Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Charlie Elphicke

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is also right that the Department’s incompetence in proceeding with some of these reforms means that many of the changes risk costing more than they save. That is why Ministers have been forced to delay implementation of the benefit cap, about which they made such a fuss last year. Now we see that it will be implemented in just four London boroughs, because the Government do not know how it will work in practice.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Does the right hon. Gentleman think it right and fair that benefits should have gone up by 20% at the same time that average earnings have gone up just by 10%?

[Mr Byrne]

I repeat: there are 6,800 people in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency on tax credits—we have rehearsed these figures before, because he is an assiduous attender of social security debates. I want incomes to go up faster than benefits. That is why it is so important that tax credits are protected. He has to accept that he has voted for a freeze in tax credits for the 6,800 of his constituents who enjoy them. Today he is proposing to vote for a further squeeze, at a time when millionaires are being given a tax cut. I just do not understand how he will justify that to the good residents of Dover.

Universal Credit and Welfare Reform

Debate between Liam Byrne and Charlie Elphicke

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

But the Secretary of State refuses to admit that the marginal deduction rates will get worse for 2.1 million people. Until he answers the question about what will happen to free school meals and to council tax benefit, he cannot give us the assurance that that number of people will be better off in every single part of this country. He has to come clean about a system that is about to go live in 150 days. He is cutting it too fine, which is why No. 10 is worried, why the Treasury is worried and why his old friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office is worried.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

The fact is that 1.4 million people have been on out-of-work benefits for nine of the past 10 years. Rather than fear-mongering, shroud-waving and trying to frighten people, why is the right hon. Gentleman not working with the Government to get the best result and tell those people, “You’re needed in the workplace. We want you to play a part in building up the economy for future generations”?

[Mr Byrne]

If the hon. Gentleman was serious about wanting to get unemployed people in his constituency back to work—goodness knows there are enough of them—he would support Labour’s proposal for a tax on bankers’ bonuses that would get 110,000 young people back into work over the course of the next year.

Living Standards

Debate between Liam Byrne and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I will give way in a moment.

There have been announcements in the past few days, not, sadly, from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, but from the Deputy Prime Minister, who announced the youth contract, which is set to be so successful that the OBR said yesterday that it cannot count on its getting any extra people into jobs. All that we have had this week from the Minister for unemployment is a decision to blame the figures—it is all down to the statistics, not his failure to get people back to work.

Long-term unemployment among young people is going through the roof—it is up 83% this year alone—but another jobs crisis is emerging up and down the country among our most experienced workers. Among the over-50s, long-term unemployment is more than 110,000—up 20% since the start of the year. People with experience to offer, who have worked hard and paid in all their lives, deserve better than to be thrown on the scrap heap.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman’s premise is that the Opposition would not have borrowed more money, but that is fundamentally false, as the reality is that they would have borrowed billions more to deal with the eurozone crisis. In addition, interest rates would have been higher, costing home owners more money on their mortgages.

[Mr Byrne]

I know that the hon. Gentleman takes these matters seriously, and that he will feel bad about the fact that 10,000 families in his constituency are seeing cuts to their tax credits to pay for the failure of his Front Bench to get people back to work. He is such an assiduous attender of these debates that he will know as well as I do that the OBR’s analysis of our last Budget showed that we were set to borrow £37 billion less than the Chancellor set out to the House yesterday. He should explain that to the 10,000 families in his constituency who are seeing a cut in tax credits.

Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Charlie Elphicke

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

The purpose of this House, when it gives new powers to the Executive, is to have at least some idea of what they will do with them. I hope that a bit of enlightenment will come from this debate, but we have not heard much yet.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I take issue with the right hon. Gentleman’s statement that the Bill is a leap in the dark. We know that 5 million people of working age could work but do not. We know from December’s labour market report by the Office for National Statistics that 1.2 million of the people who took the jobs that were created came from overseas. We need to get our 5 million countrymen who are out of work back into work. Surely that is the priority.

[Mr Byrne]

Will the hon. Gentleman intervene again and tell me how many of his constituents are chasing each vacancy?

