Business of the House

Jessica Morden Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing the sad case of Moira to the House’s attention and, yes of course, I am honoured to be able to congratulate Sandra Brown on being the gold winner at the National Business Women’s Awards. It sounds like what she does has served great moral purpose and the campaign that the hon. Lady talked about deserves wider publicity. I cannot promise the hon. Lady a debate in Government time but it would be well worth while having a Backbench Business debate on the issue. I remind the House that at the end of business questions last week the Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee, the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), asked for debate requests; I encourage the hon. Lady to be in touch with him.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

May I draw the Leader of the House’s attention to the recent Public Accounts Committee report on the benefits system during the pandemic? Among other things, it highlights how the Department for Work and Pensions lost control of universal credit fraud, including in respect of a reported £68 million mass identity hijacking by organised crime groups that meant that 10,000 genuine claimants—we all wanted to see the money go quickly to genuine claimants—had their benefits stopped or were asked to repay, at huge cost to the taxpayer. Given the Leader of the House’s earlier remarks, when will we have a chance to debate the report?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

What was achieved at the beginning of the pandemic was to make sure that people who needed money got it, whether they were on the furlough scheme or universal credit. The numbers of people the universal credit system was dealing with on a daily basis were multiples of what was ever expected. It was so important to make sure that people in potentially desperate situations got money. Of course, that increased the risk of fraud—everybody knew that at the time and they knew it was a risk with the furlough scheme as well—but what were we supposed to do? Were we supposed to sit idly by and let people have no money? Were we supposed to sit idly by and let people worry that their jobs were not going to exist? It was a fundamental urgency.

Everybody knows that with any accounting mechanism speed and detail do not go hand in hand, but the urgency was fundamental. I therefore defend what was done by the Department for Work and Pensions and Her Majesty’s Treasury in dealing with a very urgent situation. Just imagine, Mr Speaker—cast your mind back for a moment—what the noise would be from those on the Opposition Benches had the situation been the reverse and we had said that we could not hand out money to people who had no money because we had to go through some massive bureaucratic system. They would have rightly howled us down.