Comprehensive Spending Review

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I had planned to give way a few more times, but that intervention took so long that there will not be time to take any more for a while. The spending review is based on one simple principle: cleaning up the mess left behind by the Government of whom the hon. Gentleman was part.

We are making other welfare reforms too. We will cap household welfare payments at the average earnings of working households and we will reform housing benefit so that support better reflects the housing choices that working families have to make. That must be right. The welfare system should provide an effective safety net, but it should not pay workless families far more than most working families earn. That is where benefit traps and dependency start. Our reforms mark an historic shift from dependency to independence. Our measures are tough but fair.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that housing benefit is also an in-work benefit? The Government have presented very little evidence that out-of-work families who receive housing benefit live in significantly better conditions than any working family.

[Danny Alexander]

The cap that we propose, which will be debated in due course, is nearly £21,000-worth a year of housing benefit. That is more than equivalent to what most working families have to spend on their housing costs.