Pensions Bill
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
We were ambitious and wanted to focus our resources on tackling pensioner poverty. I am reluctant to take too many lessons from the Secretary of State. The 1986 cap introduced by Lord Lawson led to a huge drop in contributions to occupational schemes. In fact, the pensions Minister himself said:
“Pensioners have long memories. They remember the Conservatives’ record on pensions…That record is one of not believing in the state pension, of eroding the basic state pension…of attacking SERPS—the state earnings-related pension scheme—and of slashing entitlements.”—[Official Report, 6 November 2000; Vol. 356, c. 34.]
I am afraid, therefore, that I am reluctant to take lessons from the Secretary of State on the inheritance that he has been bequeathed. As I have said, the foundation was strong and that is why we are urging him to be a touch more radical. I think that, in his heart, the Secretary of State will share many of my concerns. I know that he has been trapped in difficult negotiations with the Chancellor and I have no doubt that he would otherwise have gone further than he has in the Bill.
My first question is about universalism. Every generation has to strike the right balance between universalism and targeted benefits. That was true of the post-war Government and it is true of this Government. The Opposition believe that there needs to be a different balance between universal and targeted benefits for older people in the future. We find ourselves in agreement on that not just with the pensions Minister in this morning’s Financial Times, but with the Deputy Prime Minister and possibly even the Secretary of State, although he will keep his own counsel.
Our biggest problem with the Bill is that if the flat-rate pension is so virtuous, its virtue should be enjoyed as widely as possible. It should be a universal pension, but it is not. In particular, we are very concerned about the 700,000 women who will reach the age of 65 in 2016 when the flat-rate pension starts but who, because they will have hit the state pension age of 63, will not enjoy the flat-rate pension, even though a man who was born on the same day will. There are many of those women in our constituencies. I know that this matter will be of concern to the Minister and the Secretary of State.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Byrne
I will give way in a moment. I will just flag another issue that the pensions Minister might say a word about when he intervenes.
There is an uplift to 35 years-worth of contributions being required before 100% entitlement to the flat-rate pension is enjoyed. That was not the original plan that was presented to the House in the Green Paper. When the Minister gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, he said that the change would save roughly £1 billion. Five years’ more contributions will now be needed before the full pension is enjoyed, so up to 100,000 fewer people will receive the full pension than if the current system had continued. For every year under 35 years, people will enjoy £4.11 less a week. Of course, someone with below about seven or 10 years of contributions will get nothing at all.
We recognise that the minimum income guarantee will remain in place, but we are concerned that the many people who fall short of 35 years and the women to whom I referred will be rather too close to the poverty line for the liking of everyone here.
Steve Webb
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned the position of women born between April ’51 and April ’53. Will he clarify whether the Opposition have a specific proposal? It has been suggested that his view and that of his colleagues is that such women should be allowed to opt into the single tier. Is he aware that the cumulative cost of that over 30 years would be about £4.5 billion? Is that an example of his laser-like focus on public spending control?
Mr Byrne
I suspected that the pensions Minister would want to play politics with this issue. However, I hope that we can engage on it constructively in Committee.
The DWP has published estimates that show that the cost of including those women will be about £220 million a year. I say gently to the Secretary of State that the change that he is taking through the House today will net the Chancellor £5.5 billion in extra national insurance contributions in 2016-17 and £5.4 billion in 2017-18. The Chancellor has obviously spent some of that money for the Secretary of State by funding the proposals for social care, which are scored at £1 billion in 2016-17, and by funding employment allowance, which is scored at £1.6 billion. There is therefore £2.9 billion left. The cost of remedying the position of these women would be about 7.5% of the remaining NICs windfall that the Secretary of State has kindly brought the Treasury and just 4% of the overall NICs windfall. We are looking forward to working with the pensions Minister in Committee to fix this injustice, which I suspect he also feels in his heart.
Mr Byrne
As the hon. Gentleman will know, many of these women have already been hit by the acceleration of the state pension age at very short notice, so no—we want to search during Committee stage for ways to include these women. I know there will be many women in such a position in his constituency, and I am sure he will want engage in that debate.
Mr Byrne
No—[Interruption.] I will certainly give way to the Minister in a moment, but I want to underline one final aspect of universalism and the increases in the state pension age to which the Secretary of State referred. The Opposition will not stand in the way of proposals in the Bill to move forward the state pension age, but we want to put it on the record that we are concerned about the proposal to review it every five years. The goalposts on state pension age have already been moved a number of times in this Parliament, which is not good for stability, certainty or long-term planning.
