Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and Kemi Badenoch

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Badenoch]

I will make some progress.

Despite the obvious flaws in the Bill, we offered to support benefit changes in the national interest. The hon. Member for Gateshead Central and Whickham (Mark Ferguson) asked a question, and I will answer it very clearly for those who have not been paying attention. We agreed to support the Government if they could make three simple commitments; they were not unachievable or unreasonable commitments. First, they had to cut the overall welfare bill, because we are spending far too much already. Secondly, they had to get more people into work. Thirdly, they had to stand by the Chancellor’s own commitment that, with taxes at a record level because of her choices, she would not come back for more tax rises.

What did we get from the Government? A sneery response indicating that they could manage on their own. How’s that going? What happened instead was that the number of MPs opposed to the Bill grew ever larger, until the inevitable U-turn finally came, announced by a press release dispatched after midnight and a panicked letter setting out that the reforms had been gutted. The Bill is now more incoherent than it was at the beginning.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

Just to reflect on the record of the previous Government, as of 2024, approximately 24% of the UK population—nearly 16 million people—were living in poverty. Between 2019-20 and 2022-23, an additional 2.1 million people were living in poverty. In the year to April 2024, before the Labour Government came into power, 4.45 million children, or 31% of children in the UK, were living in relative poverty. Will the right hon. Lady agree with me that the previous Tory Government failed a majority of the population, including disabled people and children?

[Mrs Badenoch]

I definitely will not agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is talking about relative poverty figures. The fact is that the best way to get people out of poverty is to get them into work—something we did again and again and again.

The Bill is more incoherent now than it was at the beginning. It does not do the job at all. Reforms that were not enough in the first place will now cut only £2 billion from a ballooning budget, instead of £5 billion. They will create a new welfare trap and a two-tier welfare system. Right up until the last moment, the Government kept pushing and pushing, ruling out changes and sending their poor, weary Ministers and ambitious Back-Bench bootlickers out on to the airwaves. At the last moment, as we have seen before, the Government abandon them after all of that—they have been hung out to dry.

The Government do not care how they have made their Back Benchers look, and it is not for the first time. Week after week, the Chancellor was sent here to say with a straight face that she was right to cut the winter fuel payment, that there would be no turning back and that the country’s finances would simply collapse if she did not take pensioners’ fuel money and give it to the trade unions, and her Back Benchers sucked that one up. They muttered and they grumbled, but each of them went back and told their constituents that the winter fuel payments were being confiscated to fix the foundations.

Only once pensioners had sat in the cold all winter, the Chancellor had tanked the economy and Labour MPs had had the door slammed in their face up and down the country did they finally accept that it was a mistake. This time, when asked to line up behind a Bill that takes money from older, disabled people with physical disabilities—a Bill that, according to the Government’s own modelling, gets no one into work—funnily enough, lots of Labour MPs did not fancy another go. Perhaps they will think twice next time the Chancellor comes to them with a bad idea.