Tax Credits

James Cleverly Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

What we have just heard is a Government in denial about the impact these changes will have on what my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has described as “wrecking family finances”. We are here today only because of the efforts of the Chairman of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions and of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who wrote to the Prime Minister in July to insist on a full debate on these cuts to tax credits, which were not included in the Tory manifesto. The original intention had been to implement these changes with the scantiest possible parliamentary scrutiny—through a statutory instrument not debated by the whole House, but considered by a short Committee session of no more than 15 MPs and without scrutiny in the House of Lords.

[James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)]

I am obliged to the hon. Lady for giving way so early in her speech. Does she not recognise that rebalancing the financial relationship between the state, employers and employees was in the Conservative party manifesto, which was voted on and led to the return of a Conservative Government?