Oral Answers to Questions

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

As I have said, the universal credit uplift is still in place for the remainder of this tax year. Discussions remain ongoing with Her Majesty’s Treasury, and a decision on the future of the universal credit and working tax credit uplift will be taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in due course.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab) [V]]

But the number of children in poverty has increased by 600,000 after housing costs since 2010, and that has been in substantial part due to the £9 billion that the Government have withdrawn from social security since 2015 alone. The universal credit uplift and other measures taken since the beginning of the pandemic will have reduced the number of children living in poverty to 300,000, but can the Minister confirm that if the Government proceed with ending the £20 UC uplift, together with rising unemployment, that will mean, by the end of this Parliament, that they will have seen 700,000 more children cast into poverty than at the beginning?

[Will Quince]

We take the issue of poverty, and tackling poverty, incredibly seriously, and as I made clear, active discussions are ongoing with Her Majesty’s Treasury. But I have to say that I fundamentally disagree with the approach of Labour party: simply throwing money at our benefits system—an approach that, under the last Labour Government, left a generation trapped on benefits, trapped in poverty and incentivised not to work by punitive cliff edges in the legacy benefit system. We will not be going back to those dark old days. We know that work is the best route out of poverty and, under universal credit—our modern, dynamic, agile system—work always pays.