Autumn Statement Distributional Analysis, Universal Credit and ESA

Debate between John McDonnell and Kevin Foster

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I have listened carefully to the Prime Minister’s responses to a number of questions about cuts to mental health services at Prime Minister’s Question Time. I hope that her commitment to social justice will result in the reversing of some of those cuts, particularly to mental health walk-in services, which were raised at the Prime Minister’s questions session before last.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

The shadow Chancellor mentioned what happened three years ago. He will probably remember, as I do, that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), who was the Labour party’s spokesman at the time, pledged that Labour would be “tougher than the Tories” on benefits.

Bringing things more up to date, many people in the ESA work-related activity group have told me that the current support package—a visit to the jobcentre once every six months—is completely inadequate. Does the shadow Chancellor agree that that shows a system that urgently needs reform?

[John McDonnell]

I fully agree with the hon. Gentleman. There needs to be more support, and that was promised but has not been delivered. At the same time, benefits have been taken away, so as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) said, there has been a double whammy in the impact on disabled people. That demoralises people who are under pressure, losing benefits and not getting support, which pushes them into an even worse position.

I have raised this issue before, but we now have better figures than we had two or three years ago. We now know that between 2011 and 2014, more than 2,000 people who were assessed in a work capability assessment as being capable of work died before they could even take up that work. Surely we have to learn the lessons from that evidence, and surely one lesson is that if we impose further cuts on people who are already struggling, not only will we increase the deprivation and suffering that they endure, but many of them will see no light at the end of the tunnel and will simply despair.

The WOW debate was intended simply to ensure that any impact of decisions on benefits was properly assessed. We called for a cumulative impact assessment to be published, and we asked for a detailed impact assessment of every policy to be published for the House before a final decision was made. In a supposed post-truth environment, I still believe that evidence-based policy making is worth aiming for. That is why it is critical that the Government also restore the distributional analysis of their proposals, and ensure that it is intelligible and usable.

Before scrapping that analysis entirely, the Chancellor’s predecessor took to publishing figures that disguised the real impact of his policies. That accusation is not mine but that of one of his old colleagues, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the former Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. If the Treasury is to restore public trust, it must not just let the House know when it will publish the distributional analysis, but ensure that the figures are published clearly and without any attempts to massage or spin them. Only in that way will we be able to test the fairness and equity of policy proposals.

In my view and that of many Members, when the cuts were first introduced they reflected a grotesque unfairness, because at the same time the Government were cutting taxes for some of the wealthiest in our country and for large corporations. [Interruption.] Capital gains tax, inheritance tax—how many more examples do we need? That was a strange priority to many Members on both sides of the House. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, reversing just some of those tax cuts could render the cuts to benefits unnecessary. The last Chancellor also had a penchant for absorbing budget gaps at various times.

There is a real opportunity next week for the Chancellor to live up to the Prime Minister’s spoken commitment to tackle social injustice. We believe that the Chancellor will reset the fiscal framework in next week’s autumn statement. He has already adjusted it. That will allow him the flexibility he needs to reverse the cuts. I appeal to hon. Members throughout the House to help us lift the threat of further cuts from families and disabled people. We have a week to achieve that, and we can start today by supporting the motion.