Universal Credit Project Assessment Reviews

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Again, we need to know the extent of the issues. I am sure the information system is one of those concerns. The Information Commissioner described the PARs as giving

“a much greater insight than any information already available about the Universal Credit Programme.”

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Debbie Abrahams]

I am going to finish this point. The ICO describes the programme as having

“been subject to a number of high-profile failings”.

In its judgment, the ICO weighed the public interest carefully and determined that the balance supports disclosure of these five reports, not least because UC could affect up to 11 million people, by the estimation of the ICO, with nearly 7 million relying on the programme once it is fully rolled out. The commissioner noted that the Department for Work and Pensions had not complied with the law in its handling of the original request for information and gave it 35 days to release this information into the public domain, with a failure to comply resulting in a written certification to the High Court. So we cannot underestimate the importance of this ruling.

[Debbie Abrahams]

But we do not know, do we? I recognise the hon. Lady’s commitment and drive—

[James Cartlidge]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Debbie Abrahams]

May I just finish responding to the intervention?

We need to understand what is in the reports. I absolutely understand the commitment of the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) on this issue, but we do not know until we have seen them.

[James Cartlidge]

This is all fine, but the key stats are in the public domain. The purpose of universal credit is to help people into work. We have record employment and record low unemployment. Those are the stats that matter. Does the hon. Lady celebrate them?

[Debbie Abrahams]

Well, where to start with that? First, unless the hon. Gentleman has a crystal ball and has been able to read the reports, I do not think he is in a position to say that they will reveal nothing else. Secondly, on the stats he mentioned, I think there is enough on the record to refute those points.

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[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd), because he gives a certain nuanced view on the coalition. In my view, the Government should seek to reduce the benefits bill. It is not a badge of honour if a Government preside over ever-spiralling welfare bills, and I am proud that we have brought them under control, but I accept entirely that welfare reform has consequences.

I want to focus on the difficult subject of food banks. Two weeks ago, the Suffolk Free Press, my main local paper, ran a piece saying that since the introduction of universal credit in Sudbury on 18 October—the full service roll-out—there had been an increase in the number of referrals to food banks. I received an email from the jobcentre just before this debate, so I feel that I should quote it at length. It is the jobcentre’s stance on the suggestion of an increase. It states:

“It is true that there has been an increase in referrals to Sudbury Food bank with 17 people being referred from the Jobcentre since Universal Credit Full Service rolled out… This is definitely more than we would have expected to have referred under the previous version of Universal Credit, known as Live Service, or previous benefits. While some of this might be because of the longer initial wait for payment there are other factors as well. The Full Service version of Universal Credit introduces a more diverse range of customers with a higher proportion of vulnerable groups – Live Service was only for single claimants who were often young and living with parents.”

Importantly, it also points out that it has itself been giving out vouchers for food banks, so it is no surprise that people would be visiting them.

On the measures in the Budget, the jobcentre concludes:

“It would be hoped that the recent budget announcements reducing the waiting time for the first payment by one week and increasing the amount of advance payment to 100% of their expected first payment will help reduce the number of people that need to be referred to the food bank.”

That is the unvarnished truth, as it were. We all know that the people claiming these benefits are not wealthy. That is the whole point; they are not supposed to be. They are experiencing difficulties. Wages have been compressed across large parts of the western world—I do not pretend otherwise. The key for us is to come up with a system that ensures they can break out and go on to earn higher wages and attain a sustainably better standard of living.

[Hugh Gaffney]

Would the hon. Gentleman agree that the system is broken? Food bank use has so increased since his Government came to office that people are worried they will not have enough food this year.

[James Cartlidge]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. However, the number of workless households in the United Kingdom is at an all-time low, and there is no single greater indication that poverty is being beaten than a reduction in the number of workless households. We have made incredible progress. This is not a Dickensian Christmas; it is the Christmas when we have reached the lowest level of unemployment since before I was born, in 1974. [Interruption.]

The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) is trying to intervene from a sedentary position. Let me simply say to her, as I have said in a previous debate on this subject and many times before, that I do not speak theoretically. Like other Conservative Members, I ran a small business before coming to the House. The hon. Lady talks about the effect on pay, but some members of my staff declined pay rises because they would lose so much in tax credit, and refused to work more than 16 hours a week. That was a huge problem, and it brings me to the main point of the debate.

If you want to reform welfare, you have to have a system that deals with inherited problems, particularly the 16-hour issue. The only way to do that without creating much more poverty, and much more dependence on food banks and the like, is to do precisely what I think we are trying to do, and give people incentives to earn more through work. If we give them universal support, they will have the encouragement and the skills to do better in the workplace. The other point about my local jobcentre is that it has been incredibly positive about that experience. This is a joined-up programme that does not just make work pay, but enables people to get more from work and to build a career.