I represent one of the poorest communities in the country and there is a 16-year gap in life expectancy between my constituency and Lichfield, a little way up the road. The mortality figures published by the Library over the past few days show that 1.2 million citizens die between the age of 65 and 69, and 60% of those are in the bottom three income groups. Mortality rates for the poorest in our country are twice the level of the richest, and we must take great care, not just with projections about life expectancy, but also about healthy life expectancy. The Secretary of State is asking for the power—unfettered —to review the state pension age every five years, which we think will promote uncertainty and instability, and damage the pensions savings rate that he seeks to increase.
Steve Webb
I believe the shadow Secretary of State has inadvertently misspoken. Will he confirm that no women born between 1951 and 1953 have had their state pension age changed by this Government, that any changes to their state pension age were made under the Pensions Act 1995, and that they have not had their pension age changed at short notice?
Mr Byrne
The Minister is right. I was referring to the problem that the state pension age has been moved a number of times in the past three years. The Opposition believe that it is unwise of the Secretary of State to ask for the right to review the pension age every five years because it will promote instability.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
We have had five hours to talk about pensions—what could be better? The debate has been unusual in the sense that the Government have had support for the Bill and its principles from Members on both sides of the House. That is vital, as the Chair of Work and Pensions Committee and others have said. Pensions reform that will last and that will not be blown about by changes of Government—in the long term, obviously—is a good thing. I welcome the fact that hon. Members on both sides of the House have welcomed the Bill and its central measure, the single-tier pension.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State began the debate in characteristically statesman-like fashion and in a non-partisan way. Unfortunately, that was not immediately followed. This reform deals with fairness, gives decent pensions to women, and tackles the poor pension position of the self-employed, which is vital. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who is no longer in his place, set hares running. He seemed to believe that assisting the self-employed is pork-barrel politics because, apparently, the massed ranks of the self-employed are all Liberal Democrats, which I was pleased to hear.
I am pleased that my coalition colleagues and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) welcomed the measures on the self-employed, who for many years have been excluded from the full state pension. The previous Government recognised that there was a problem and did a research report. I am not sure whether the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) was the Minister with responsibility for pensions at the time or which of my 10 predecessors was, but I found the report on the top shelf when I moved in. It had been put in the “too difficult” box, which was overflowing. This Government have grasped the nettle and provided for the self-employed to be full members of the state pension system. I have never heard a Government measure described as too good to be true, as that measure was described today, but I can assure the House that the deal is that the self-employed are full members. Low-earning self-employed people pay more national insurance than their low-waged counterparts. It therefore is not a freebie—the self-employed pay national insurance, and they should be part of the system.
I shall try to address the specific issues that arose during the debate. Several members of the Work and Pensions Committee spoke. I am grateful to the Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and their Committee colleagues for their pre-legislative scrutiny of clause 1. They suggested a number of amendments, including putting the start date of 2016 in the Bill, which we have done, and making 10 years the maximum minimum for a pension, which was welcomed by my hon. Friend. He pressed me mercilessly when I gave evidence, and we were pleased to give him what he wanted. I was keen on having him on the Public Bill Committee, but went a bit cool on the suggestion when he said he likes to table amendments.
I will address a number of the substantive issues raised in the debate in turn, the first of which is the move from 30 to 35 years. To be clear, 30 years currently gets people a basic state pension of £110 a week, and 35 years gets people a full single-tier pension of £144 a week. We are therefore not comparing like with like. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, the Government are merging a basic pension for which people work for 30 years with a second pension, for which people might work for 50 years. Thirty-five for the merged pension is therefore hardly ungenerous. If people who have already retired on the expectation of 30 years would have got more under the old rules than they will get under the new rules, they will get what they would have got under the old rules, so nobody in that situation will get less than they were expecting.
That brings me on to women born between 1951 and 1953. To be clear, they will receive their state pension on the day they would have got it if Labour had continued in office. We have not changed their state pension age. They will receive the pension they would have got had Labour continued in office. We have changed, with one exception, neither their pension age nor their pension amount. To hear Opposition Members talk about this group of women, one would think we have ripped them off, taken money off them and created losers. They are getting the pension they were going to get on the day they were going to get it.
There is one exception to that. We have changed something for this group: we have given them a bigger pension, because of the triple lock. If the Labour Government had continued in office, their pension would have been price indexed. We introduced the triple lock, so each one of those women born between 1951 and 1953 will receive a bigger pension under this Government’s policy than under the continuation of the previous Government’s policy.
Steve Webb
Let me be absolutely clear: the triple lock, as a concept, was in the 2010 Liberal Democrat manifesto. It was agreed and implemented by the coalition, and I want it to carry on after the next election. There is no question about it. I should add that all the figures in the coalition’s impact assessment on the Bill are premised on the assumption of the continuation of the triple lock.
