Universal Credit

John Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

I will continue just a little bit further.

In less than 10 months, my ministerial colleagues and I have met over 500 colleagues, charities and stakeholders. We have come to the House on 56 occasions; visited 46 jobcentres, service centres and pension centres; tabled 34 written ministerial statements; and appeared in front of Select Committees 12 times. My Department has published 637 responses to parliamentary questions, 153 pieces of guidance, 102 statistical releases, 30 research reports, and 23 consultations. We have gone to great lengths to be open.[Official Report, 22 October 2018, Vol. 648, c. 1MC.]

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Ms McVey]

I will indeed.

[John Redwood]

I am very grateful to the Secretary of State, who is doing an excellent job in improving an intrinsically good system and dealing with the little difficulties we need to sort out. Given that it is crucial that there is enough incentive for people to get into work, will she confirm that one of the improvements is to lower the rate of withdrawal so that it is more worth while to work, and will she push for that to be improved further?

[Ms McVey]

My right hon. Friend is quite correct. As he will know—and everybody in the House should know—under the legacy benefits there were punitive tax rates of over 90%. We have now brought that down to 63%. As an advocate of people who want to get into work, he is right: we should aim to get that taper rate down even further.

We also took the unusual step, earlier this year, of publishing a summary of the universal credit business case, which explained the economic case for universal credit, showing that it will help 200,000 more people into work when fully rolled out, and empower people to work 113 million extra hours.