Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Kate Green and William Bain

Wednesday 18th March 2015 Commons Chamber

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

I am sure that by now Government Members will recognise that the Chancellor’s Budget has not convinced my colleagues and has not convinced the country, and it will not convince my constituents. There is very little in it to return them to the confidence in the future that everyone I speak to on the doorstep tells me they desperately want. Whatever the Chancellor likes to say, low productivity, low pay, low tax receipts and high spending cuts have characterised his management of the economy until now. We heard this afternoon that such an approach is set to continue if his party returns to government in the next Parliament. Happily, we do not expect that to happen.

The Chancellor has taken a series of quite deliberate fiscal choices that have favoured the better-off, whether it is reducing the top rate of income tax or introducing the marriage tax allowance. The latter benefits only couples who are well off enough to be paying tax at all, and, what is more, only one in five of the couples who will benefit are raising children. Middle-income families have been squeezed repeatedly under this Government. My constituents report a pervasive feeling of insecurity and a deep concern for the future of young people.

Most distressingly of all, the very poorest have been pushed to the very margins of our society. There was a shocking rise in food banks from 60,000 visits in 2010 to nearly 1 million in 2013-14, and there was a 55% rise in homelessness and people sleeping on the streets between 2010 and 2014. I am sure that hon. Members cannot have escaped noticing that, as I have, including on their way home from this place in the evening.

The Chancellor repeated this afternoon the claim, which Government Members often make, that child poverty has fallen under this Government. Let us put the record straight: it has fallen in only one year under this Government—2010-11—which was before a single coalition fiscal policy had taken effect. Since then, it has flatlined at 2.3 million children, and the IFS has predicted that, under the measures the Government have already announced, it will rise by 700,000 children during the next Parliament. The fall in the first year of this Parliament was wholly and solely the result of the 2010 Labour Budget, since when median incomes have stagnated. Government Members used not to like the relative poverty measure for exactly the reason that it was bound up with what happened to middle incomes. I notice that they are not so vocal against the relative poverty measure now. They may now want to look at other measures of poverty, but it is an absolute disgrace that absolute poverty has risen under this Government for the first time since measurement of that element of poverty began, while material deprivation has also risen.

[Mr Bain]

Does my hon. Friend share my astonishment, and that of other Labour colleagues and indeed the whole country, that to try to persuade us people were better off the Chancellor used a metric that deals only with mean incomes—skewed to people at the very top of the income scale—and includes universities, which are not of course households?

[Kate Green]

The use of statistics this afternoon bore absolutely no relationship to the lived experience of my constituents and those of many of my hon. Friends.

As colleagues have said, most recently my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies), this Government’s total lack of attention to working poverty is crucial: it is right and welcome that more people have moved into work since 2010, but that is not sufficient if they do not earn enough to live on. The increase in the national minimum wage will help a little bit, but the increase is more modest than we were promised last year. Increases in the tax threshold will increasingly give diminishing returns—they omit the poorest, who pay no taxes or whose incomes are already below the tax threshold—and what is more, they help the better-off. I remind Government Members that the better-off include us. The fundamental problem is that people cannot find the hours they need at the pay they need, which not only puts families under pressure, but is a major contributor to the failure to bring down the deficit as planned. The TUC says that we are set to borrow £54 billion more than planned this year, of which two thirds is a direct result of poor wage growth.

As colleagues have said, young people have been especially hard hit, again as a result of conscious policy choices by this Government. Of course older people should never face retirement in poverty—I am proud that Labour Governments halved pensioner poverty—and an ageing population means increasing the spending on this group, but we are significantly under-investing in the next generation. My constituents repeatedly say that to me. Hourly wages and weekly earnings have fallen fastest among young workers. Research by the London School of Economics has shown that typical incomes for those in their 20s were nearly a fifth lower in 2013 than they were five years earlier, and even those in their 30s with good degrees have lost out on their incomes. That not only blights young people’s lives today, but damages their ability to plan, save and look forward to the future. A Government who have made much of rewarding saving and forward planning should be mindful that they are putting a whole generation in a position in which they are simply unable to do so.

Although there were announcements today about helping people who wish to buy a home, an aspiration shared by many of my constituents, it is noticeable that there was absolutely no help whatsoever for the many young families who rent a property and will continue to do so for many years to come. If it is right to provide financial support to young people to buy their first home, will Ministers explain why it is not right to offer the same kind of financial support to those of them who rent?