[Jamie Stone]

May I amplify the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd)? Perhaps all Members on both sides of the House are uncomfortable, even within themselves, about the concept of food banks. When I was growing up, there were no food banks because we did not need them. Surely, ultimately, we all agree that they are an evil sight and we would rather it was not there.

[James Cartlidge]

The hon. Gentleman speaks as if he wanted to abolish food banks. They are run by a charity that is helping people in need, and I have no problem with that. I accept that even in the wealthiest districts of the wealthiest countries in the world there will be people who are struggling for one reason or another, and it is good that there is that sort of provision. The duty of the Government is to build broad policy that encourages people to improve their position in life, to earn higher wages, and to get on.

[Luke Graham]

As has been acknowledged several times in the House, just over 1.1 million people in the UK used food banks in the last year. In Germany, where pay and benefits are higher, the figure is 1.5 million every week. Although there may be some individual cases, food bank usage is a structural issue. It is not solely down to universal credit.

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend has made a good point. As I said earlier, the issue of the compression of wages in certain parts of the economy is a global phenomenon. It has been seen in the United States, in particular.

Let me end by raising an important issue that I have not heard a single Opposition Member mention in all our debates on this subject. The purpose of welfare reform is not to pay out more in benefits; it is to help people into work, and that is something that we should be thinking about.

In Suffolk, we have a real problem with finding people to pick fruit in our local growing sector, and I understand that in Cornwall fruit is rotting in fields because EU workers are going home and there are not enough people to pick it. Although unemployment is very low—and I am proud of that—more than 10,000 people are unemployed in Suffolk and Cornwall, yet we say that there is no one to pick our natural abundance. I do not understand why not a single Opposition Member, at any point during any debate on welfare, ever comes up with a way to reform the system, to encourage work, and to incentivise people to go out there and get it. Moreover, I am afraid that we should consider the other side of the issue: sometimes we need stick as well as carrot. There are people who are not taking work that is available, and in my view they should be.

[Neil Gray]

The hon. Gentleman’s right hon. Friend, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)—who designed universal credit—has said that work allowances need to be restored to retain an incentive to work as part of universal credit. Does he not accept that?

[James Cartlidge]

I think that the benefits system remains extremely generous. The difficulty for the Government is that they inherited a system in which millions of people have been taken through tax credit and made unnecessarily dependent on benefits. It is incredibly difficult to wean people off that dependency, and you do not do it by paying out more and more in benefits; all that you do is get the country into ever greater debt. I am proud that we have made the progress that we have made, but it is a difficult issue.

I am trying to focus on the fact that we are starting to see labour shortages in areas where we have 10,000 unemployed. What is going on? What malfunction is occurring in our so-called social security system? For me, the answer is not a softening of the welfare system or the increase in benefit payments that the Opposition are calling for, because that would create even less incentive for people to go out to work. We need to understand how we are going to fill those positions as we head into Brexit and turn off the tap of cheap labour from abroad. How are we going to fill those positions with people from this country? We will have to take some very difficult decisions in regard to the economically inactive and those who remain on unemployment benefit. If the Opposition cannot see that, it shows that they did not learn any lessons when they were in government. They left us with the deficit that caused the whole mess to start off with, and they need to start understanding that welfare is not just about paying more benefits. It is about encouraging people into work and reforming the system.

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[Laura Pidcock]

I am not going to give way, so Conservative Members should save their energy.

Colleagues on the Opposition Benches have conveyed their deep unrest at the system, not to score political points but to try to get the Government to see what we see: people in work and out of work enduring what is essentially an ill-thought-out experiment. It is an experiment built on deeply flawed assumptions about what causes worklessness and what creates low pay. It is based on a deeply flawed model of what traps people in a cycle of debt and financial crisis, and it is a deeply flawed ideology that labels workers and people unable to work with the worst of motivations rather than the best, created by people who, if I am honest, know little or nothing about poverty and what it means to struggle in that poverty.

Leaving aside the ideological differences, the practical issues are enough to go on alone. We have listed them in this place time and again. We have had meetings with the Secretary of State. We have written letters and held evidence sessions. We have listened cumulatively to thousands and thousands of people, from claimants to advice agencies, about the chaos the system brings, and we have witnessed the fear that people are experiencing or anticipating.

Let me say what is still wrong with the system: the wait is still too long, the advance payments are still a loan, the disability premium remains removed, explicit consent is still a barrier and universal credit still penalises people with fluctuating wages. There is still uncertainty about claimants’ entitlement to free school meals, prescription exemptions and Healthy Start vouchers. Private landlords are still wary about having universal credit claimants as tenants and housing associations are still anticipating arrears. So, I was not cheering and whooping at the Chancellor’s announcements. On all the things we raised that the Government conceded on, there was originally no acknowledgement that there was a problem.

