Budget Resolutions

Debate between Jim McMahon and Rachel Maclean

Thursday 7th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow the previous speakers, and the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali). Today’s theme is making work pay. I believe that this is one of the key challenges facing our country. Conservatives believe in conserving, but what is it that we seek to conserve? In a word, freedom. As Ronald Reagan said:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same”.

There is nothing more important to the cause of individual freedom for human beings than the opportunity to work. It is the only moral way to achieve financial security. It is the path to a better life. It is not the meaning of life, but there is no meaning in life without work. It is:

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”,

as Dylan Thomas said.

God put Adam and Eve on Earth to work. I believe that was a wise decision, because good, hard, challenging, stressful and important work, done well, makes people happy and purposeful. It is not just a means to an end for generating taxes; the true gifts of life are to be found in the struggle on the hard road. We Conservatives are not blind to the reality of human nature. We do not pretend that people are not motivated by financial incentives. It is not selfish to want to earn more for ourselves and to work hard for it. I believe that in the Budget that was set out yesterday by the Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher would have found much to be pleased with. In 1975, she said that

“the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax…we should back the workers and not the shirkers…it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts”.

How right she was in 1975, and how right we are as Conservatives to do that now.

That is why I welcome the Budget measures, especially the cut in national insurance, which will save the average worker £900, and the average self-employed worker—we have a lot of them in Redditch—£650 per year. Combined with the changes to high-income child benefit and the childcare support that we have previously talked about, the reduction in inflation, and the economy starting to turn a corner after a very difficult time, I know that those measures will be welcomed by hard-pressed families in Redditch juggling work and home life.

Of course, the welfare state and benefits are necessary in today’s world. Our fellow citizens rely on us when they are sick, or struck down by life’s blows, or cannot sustain themselves, but the pandemic has had a worrying impact, and I have seen a loosening of the links of the social contract between all our citizens as a result. We cannot ask a shrinking pool of workers to pay out of their taxes for a growing cohort of people who cannot or will not work. Benefits must only ever be a last resort for those truly unable to work—never a lifestyle choice caused by faulty wiring in our system.

It is tempting to view the Budget as a single event. It happens over a day, and there are headlines in the media. We look at it through the obsessive lens of our 24-hour news cycle and social media feeds, but we should not judge it in that way, and nor should we look at the events happening in our country as unique. We are not an outlier. Every country around the world has suffered from the pandemic, and the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Dame Jackie Doyle-Price) rightly said, the public are not fooled—they definitely understand and can see what is going on. They can also see that, over the course of 14 years, it is the Conservatives who have made huge strides in reversing Labour’s “something for nothing” culture. We have ensured that welfare is truly targeted at the people who really need it, meaning that we can be more generous to really vulnerable citizens.

After all, Keith Joseph first articulated the concept of the cycle of deprivation, and he set about helping people to break out of it. A Conservative Government implemented the life-changing universal credit reforms so successfully being rolled out across our country. Those reforms were conceived and led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). That was the true genesis of the value that work must always pay.

Every time we have made reforms to welfare, the Opposition parties have howled that we are cruel and heartless. It is totally fake outrage. The true moral failure is to let people languish on benefits and not expect any better from them. That is Labour’s legacy, and we saw record levels of unemployment in every age group when they last left office, in particular among young people and women. We were prepared to take the hard decisions about universal credit. I have the scars on my back from standing here to defend the Government’s decisions at the time. But guess what? The apocalypse did not arrive.

Instead, we now see record numbers of people in work, including record numbers of women and record numbers of women over 50. Government analysis has consistently shown that universal credit is having a positive impact on labour market participation for all groups, including single parents and other vulnerable groups who face the most barriers when returning to work.

[Jim McMahon]

Most people who experience the benefits system will understand and support the need for a more simplified one that works around working people. The hon. Lady must also accept, however, that that was not the design of universal credit that met such opposition. The five-week wait limit before entitlement was drawn, for example, meant that people were getting into debt unnecessarily when they were entitled to the benefit earlier. She must accept that even given the principle of a simplified system, the way it was done was not right.

[Rachel Maclean]

I do not accept that, and I do not wish to rerun all the previous debates. The Government have listened to a lot of the issues involved in the roll-out of an incredibly complicated system, and the evidence speaks for itself. Universal credit has helped more people get into work, and work is always the best route out of poverty.

Before I move on, I will make a few comments about mental health conditions. A category of people in our country are the economically inactive, which is sad to me and many of us, because those people are fundamentally not free—they are dependent on the state. My concern is that the number of working-age adults who are out of the labour market because of long-term sickness has been rising since 2019, from about 2.2 million people then to about 2.5 million in the summer of 2022. I understand that that started before the covid pandemic.

The biggest relative jump in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness is among the under-35s, whose main complaints are depression, bad nerves or anxiety. I have two psychology degrees, and I fully understand mental illness and mental ill health. I also believe in using words precisely. I am therefore alarmed to see the conflation of the terms depression and anxiety together with “bad nerves”. Bad nerves? Both anxiety and depression are clinically recognised conditions; bad nerves is not.

Government statistics, obtained following several questions that I posed to the Department, do not break down the number of people self-reporting under each condition, and there is no data or information on how that concept of bad nerves is defined, assessed, treated, understood or prevented as a separate condition from depression and anxiety. That is because there cannot be. Having “bad nerves” is a totally meaningless phrase. No one knows what it is, so how can people decide if they are unfit to work if they have it? I have bad nerves about standing to speak in this Chamber, and my constituents have bad nerves when they are navigating the day-to-day challenges of juggling work and family. The phrase sounds like something out of a good housewife manual in the 1950s.

I simply do not believe, frankly, that bad nerves is a reason to be on sickness benefits, and yet figures from the labour force survey indicate that 1.3 million people are economically inactive due to some combination of bad nerves, anxiety and depression. We do not know how many are off because of each condition or how many are off because of bad nerves. I think it would be a good idea for the Department and the Ministers I can see on the Front Bench to understand on a more granular level what conditions are preventing our constituents getting back into work, so that we can target more efficiently the taxes of our constituents who are working hard for long hours and paying into the system, so ultimately reducing the bill.