Nor was there anything to comfort families with children. As the Child Poverty Action Group has pointed out, the cost of raising a child has grown significantly faster than its parents’ incomes under this Government. We heard nothing to help people with the additional costs of raising children, simply a tax break for married couples, many of whom will not be raising kids at the moment.

Finally, we heard today of the truly shocking plans for further cuts if the Conservative party were to form the next Government. Those shocking cuts to public service spending have been accelerated into the early part of the Parliament, no doubt so that a future Conservative Chancellor would be able to say that he was increasing spending as an election approached. We have heard in the past about shocking cuts to social security spending, and those cuts will be even harder on working-age people and families with children because pensioner benefits will be protected.

The Budget has told half the story today, hidden the pain for tomorrow and done nothing to put the country and families in my constituency back on their feet. It is not a Budget about the future: it is the Budget of a failing Government.

Assistive Technology Sector

Debate between Kate Green and William Bain

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

We celebrate the UN international day for disabled people tomorrow and we will consider what help and support the Government should be offering small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, such as those in the assistive technology sector, in tomorrow’s autumn statement, so it is fitting that we should have a debate on the role of assistive technology and its empowering effects on disabled people in our society.

The UK is the world leader in the assistive technology sector, comprising 1,000 businesses and other enterprises, providing approximately 1,500 products to students with disabilities, helping to employ nearly 10,000 people in education and other connected sectors, and exporting technology across the world. A recent study by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, in partnership with BT and Scope, found that digital technology has the potential to change radically the lives of disabled people, but that they are a fifth less likely to be online than their peers. Scope’s partnership with BT provides disabled people with new opportunities to stay in touch with friends and family and help ease that digital exclusion, which can affect disabled people’s life chances and their state of well-being. That is done not only with new devices, but by adapting existing devices through, for example, developing new apps or open source software or hardware to cater for individual needs.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing forward this important subject for debate this week. Given the beneficial effect he has highlighted of assistive technology, both for individuals and for our economy, does he agree that it is regrettable that the Government appear to be downgrading their interest in the subject, with their decision no longer to fund the Foundation for Assistive Technology to produce its independent report?

[Mr Bain]

Very much so—I am sure my hon. Friend will make an outstanding Minister for disabled people in a few months, and I look forward to working with her and championing the interests of disabled people. I think—I will develop this later—that what has happened reflects an attitude towards the needs of disabled people which sadly followed on from those terrible remarks by Lord Freud.

What we need from Government is policy that encourages the development of assistive technology, not discourages it. However, the sector feels neglected under this Government, with weaknesses in procurement practices in the NHS, responsibility divided between five different Ministers in three different Departments, and legislation affecting the industry being driven by a fourth Department.

In this debate, we should also thank Guide Dogs for the work that it does in promoting audio-visual final destination and next-stop announcement technology on buses. Many Members have had representations from constituents looking for that form of assistive technology to be installed on all new buses across the UK to boost accessibility, which would remove a barrier that many sight-impaired people experience when seeking to take up work.

Online services such as shopping or banking are vital for disabled people, but lack of accessibility remains a key issue. Most sites comply with accessibility standards, but the Scope study found that some disabled people still struggle to use those services, as codes and standards on websites do not meet accessibility needs. Scope has recommended measuring online services by how responsive they are, focusing on the person not the system, through, for example, examining how long it takes a disabled person to complete tasks online compared with non-disabled users of the same site. If it takes longer for a disabled person to use the service, the service provider must do more to make the site equally accessible. That is where assistive technology can really help.

One of the first Bills I voted on after being elected to this House was the one that became the Equality Act 2010, which creates duties on the Government and those providing services to the disabled, or hearing or sight-impaired people, or people with individual needs in learning, including the obligation to make reasonable adjustments to workplaces, places of study or elsewhere, to allow for the widest possible inclusion of people of talent in our universities, colleges and workplaces.

I experienced first hand, as a university lecturer in Glasgow and London for a decade, how essential the support provided by assistive technology to students’ learning experience is. It is a necessity, not a luxury. Many universities have improved greatly the resources available to students with particular learning needs, but it is wrong for the Government to shift the burden more and more on to universities, as the regulations before Parliament on disabled students’ allowances run the risk of doing. Government should work with universities to ensure that more students from backgrounds where there are special learning needs can prosper in higher education, not wash their hands of responsibilities to promote and deliver inclusive education under the Equality Act and article 24 of the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

Although the regulations on disabled students’ allowances would apply only to students and universities in England, they would have effects on UK-wide supply chains for companies involved in assistive technology manufacturing and development. That is something that, as a member of the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills, I am extremely concerned about. All Members of this House should be concerned in this week of all weeks about additional costs for disabled people that could cause additional hardship for a section of the community which already feels that more acutely than many other people.