On behalf of my constituents, I would like to know why the Government are rolling out this system in Consett and Crook jobcentres on 13 December. Who thought that was a sensible idea? Who on earth signed it off? I still do not have an answer to that. At a time of year when people quite rightly take leave and endure increased costs because of all the difficulties of winter, who signed that off?

The Opposition, backed by some brilliant campaign groups, have won victories against the Government, including concessions on phone-line charges, the increase in advance payment entitlement and the repayment schedule, and the removal of the seven-day waiting period. But let us be under no illusions at all: the Government would not have conceded on any of those points were it not for the political pressure and the activism of those groups. We need more popular resistance to this Government, who have repeatedly told us that everything is fine. Everything is fine, until they concede on another wholly inappropriate part of the universal credit system, so to find out that they have been withholding the publishing of papers—reports that potentially give us the facts to support everything that we know and have been saying is already going on—feels like a betrayal.

I want to see the papers and I want the Work and Pensions Committee to see them in time, before universal credit is rolled out in my constituency on 13 December. The Select Committee will not have time to analyse the information before the system is rolled out. I do not think any of us can buy the argument that the content cannot be shared while retaining the anonymity of those surveyed. Of course these assessments can be published. Let us be honest: the Government are embarrassed. The hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said earlier that the Opposition were trying to embarrass the Government; no, the Government are embarrassed about this system. They are hell-bent on continuing the roll-out of this system, irrespective of the evidence. As I have already said—

[James Cartlidge]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Laura Pidcock]

I am not giving way to Government Members. I have heard enough of their contributions about my community. I have sat here for hours. I want to say my piece and then continue to listen to the rest of the debate.

The Select Committee will not have time to analyse the evidence. The announcements that were made by the Chancellor will not take effect until next year, so they mean nothing to the people in my constituency. I beg this Government to please pause the roll-out in North West Durham.

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[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

It was the former hon. Member for Foyle, Mark Durkan, who is sadly missed in this place, who once referred to Opposition day debates as being like a silent disco: the Opposition talk about the motion on the Order Paper, and Government Members talk about something that might have a tenuous link to the motion on the Order Paper. In this debate, some Conservative Members— rather naughtily I thought, Mr Speaker—have questioned occupants of the Chair as to whether the motion is actually in order. I should have thought that the fact that it is on the Order Paper would suggest that it is in order.

Given that this is pantomime season, we have seen a competition on the Government Benches as to who their top pantomime villain is—[Interruption.] Well, he was pulled up. We almost, but not quite, had the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) suggesting some sort of corporal punishment for the unemployed when he was talking about using the big stick. I thought that that was completely and utterly outrageous.

[James Cartlidge]

I was simply saying that, when we have a massive lack of labour—for picking fruit, for example—and thousands of people unemployed, we have to ask ourselves what is wrong in the benefit system that we are not getting people to fill those positions. That is not calling for corporal punishment; it is a perfectly fair thing to ask for.

[Chris Stephens]

I asked a number of my hon. Friends before I rose to speak whether the hon. Gentleman seemed to suggest some sort of corporal punishment, and I have to say that they thought that he did.

I want to talk about the Information Commissioner, because what has happened is quite strange. The DWP appealed to the Information Commissioner over the publication of a 2011 report and then went to the first-tier tribunal, but the appeal was not upheld. Having been told that it had to publish that report, why is the Department now blocking further such reports—from May 2012, February 2013, June 2013, March 2014 and March 2015? I hope that the Minister will explain why the Department, having previously lost decisions at tribunal and been forced to respond to freedom of information requests, is choosing to appeal now.

The report from the Information Commissioner is particularly devastating for the Government. It even quotes a National Audit Office report, saying that it stated that a project assessment review report from February 2013

“raised serious concerns about the UCP which lead ‘to a reset of the programme between February and May 2013.’”

I think the Work and Pensions Committee, of which I am a member, has the right to review these reports, and also to look quite specifically at what recommendations have been brought forward and which of them the Department has not acted on. Could the issues covered include telephone calls and telephone charges—something I have been campaigning about since I came to this place two and a half years ago? Has a previous report suggested that calls to the Department for Work and Pensions should be free? Have recommendations been made, for example, regarding the difficulty faced by those who have to rely on a text relay operator or to use Minicom services—another issue I have raised recently? The Select Committee heard rather disturbing evidence of people having to use the text relay operator service who waited 45 to 50 minutes to contact someone, but found that they were hung up on. That is something the Department should urgently address, and the same applies to Minicom services. Did these project assessment reviews look at the closure of jobcentres? We have seen the Department’s proposals for the closure of hundreds of jobcentres across the UK.