Income Tax (Charge)

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC) [V]]

The extension of the £20 uplift to universal credit is welcome, but why is it to be snatched away in September? What will have changed by then for the nearly 5,000 universal credit claimants in Arfon—a number that has doubled in a year; for the 47,000 households in Wales that depend on universal credit; or for the 53,000 children in Wales who have benefited from this modest increase? Their needs will be the same and they will have become accustomed to being better able to meet those needs—although providing a decent standard of living for children, even on the enhanced level of universal credit, is a huge challenge.

It is not the poverty that blights the lives of so many children that will have changed; rather, it is the Chancellor and this Government’s chosen policy—their response, which denies people’s real lived experience and deliberately increases poverty. That is the charge against them: generating, not alleviating, poverty. I have listened to the Chancellor and his friends trying to justify this cut to the incomes of the very poorest and trying to avoid the question, and I have not heard a single half-plausible answer, other than that the modest improvement to universal credit was always meant to be temporary and so is temporary.

The justification is: “The poor will always be with us”. Well, I reject that contention, as do so many other people—those who depend on universal credit; those who have had to claim it for the first time and are appalled by the meanness of the system; and those who have seen their friends and relatives lose their jobs through no fault of their own and whose families are now experiencing poverty as the deliberate policy of this Government. The ancient ploy of deliberately imposing poverty on the workless has never been justified, and that is even more true now, when circumstances throw people on the mercy of an inadequate system. We are all victims of covid-19, but some are more victimised than others.

Over the past year we have seen this Government rectifying their many failures, one after another, with one policy reversal after another, with catastrophic consequences not only for their credibility but, more importantly, for those who suffer from the initial policy decisions. The decision to cut universal credit is just one such failure. I have no care for this Government’s credibility—they are already busted in my eyes; what concerns me is not their credibility but the welfare of families and children throughout the UK. My one call today, then, is for the Chancellor not to punish poor people, and certainly not to punish their poor children.