[Charlie Elphicke]

Of course there are quite a few people chasing each vacancy. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the issue is not with this Government but with the mess left by the previous Government. This Government are trying to grow the economy and make Britain great again.

[Mr Byrne]

I am grateful for that observation. I say gently that, with five people chasing every job in the economy, if we are serious about getting people back into work—I think that the Government do want to do the right thing—we have to do more to create more jobs. We can pass laws and put in place extra help for unemployed people, but there must also be an economic policy that creates more jobs to absorb the very deep public sector job cuts that we know are coming down the line.

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlie Elphicke]

Would not one key reform be to ensure that those claiming the allowance are seen, to check that they are still in need of it? Some 140,000 people have not been seen by the Department for Work and Pensions in the last 20 years, going back to 1992. Surely that is unacceptable.

[Mr Byrne]

There is a strong case for reform of DLA. The lobby groups agree with that, as do we, but we do not agree with the way the Government have approached the issue. First, we had an announcement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that DLA would be cut £1 billion, then we got a consultation, which has only just finished, and while all that was happening a Bill was published with no detail or safeguards dealing with how that reform would be conducted. The Secretary of State must realise that that is a serious concern for millions of people up and down this country.

That alarm is simply magnified by the proposals to set a one-year limit for those who can receive contributory employment and support allowance. I, too, think that there is a case for time limits—there is a good case for considering two years, for example—but this morning 30 cancer charities have written to the Secretary of State urging him to think again on that measure. His own Department’s statistics, they say, show that 75% of cancer patients still need ESA after a year. Their message is blunt:

“this proposal, rather than creating an incentive to work, will lead to many cancer patients losing their ESA simply because they have not recovered quickly enough.”

If this indifference is not addressed in Committee, the Secretary of State will have single-handedly dismantled any notion that compassionate conservatism is truly a reality. This simply cannot be right, and it needs to be looked at again.

Finance Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Charlie Elphicke

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right. One reason the British supply chain is now so worried about the Government’s intentions is that it has seen these knee-jerk reactions, such as yesterday’s decision, of which the Chief Secretary was so proud he did not dare come to the House to say a word about it.

I want to make a point that follows on from what my hon. Friends have said. Rather than balancing spending over the economic cycle, we now have, in the Budget, a plan to eliminate in just five years the structural deficit. However, the Finance Bill ignores the question of what happens if growth is weaker than expected. It is worth for a moment the House exploring the economic consequences of this Chancellor’s proposals. If growth fails, the structural deficit as a percentage of our economy goes up, yet the timetable for its elimination remains unchanged, so the Chancellor’s only course of action is to cut deeper and deeper. If growth falters or the economy shrinks, the Chancellor cannot stimulate the economy, but can only respond with cuts. It is not a plan to manage the economic cycle; it is a plan for an economic death spiral. Like some kind of self-flagellating penitent who believes borrowing is so morally wrong, he responds to any new urges with another bout of whipping. He might feel it gets him to heaven a little faster, but I am afraid it is no way to run an economy.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I enjoy the right hon. Gentleman’s thirst for talking down the economy, but how many independent economic forecasters are predicting the double-dip recession that the Labour party seems to constantly hope and pray for?

[Mr Byrne]

I note that the hon. Gentleman was so eager to participate in this debate that he missed the beginning of it. The words I used were not my words, but the words from a wide section of the British business community. [Hon. Members: “Who?”] Well, Goldman Sachs, the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, and the judgment of the stock market. This is not a perspective held by a narrow corner of the business community. The judgment on this Budget is widely shared across this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Byrne]

Quite right. Sir John Major told us:

“If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working”.

This Bill, and this Budget, will hurt all right—hurt the recovery; hurt families; hurt pensioners; and it will not work, as it will put people out of work.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Perhaps I am just confused, but I am looking at the OBR table C.2 and it seems that ILO unemployment and the claimant count will be falling over the course of this Parliament. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm if I have misread the table?

[Mr Byrne]

In preparation for this debate, the hon. Gentleman will have compared those employment forecasts with those in the March Budget and will have noticed, like the rest of the world, that they are now 100,000 lower.