Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The hon. Gentleman knows that that is just another attempt to start scaremongering about the whole idea—[Interruption.] Yes, it is. What has been disgraceful about the Opposition is that they have spent their time scaremongering up and down the country about this issue. He knows very well that local authorities and the police work together, they have discretionary housing payments to deal with that matter at a local level and they can resolve it. More than £380 million has been granted to local authorities for discretionary payments.

I have looked at what the hon. Gentleman said previously about the number of houses available. He said that some 5,000 people are suffering due to the under-occupancy rules because they had nowhere to move, but I remind him that there are 63,500 one and two-bedroom properties in Birmingham. He yet again mis-states the reality, which is that this has to work. I remind him again that it was his Government who introduced this for the private-rented social sector.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is too complacent. The fact is that when a family pays the bedroom tax, the whole family suffers. The actual number of people affected is much higher than the numbers he quoted, at 750,000. Making families move is unkind, especially when it disrupts children’s education. There are not enough smaller properties, as colleagues have said, and people cannot move. So why did not the Government vote with Labour before Christmas to abolish the bedroom tax?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The hon. Lady, like many on the Opposition Benches, is living in cloud cuckoo land. They invent a whole series of issues about this. First, we get these lines about the fact that evictions are up. In fact, evictions are a very small proportion and are down. They say that rent arrears are up, but they are stable and have not risen. They say that homelessness is up, but it is actually down. The reality is that every time the Opposition talk about this subject, they invent these issues. But never once in the whole of the time they were in government—or even now—did they bother to talk about the fact that their policies meant that house building fell to the lowest level since the 1920s and that many people live in overcrowded accommodation, thanks to Labour’s failure, its crashing of the economy and its shocking mismanagement of housing.

Universal Credit

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

All I can say is “at the earliest”, but we want to shift as many people as possible. I would rather think in terms of how quickly we can move people from tax credit and jobseeker’s allowance to universal credit, and I hope that that will happen well before the election. I expect big volumes to be running through, but we need to take our time in order to ensure that when we roll out the IT, it works properly.

I have made the changes that I have made in order to ensure that the system is delivered safely. I could have just let it run. I could have accepted the word of some people that it would be all right on the night. However, I did not. I took the job of making sure that we knew whether it was all right, and I have made the changes that are necessary for the delivery of the programme.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

What is the Secretary of State’s estimate of the number of people who will be on universal credit by the time of the next general election?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I will not give that estimate now, because I intend to make a clear statement in the autumn about how and when we will roll this out. All I can tell the hon. Lady is that there will be significant volumes, and that I intend to close down jobseeker’s allowance and tax credit well before the election.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Monday 11th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree, particularly with the last part of the question. We have set aside £280 million over two years for councils to be able to negotiate and work out with their tenants the best and most amenable way to go. My hon. Friend’s question is constructive, in sharp contrast to the Opposition. All they can do is moan about a policy, but in 13 years they did nothing about overcrowding, with the lowest level of house building since the 1920s.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

When the bedroom tax is introduced in my constituency, some people, who will be unable to move because properties are not available, will be left with £18 a week to live on. During the recess, I tried that to see what it would be like. I have had a lot of messages from members of the public asking me one question: will the Secretary of State try for a week to live on £18?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

When we made changes to local housing allowance, the hon. Lady and others prophesised that hundreds of thousands of people would be made homeless—they went up and down the country scaring everybody. The figures now show that our homeless figures are lower than the peak under the previous Labour Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I have known the hon. Gentleman for a long time, and the reality is that none of these decisions is taken lightly by this Government—indeed, any Government. I remind him, however, about all those people who, because of the mess in which the previous Government left the finances, have found themselves out of work or with incomes falling. When he talks about vulnerable people, it is this Government who have increased the pension and made it better for some of the most vulnerable people in society.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Under the current rules, citizens from some eastern European countries are entitled to housing benefit and working tax credit, but not to income-related jobseeker’s allowance. Will the Secretary of State set out for the House what the position of these people will be once universal credit, which will wrap all the benefits up together, has been introduced?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It is our intention to try to ensure that under universal credit the loose access to benefits that has been enjoyed by far too many people coming into this country who have no right to them will actually be limited. I will be able to brief the House much better on that as and when we complete the rules on it.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It is interesting that the hon. Lady raises that point, because under the Labour Government, tax credits absolutely boomed. In 2005, there were increases of 58%. Overall, there were 340% increases in tax credits, 70% of which goes to child tax credits. The hon. Lady says that tax credits should continue to rise, but she can make that argument in due course.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State admit that the social security budget is going up on his watch because unemployment is rising faster than his colleague expected?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Never let a good fact get in the way of a good argument. Unemployment is falling, youth unemployment is falling, more women are in work than ever on her watch, and long-term unemployment is flattening out. The reality, therefore, is that we have better employment figures—there are 1 million new private sector jobs, which outweighs the public sector jobs we have had to get rid of. The reality is that the rate of unemployment, at 7.8%, is better than the EU average and better, almost for the first time, than the United States of America.

Welfare Reform

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Thursday 11th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The last Government spent more than £35 billion on child poverty, and they are to be applauded for making some changes and lifting 100,000 children out of poverty. We should be conscious of that and I will not say anything other than that that was the right direction of travel. However, that was a lot of money to spend to get what was quite a narrow effect, and child poverty rose relatively speaking after 2004. The best approach, we think, is the universal credit, because take-up rates will improve, allowing families who do not know what they are eligible for to take the money. That will automatically improve the quality of life for those families and have a huge effect on child poverty.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

As I understand it, the new contract that the Secretary of State will introduce will begin from day one of a person’s unemployment, so he will be tearing up the old contract and the entitlement to benefit of people who have paid national insurance. Furthermore—as the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) pointed out—the sanctions regime will also be introduced at that very early stage. Does not the Secretary of State realise that it is an extremely inefficient way to run an economy to force people with high skills into jobs for which they are not suited? We do not want physics graduates on the checkout till.

Tackling Poverty in the UK

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Helen Goodman

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

That is the big worry, and if even Government Back Benchers can see it, I hope that Government Front Benchers will take that concern very seriously. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) said earlier, the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies also stated that Labour’s tax and benefit reforms have reduced income inequality. If we had maintained the policies that we inherited in 1997, there would have been a much greater degree of income inequality.

The Minister before us this afternoon also overstated his case on worklessness. In fact, the number of people on inactive benefits is now 350,000 lower than the number that we inherited, and the number of lone parents in work has increased substantially from 46 to 58%, because of the positive measures that we took. I hope he does not mind my saying that he will find the problems rather more intractable than he implied in his speech.

We welcome the commitment to restoring the earnings link to pensions, and we are extremely pleased that the Government have decided to maintain the winter fuel allowance and free bus passes, which we introduced. As the Minister said, encouraging a savings culture is obviously important, but Labour Members cannot quite marry that with the halt that seems to have been put on the auto-enrolment programme.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

May I, for the record, ensure that the hon. Lady understands that there is no such halt? We are committed to auto-enrolment, but we are reviewing how it is done within the whole NES—new entrepreneur scholarships—programme.

[Helen Goodman]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention.

The Minister talked about the importance of the problem of debt facing the very poorest people, and the Secretary of State mentioned credit unions in his speech on Tuesday night. The Labour Government introduced a growth fund for credit unions, and we put £86 million into credit unions across the country. I very much hope that the new Government will maintain that level of support in the public spending round that they are going to undertake.