Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill

Lee Anderson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me so early in the debate, Madam Deputy Speaker; it is a great privilege.

There will be no surprise that I welcome this Bill, which will help millions of families during these very difficult times. The Labour party thinks that the only way to help families is to just keep increasing benefits, but working-class people in places such as Ashfield are a bit more savvy than that. They realise that we make families better off by increasing opportunities through the job market, and education and training, which leads to promotion and better job prospects.

For the purposes of this debate, we need to go back in history a bit, to the end of the ‘90s, when Tony Blair came into government and introduced something called the tax credit system. Although at the time it seemed an incredibly kind thing to do, we are now feeling the unintended consequences. It has damaged businesses and damaged the prospects of millions and millions of people throughout the UK. I will give the House a good example.

A friend of mine refused to work more than 16 hours for over 10 years because she was a single parent. However, that backfired when her daughter got to 18 and my friend lost all her tax credits, her child benefit and her child support. Now we have a lady in her 40s who has, overnight, just lost half her weekly income, and she is stuck in a low-skilled, low-paid, minimum-wage job. She has never upskilled, despite her employer wanting her to upskill for years and years, so she has missed out on that career development, which could have led to a better job and less dependency on benefits, all because she did not want to work more than 16 hours a week.

This Government are trying to fix things like that with the universal credit taper, which will now allow people like my friend to work more hours and get a better paid job without it affecting their income as much as it would have affected hers all those years ago. That is the way to tackle poverty and help to people achieve their goals, but what Labour did is trap people—millions of people—into just having 16-hour—[Interruption.] Opposition Members can shake their heads and chunter away, but it is true. I know hundreds of people in Ashfield who were trapped in 16-hour-a-week jobs, and what good has it done them, years later? Ten years later, they are still in a minimum-wage or living-wage job, they have not upskilled and they have not moved any further, and they lose all their benefits when their children leave school. That is not progress.

The answer that the Labour party had, when all these people were stuck in 16-hour jobs and we could not get them to work a full-time job, was simple: open the floodgates and import cheap foreign labour, which is what happened. Twenty years later, we have a failed migration policy and a failed benefits policy, which has led to millions of people being trapped in a poverty cycle. We have spent the last 12 years trying to put right this mess and it is not easy when people are trapped in a poverty cycle —[Interruption.] Lots of Members on the Opposition Benches are grinning, but I will crack on.

Our benefits system in the UK is very generous—[Interruption.] It is generous. I will give an example. If my friend was a single parent now, living in Ashfield with two children and working 16 hours a week on the living wage, she would be getting £18,000 a year in universal credit and £6,000 or £7,000 a year in wages, which is an income of about £24,000 a year. She would not be paying any income tax, which is a bonus. To have that sort of income, a person would have to earn about £30,000 a year, which is a good wage in Ashfield.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

If the hon. Gentleman thinks that is very generous, how does it compare with benefits systems across the EU, for example, that are significantly more generous?

[Lee Anderson]

I will tell the hon. Lady what is generous: a single parent, like my friend and I were all those years ago, getting £24,000 a year for working 16 hours a week. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady can shake her head, but I think that is a pretty generous payment. That person would not be paying any income tax. Come to Ashfield and ask if £24,000 net is a good income. It would be a struggle to find people who are earning that sort of income so, yes, it is a generous income.

As we level up the country, we need to level up the skills of people who are trapped in this life of benefit dependency caused by the Labour party—I will stick to my words. In the meantime, this caring Government realise that families need extra support, which is why we are providing £37 billion to support families. Remember this is taxpayers’ money. There is no magic money tree, so hard-working people are having to pay for this.

This Bill will ensure swift action by providing the power to make two cost of living payments of £650 to 8 million households throughout the UK. This is real, targeted help for real, vulnerable people. The £200 rebate on energy bills has been doubled to £400, and it is now a grant, so it will not be paid back. The living wage is up, the national living wage is up, the universal credit taper rate is up and national insurance has been cut, so 70% of those who pay national insurance will pay less and more than 2 million people will pay no national insurance at all. We are doing all we can to ensure we help to keep people’s head above the water by spending more than £80 billion on universal credit and legacy benefits, which now represent 3.8% of our GDP.

We cannot keep asking the hard-working taxpayer to put their hand in their pocket to pay more and more. We must all do our bit. Although I welcome that the Bill will get immediate support to families, we must all work hard to make sure every single person in this country has the chance to support themselves. The benefits system should be there to help people in their hour of need; it should not be a way of life.

If it were left to Labour, everyone would be sat at home feeling sorry for themselves, but I am different. I want people to have a good job, to earn more money and to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the SNP spokesperson, Kirsty Blackman.