Universal Credit and Welfare Reform

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Once arrears build up, it becomes far more difficult for social landlords to raise the money they need to build much-needed social housing. These are very serious risks.

[Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for reciting the concerns of a whole range of people and organisations. One of the things that has surprised me most is that every employer in the country will have to report to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on the circumstances of every employee on a monthly basis and sometimes, perhaps, even on a weekly basis instead of annually. Is this not going to be an incredible burden on British business, which is already in difficulty?

[Mr Byrne]

Exactly—as if British businesses were not struggling enough. The point is that the 500 pages of evidence submitted to the Select Committee on Friday present to the Secretary of State a whole range of issues to which we have received no answers, despite the fact that the system will go live in 150 days. The system is already over budget and late, and I am afraid that we now need some urgent answers from the Secretary of State this afternoon.

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[Mr Duncan Smith]

Absolutely right. That is exactly what we are trying to do, and I will ensure that it is one of the areas we look at. That is the whole process we are engaged in. If we can get more people in social housing online, the net benefit will be phenomenal. We are all desperate for more broadband, but the people who will benefit the most—for shopping and so on—will be older people and others in difficulty on lower incomes. They will benefit massively, if we can begin to get them online. This is a crusade as much as anything else.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

I am extremely grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. He said earlier that he would not publish the business case, despite the request. I wonder, however, whether he can tell us something that we assume might be in the business case. How many more hours working in the economy does he expect to see as a consequence of introducing universal benefit next year?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

If the right hon. Lady will forgive me, I am not going to give her specific details now, although I am happy to talk to her at greater length later on. The point I would simply make is that universal credit is designed to get more people who are below work, as it were, to cross the line into work. When people ask, “What is universal credit really about?”, they always talk about the taper. That is really important: simplifying the taper allows people to move up the hours. In truth, however, universal credit’s key component is the disregards—the bit we call the participation tax rate. In other words, right now, unless someone goes straight to 16 hours as a lone parent, for example, the participation tax rate—the moment when they join work—is so high that there are households that need two earners in work just to have enough money to survive. The idea of universal credit is to break that down and improve their lot. I cannot give the right hon. Lady the detail, but I believe that more people will move up the hours, with more people moving into higher hours and longer-term work.

Welfare Reform Bill

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

Indeed, and what my hon. Friend says makes all the more extraordinary the flip-flopping position that we have seen from the Opposition in the past few weeks.

A recent YouGov poll showed 76% support for the cap, confirming what all of us will know from our mailbags—that the vast majority of the general public agree with the Government. It is not just the general public as a whole who agree with us, it is Labour voters as well. More than two thirds of them support the principle of a benefit cap. They agree with us that it is wrong to pay people who do not work more in benefits than people earn on average when they do work.

The cap will set a firm upper limit on total benefit entitlement, which for families and lone parents will be equivalent to the average wage for working households. We estimate that to be about £500 a week or £26,000 a year, which is equivalent to gross earnings of £35,000 a year.

[Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I would support entirely what the Minister says but for the fact that in my constituency, rents are so high and housing shortages so great that people do not have a choice. They are obliged to rent properties that entitle them to higher housing benefit, which costs more than the cap. That is the fault of landlords for the rents that they charge, not of the poor people who have no choice and will become homeless under the cap provision.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Lady uses the evocative word “homeless”, but what happens to people in her constituency who are bringing up a family and earning a salary of £35,000 a year? Should they pay for those who are not working to have a home at the taxpayer’s expense?

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

As the Minister will know perfectly well, families in work are entitled to housing benefit, and approximately half of housing benefit recipients in my constituency are working families.

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[Mr Byrne]

They should be back in work, which is why we are so angry that unemployment is set to rise, rise and rise again over the course of this year.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

Let me remind my right hon. Friend and, through him, the House that we are talking about benefits and caps that are completely and utterly inappropriate in London where many people in receipt of housing benefit because of high rents are in work. When they are told to move, as the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) suggests, there is nowhere for them to move to. Our constituents are being told to move to outer boroughs, but Conservative Members know perfectly well that moving to Croydon, Bexley or Bromley is no solution for people who live in Lewisham, where rents are lower. Let me make a further point. I am told on good authority that Croydon, where it is suggested my constituents could move, is now looking to towns in the north of England to house its homeless.