To be fair, the Minister for Universities, Science and Cities—I thought perhaps he was going to reply to this debate—responded to a strong, evidence-based argument earlier this year, when he decided to postpone the changes to disabled students’ allowances until 2016. He knows that the National Union of Students provided strong evidence showing that half of disabled students get their assistive technology through funding they receive through DSA, compared with only 8% of non-disabled students relying on allowances.

I hope that the Minister for Skills and Equalities will respond in a similar way to the representations that have been made on the regulations before Parliament. Regulation 10 of the Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2014 changed the law to provide that DSA is only available in respect of expenditure on a computer minus a contribution by the student of £200. With 78% of disabled students surveyed by the NUS reporting owning a laptop, rather than an iPad, desktop computer or a MacBook Pro, it is effectively a tax of £200 per student on laptops payable next September for new students who qualify for DSA.

Many students are working long hours as well as studying at university, because for them, every penny counts. A look at any price comparison website will reveal that many popular brands of laptop computers are available for less than £200, but would not now qualify for DSA grants under those regulations, placing the obligation either directly on students themselves or on strained university budgets under this Government. Either universities will have to make the financial commitment themselves in pursuance of their duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act, or affected students will face the additional costs for equipment that is vital for them to be able to study properly.

It is grossly unfair that the Government have proven to be so out of touch in drawing up the new rules and bringing in a £200 laptop tax, even though the average expenditure per student has fallen over the past eight years. I urge them to take the opportunity presented by this debate to reflect again, or the Government who were the authors of the pasty tax and the granny tax will have a further problem with their legacy by inflicting an unfair £200 laptop tax on thousands of students with disabilities or acute learning needs who are beginning their courses next September.

Even more extraordinary is the Government’s position in the explanatory memorandum to the regulations, confirmed in parliamentary written answers to me by the Minister for Universities, Science and Cities, that the laptop tax would have no impact on business, charities or the voluntary sector. The views expressed to me by the assistive technology sector—by individual companies and by the British Assistive Technology Association—have been somewhat different from the complacent attitude shown by the Minister. It is striking that the Minister believes that the imposition of this new laptop tax would have no impact on the ability of students with disabilities or particular learning needs to attend university. That is not the view strongly expressed by the National Union of Students. There has been no answer from the Government about how the laptop tax would be paid or collected. It is the case that 83% of students purchase their laptop through their DSA payments and 98% of students told the NUS that that was the source of their funding for acquiring supportive software.

We have no details about what support the Government will provide to universities in cases in which a student faces particular financial hardship. We have no clarity on what will happen in the case of postgraduate students who would be eligible for DSA but no other financial support. We have no information about the Government’s plans for bulk purchasing, which they have previously floated as a solution to the problem that they have now got themselves into.

The Prime Minister once said that we should judge a Government by how they treat the most vulnerable. Disabled students have all the talent in the world and contribute billions of pounds in tax revenues to the economy when they graduate. They deserve a Government who are on their side, not acting against their interests with a £200 laptop tax being sneaked through the House without a substantive vote.

Assistive technology companies are one of our new economic success stories in manufacturing, contributing £55 million a year in tax revenues to the Exchequer. The 21 small businesses directly involved, some of which have been scathing about the lack of proper Government consultation and engagement on the proposal, and the wider supply chains that they support deserve better from Government than this. I urge the Minister to use the opportunity presented by the debate this week to reflect on what is right for disabled students and our universities, to support our small and medium-sized manufacturers in an important industrial sector and to scrap the laptop tax before it causes further financial hardship to thousands of disabled people across the country.

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Kate Green and William Bain

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Commons Chamber

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

All Budgets have a tendency to create both winners and losers, but this Budget, unlike others, appears to create winners and losers in an inconsistent and illogical manner and without any clarity of guiding values or objectives.

[Mr Bain]

My hon. Friend is showing her customary generosity in giving way. I anticipate that she might make the point that 70% of the cuts in tax credits will affect people in the lower half of the income scale, but the Resolution Foundation determined yesterday that 70% of the gain from the change in the personal allowance will go to people in the top half of the income scale.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend does indeed anticipate my first point. Although there is of course an attraction in lifting more people at the bottom of the wage spectrum out of tax, it makes little sense to introduce a measure that still favours more men than women when women have already lost out under previous Budgets and spending announcements.