Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Madeleine Moon

Monday 1st February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I will certainly look at that request. The door is open to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. He has had a huge part to play. One of his recommendations, which is quite legitimate, is that we look at how we incorporate early years into the life chances measures. We are looking at that and would be happy to discuss it further with him.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

22. There is increasing inequality across society for those who are disabled and need access to aids and adaptations. Those who can afford to buy them are fine, but there is a postcode lottery of availability. Is it not unfair, therefore, to look at aids and adaptations in assessments for the personal independence payment? Will the Secretary of State withdraw them from the PIP assessment?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I say to the hon. Lady, whom I respect enormously, that we are consulting on what changes are necessary to aids and adaptations to ensure that the support, which was always bound into the personal independence payment, gets to those who need it most. That is the critical point. All of us should want to ensure that people get the support they need for the things they need most to get by. The door is always open to her, as it always has been, and I would be happy to discuss this matter further in light of the consultation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Madeleine Moon

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend. He has made support for families an important issue, and I have talked to him on a number of occasions. I believe that the troubled families programme is critical in supporting families with multiple and often highly complex problems to turn their lives around. Between 2013 and 2015, the DWP created 150 troubled families employment advisers to support people, and 116,000 families have been turned around with nearly 12,000 adults moved into continuous employment. I hope that helps my hon. Friend to understand that the Government are serious about this issue.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Poverty is a destructive element for family stability. Has the Secretary of State read the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, “Monitoring poverty and social exclusion in Wales 2015”? It points out that working families and young people in Wales are at greater risk of poverty now than they were a decade ago, that 45% of all part-time jobs are classified as low paid, and that for those who work part time or are self-employed, the number of families living in poverty has increased by 100,000 in the past decade. It states that changes in the Welfare Bill will be damaging for families in Wales. Does the Secretary of State acknowledge that?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I acknowledge that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has written its report, and it has said many things in the past about what we have been doing. As I said earlier, the number of families that have risen out of poverty directly as a result of our changes has been dramatic. As the hon. Lady well knows, Wales had a difficult time in the recession, but unemployment is now falling dramatically and employment is rising. I believe that the best way to get people out of poverty is to get them into work, and eventually into full-time work. That is happening right now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Madeleine Moon

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

8. What his policy is on maintaining the level of (a) employment and support allowance, (b) personal independence payment and (c) attendance allowance for disabled claimants.

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

I thank the hon. Lady for her question and for her campaigning in this area. I would like to take this opportunity to offer her my condolences, not having spoken to her before.

I am currently reviewing all policy on welfare. The outcome will be announced when the work is complete, but as the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), said, it is our intention to protect the most vulnerable, including the disabled. I believe our reforms demonstrate our strong record of supporting disabled people. We introduced the personal independence payment to ensure more support is going to those who need it. More than 700,000 of those who were, once upon a time, stuck on incapacity benefits under Labour are now preparing or looking for work. Spending on disability benefits increased in real terms, and, as my hon. Friend has said, disability employment increased by 238,000 in the previous Parliament.

[Mrs Moon]

I thank the Secretary of State for his condolences.

My advice surgery has received people who are terminally ill, people with life-ending degenerative conditions, people who have been found fit to work despite both conditions, and those on attendance allowance have been told to use their attendance allowance to pay for their second bedroom, so that they are not affected by the bedroom tax. There is huge fear out there in the disabled community. May we have an assurance that those with disabilities will not be further affected by more cuts in welfare benefits?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Our purpose is to protect the most vulnerable. It has been from the beginning, and it will continue to be. There is, therefore, no reason for people to be fearful, and I hope that Opposition Members will not whip up such fearfulness, although I am by no means accusing the hon. Lady of that.

We must review welfare spending, but we want to do so in a way that actually changes lives. We felt that much of the huge increase in welfare spending under the Labour Government—an increase of some 60%—went to the wrong people who were not doing the right thing. That is the key point. Our purpose is to reform welfare in order to get people back to work, and to ensure that those who cannot manage and have disabilities are treated with the utmost kindness and given the utmost support.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Madeleine Moon

Monday 13th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am not sure from that whether the right hon. Gentleman supports the change or not. [Interruption.] He supports it—yet again a lone figure on his side, on which I congratulate him. We have carried out a whole load of revisions and changes, making sure that we watch implementation carefully. We carry out research constantly when it comes to the effects of all of our benefit changes. This one is an overall positive rather than a negative.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

5. What recent assessment he has made of Capita’s timescales for processing medical assessments for personal independence payments and providing them to his Department.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Madeleine Moon

Monday 23rd January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. She has raised an issue that has been raised by a number of people. The reason why we want to try to pay universal credit monthly is simply that when unemployed people go back to work, they sometimes have to adjust to their wages being paid monthly rather than bi-weekly, which often causes them problems. One of the reasons why they often fall out of work is that they cannot settle on that. We want to try and pay the universal credit monthly, so that it assists them. We will give every bit of assistance we can to all those who have difficulty to help them manage their budgets, which will include a new test on the way we pay housing benefit and the way it will be allocated through their bank accounts. I also give my hon. Friend this undertaking: we will have set-back proposals to make it absolutely certain that we can assist those who genuinely cannot do so to pay their relevant bills.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Before Christmas it was announced that, at least initially, local authorities would have no role in the universal credit assessment. Will the Secretary of State tell me what impact that will have on those working in housing benefit departments in local authorities? Will his Department be helping with redundancy costs if large numbers of people working in housing benefit departments lose their jobs?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The reason is that we will be talking full time, all the time, to local authorities. We receive a huge amount of information from them, so we are not talking about stand-alone assessments being made; rather, the functioning of universal credit requires that, at its best, it should be done in one location. However, we will be in constant contact with local authorities about the needs in their areas, and we will be with them all the way through in the way this is applied.