Universal Credit Sanctions

Debate between Judith Cummins and Jim McMahon

Monday 4th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank those Members who are staying to listen to the debate. I realise that it is very late at night, but this is an important issue that affects many people—far more than we would want to be affected. Ideally, we would not be having the debate. We hoped that by now the Government would have listened to the calls for the universal credit programme to be paused so that they could learn lessons, take stock of where we are, and fix an arrangement that ought to be providing a decent service and simplifying the benefits system.

After the great war, William Beveridge declared that there were five giants on the road to reconstruction: poverty, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. To tackle those five giants, a new, radical response was needed—a response big enough to meet head on the challenges of the day that risked Britain’s future. Furthermore, Beveridge set a vision for a new settlement between the rights of citizens, the role of the Government, and the formation and foundation of public services. It was a balance of roles and responsibilities, rights and obligations, and an expectation that if Britain was to succeed, there must be investment in its foundations.

The challenges that face Britain today, although different, are as big. Our economy is weak and reliant on low wages, low skills and insecure employment. We might sweeten the bitter reality by making it sound cutting-edge—by calling it the gig economy rather than exploitation —or by affixing power to the workers when in fact many of them are powerless, but at its heart is a weak foundation of exploitation and low value that fails to respect a basic belief on which I was raised: a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.

Why is this important? It is important because people should be able to earn enough to live—not just to get by, but to be comfortable and enjoy life: to have a nice meal, a holiday, a reliable car, a decent, secure home and a healthy family, and, crucially, to live in a country that invests to ensure that the next generation does even better than the one that went before. We should have a society in which fairness runs through everything we do. There should be a balanced contribution, with equal dividends for those who pay their fair share.

[Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the new sanctions in the universal credit system punish the working poor, especially low-paid workers?

[Jim McMahon]

The evidence says that—it says that working families are worse off under universal credit, and not because of its technocratic elements, but because the Government made a deliberate decision to make sure the financial crisis would be borne by those who could least afford it. They are people who are going out to work and doing what is asked of them but, as hard as they try, they cannot make ends meet because the odds are stacked against them and the Government are not on their side. That is what people in Oldham tell me, and that is what people in Oldham feel when they work very long hours and do not see the reward from doing that.