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[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend raises a key point, and I will come on to the definition of “homeless” in a moment, as it is of significant interest.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

We all appreciate that the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who are in work are hard-working and may be getting less than the national average wage, but will he acknowledge that they may well be entitled to a raft of in-work benefits such as working tax credit, child tax credit, child benefit and housing benefit? It is not a case of saying that people in work have only a certain amount of money and others should not have so much. There is a real difference between people’s overall entitlement and the simple figures about their wages.

Youth Unemployment

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight his constituency case, which has caused concern to families up and down the country. We saw figures today showing that earnings growth is now about half the rate of inflation. At a time when the jobs market is weaker, that will contribute to a tighter and tighter squeeze on working families over the coming months.

[Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

May I tell my right hon. Friend that in my constituency, in the first 10 years of the Labour Government, youth unemployment was halved? Then we had a recession, and of course it began to rise. Will not the Government’s cuts to the Connexions service, Opening Doors—one of our local facilities paid for by central Government—and education maintenance allowance for students who are in the middle of two-year courses result in more young people going on to the dole?

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is right. Unless we hear something of substance from the Minister, I am afraid that her prediction is all too likely to pan out.

When the squeeze on living standards is about to get tougher and tougher, one would expect action from the Government to help. In fact, more than half the welfare cut will hit working families, and by the end of the Parliament £3.4 billion will be taken off benefits for children—far more than the amount being taken off bankers. Putting aside the question of what kind of Government take more money off children than off bankers, if the Chancellor had done what he should have done, and implemented a proper bonus tax on the banks, he would have about £3.5 billion to invest in jobs and growth, including in jobs for young people. That must be the substance of our debate this afternoon.

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[Chris Grayling]

We published those figures in December. I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman read the invitation to tender for the Work programme. I will tell him, however, that the number of people who went through contracted programmes in the last year of the Labour Government was well under 600,000, and that next year’s projections for the Work programme are over 600,000. As for my noble Friend Lord Freud, if he thought that the Labour Government were doing so well, why does the right hon. Gentleman think that he joined us?

The Opposition were in government for 13 years, during which they systematically delivered for this country a higher level of youth unemployment than they inherited. They spent almost £4 billion on new deal programmes, much of it aimed at getting young people into work. Even while all that money was being spent, we saw youth unemployment grow between 2005 and early 2007 and rise steadily in the run-up to the recession. Back in 2008, the OECD published a report raising concerns about what the British Government were doing and stating that only in Britain was youth unemployment rising, while everywhere else it was falling.

So let us have no more accusations from Labour Members about the coalition’s record. We have been in office for nine months. We inherited from them 600,000 young people who left school, college or university and have never worked. We are moving ahead with plans that will make a real difference to those young people—through the Work programme, through apprenticeships, and through the schemes we are introducing at Jobcentre Plus level to help them into employment.

[Joan Ruddock]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chris Grayling]

No, I am going to wind up now.

The Opposition were in government for 13 years, and they failed abjectly. They spent billions; they delivered nothing at all. They left youth unemployment as a national challenge and a national disgrace—part of a legacy of chaos and failure from a Labour Government who ran out of money and ran out of ideas. It is time that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill and other Labour Members recognised the damage that they did to this country, and time they realised that it will be a long, long time before the people of this country even start to consider the possibility that they might ever be fit to govern again.

Oral Answers to Questions

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The first thing I can say to my hon. Friend is that one of the key coalition drives is to stop the would-be jobs tax, the national insurance charge, that was to be imposed by the last Government when they were in power because that would have taken away a great many opportunities for young people. The other thing is to make sure that the targeted Work programme, which the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), will be speaking about in more detail later, helps the youth unemployed get back to work. We must remember that after all the money that was spent by the other Government, youth unemployment is now higher than it was when they came into office in 1997.

[Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

Last week, the new Government announced that the jobcentre in Deptford, serving 2,500 of my constituents, is to be closed. Will the right hon. Gentleman meet me urgently to discuss how he plans to help the unemployed in my area, or is this to be the first example of how the coalition seeks to protect the poorest and most vulnerable from its savage cuts?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am very happy to meet the right hon. Lady at a moment of her convenience. I understand that the centre had reached the end of its lease, and we are trying to find a way of ensuring that there is support in the area. I am happy to meet her and deal with those specifics.