His use of tax credits to flatter his relative poverty measure was disingenuous.

People in Britain find abuse of welfare distasteful. A week ago a constituent who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness came to me. He may have a more difficult time under these measures, but he said, “I’m so glad that you are tackling this because the level of welfare is completely unfair on people who work.”

The Bill is full of positive steps such as measuring the root causes of poverty and rightly emphasising the positive intent in calling the measurement process “life chances”.

[Helen Jones]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the measures in the Bill do not recognise the fact that two-thirds of children in poverty are from families in work, and that the number of poor children in families in work, as a proportion of all children in poverty, has been increasing? It increased under his Government from 54% to 63% and he is not even going to measure that.

[Marcus Fysh]

We need to enable more people to get better work, and that is what my Government are focused on doing.

There are other very good measures in this package, such as keeping financial support for people in difficulty with their mortgages, and ensuring that people who claim benefits now face the same choices as people in work. We need to ensure that a job always pays better than welfare and turns life chances around.

It is telling that the Opposition are so divided on these issues, tabling conflicting amendments and saying they will come up with more later. Who knows what they will support in the end? What we do know is that the Liberal Democrats have for now, by their blanket opposition, moved further to the left than the Labour party and into the same basket as the SNP. No longer do they seem to have any intention of balancing the budget and rebuilding our finances.

I commend the Bill to the House.