Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Hywel Williams and Heidi Allen

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I speak on behalf of Plaid Cymru.

So, we have another round of cuts to social protection and a Government unrestrained by the alleged compromises of coalition. I note that the new leader of the Liberal Democrats has already left us. The Government are unrestrained in slashing the social safety net, shrinking the state and allegedly balancing the books, and doing this, they say, to put the public finances in order—indeed, claiming that it is in the interest of working people. They no longer talk about “hard-working families”; it is just “working families”. The election is over; the election is won; now it is the Government’s turn to be hard.

Government supporters say, “Aha! We have introduced the national living wage.” We saw the jubilation of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when that was announced—his ugly triumphalism at having got one over on the poor old Labour party—except it is not a living wage at all, and when combined with cuts to tax credits and a host of freezes and other cuts, people will be worse off overall, as respected bodies such as the IFS and the Resolution Foundation have made clear. I welcome any rise in the minimum wage, but a genuine living wage would provide a decent living and bring down the in-work benefits bill. What we are getting is the rebranding of the higher minimum wage, while a large chunk of tax credits is cut out—giving with one hand and taking much, much more with the other.

Look at the Government’s appropriation of the term “living wage”. They steal the language of social justice and talk about full employment, but there is a crisis of under-employment, low wages, insecure employment and precarious self-employment. Without proper measures to tackle those problems and boost the UK’s woeful productivity, the foundation is not firm and a dip in the global economy could swiftly push up unemployment again here and especially in Wales. Outside the headline figures, large areas of the UK still suffer from persistently high unemployment and levels of economic inactivity—areas on the so-called periphery. I live in Caernarfon, which is in no way peripheral to the people who live there, so what does peripheral refer to? It is areas out of the sight and out of the mind of the economic and governing elites. In my constituency of Arfon, the economic inactivity rate is 23.5%—almost a quarter of all people of working age are economically inactive.

The restriction of child tax credits to only two children seems to answer the question so often posed by Government Members: why should parents get support for more than two children when others cannot afford to have more children? However, it fails to answer a more fundamental question: why should any child be denied support through no fault of its own? It is a perverse logic that ignores a child’s inability to control their parents’ reproductive abilities, then punishes them none the less.

[Heidi Allen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hywel Williams]

I will not. The hon. Lady should have been here from the start.

That is the reasoning of the tyrant, from one-child China to Ceausescu’s Romania. Most grim of all are the tortuous complexities involved in demonstrating that the third child is the result of rape.

We sorely need a system that pays a fair wage for a fair day’s work, and a top-up when the Government’s minimum wage policy fails to provide an adequate living for families with children.