Steve Webb
Just to be clear, the single tier comes in in 2016, which is not within the scope of the spending review, as the right hon. Gentleman probably knows. I was interested in what he had to say about pension spending, because apparently pensions will be included in the cap on welfare. As I understand it, if a Labour Government had a bad year on housing benefit, they would take some money off pensions. How would they do that? We were told this week that they would not undermine the triple lock, so what is left? They are in favour of raising the state pension age. As I understand it, if they have a bad year on housing benefit they will jack up the state pension age in the next year to make up the shortfall—that does not make any sense.
Steve Webb
I have given way to the right hon. Gentleman twice already, so I will make some progress.
A number of hon. Members raised matters of detail. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who said that he had approached the Bill in a spirit of scepticism. He is right to have done so. We should approach all new pension reforms in a spirit of scepticism, because there have been so many of them. One of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me is that the more he found out about the Bill the more he liked it. I am grateful to him for that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood asked a specific question on whether someone who defers under the current system past 2016 will continue to receive the current generous terms after 2016. He also paid tribute to the staff in the House of Commons Library—he mentioned Djuna Thurley specifically—who have to wrestle with complex legislation. I echo that tribute. A lot of legislation is complex and difficult, and I think all of us accept that the Library provides us with great support.
My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) asked about another group and the whole issue of derived rights. The single-tier pension is designed for the future, whereas the current state pension system is rooted in the 1940s when men had jobs and women had husbands. We cannot go on like that. We have introduced a lot of transitional protection. For example, there was an option for women to pay something quaintly called the married woman’s stamp. If they did that at any point in the 35 years up to their pension age, we would protect them and pay them the pension they would have got. There is extensive transitional protection.
My hon. Friend raised the question of what she described as homemakers. People who are not in the paid labour force can still receive protection for their pension rights in a number of circumstances. If they are at home with children, caring for an elderly or disabled relative, or are unemployed and looking for a job, they receive credits. If they are too sick to work, they receive national insurance benefits credits. So a whole raft of circumstances are covered.
My hon. Friend mentioned a specific and narrow group of people—childless homemakers. Interestingly, at the start of her speech, she said how important the contributory principle was—I agree with that—and she was right that in many ways the Bill reasserts that principle. To reassert it, however, and then say that someone who has paid no national insurance, not been a carer, not been looking for work and not been too sick to work should none the less get a significant pension creates a tension. I can reveal to the House that she and I discussed this issue in the Tea Room before we got here, and she said, “But aren’t you changing the rules late in the day?”, as she also said in her speech. We have to strike a balance between moving to a new system and protecting people as we move, and not setting in aspic every single corner of the old system.
The hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Gregg McClymont) said, “You can’t go on running two separate systems”, and then demanded that we keep various bits of the old system going for another 15 years while running two separate systems. I would say to my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock, then, that there is extensive protection. If the lady in question were widowed, for example, there would be pension credit of £145, so if she had nothing else she would be brought up more or less to the same level. Extensive protections are in place. I cannot promise that every single person will be protected in every single respect, and nor should I, but there is extensive protection.
Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Steve Webb
I am grateful that someone has brought a voice to the voiceless in this debate. I have heard nothing about the 250,000 people shamefully left in overcrowded accommodation by the last Government and the nearly 5 million men, women and children on housing waiting lists up and down the land. Their voice deserves to be heard, so I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
I was pleased to hear the Minister’s comments about fairness. I notice that the Conservative literature in Eastleigh says that the Liberal Democrats oppose further changes to benefits that would, they claim, make our welfare system fairer. Is he 100% sure that this measure will deliver the savings set out by the Chancellor? Yes or no.
Steve Webb
Our impact assessment is our best estimate based on what we expect the impact of the policy to be. That is all any Department ever produces. We believe that it is a robust best estimate.
Steve Webb
We know that the housing benefit bill doubled in a decade—up 50% in real terms—and that Labour did nothing to tackle it. With the collapse in house building under the last Government, it is not surprising that private rents, and as a result housing benefit bills, soared.
Mr Byrne
I know that the Minister does not want to deliberately mislead the House, so I know that he will stand up now, correct the record and say that Labour introduced the local housing allowance and limits on housing benefit, and acknowledge that our manifesto set out plans for a cap on benefits, including housing benefit.
Steve Webb
That is very interesting. The right hon. Gentleman and his party were in office for 13 years and decided in their 2010 manifesto—the manifesto to which he just referred—to do something to control housing benefit. In office, they do not do it, but as they are heading out of government, they promise to do something.
Steve Webb
Perhaps I could make a little more progress.
The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan—[Interruption.] Sorry to disturb her—referred to private sector tenants and the relative position of social housing tenants. We spend more housing benefit on social housing tenants than on private sector tenants and we pay for their rent subsidy, so it is wrong to say that we subsidise private tenants more than we do social housing tenants. That is simply wrong. But if someone is living in private rented accommodation, broadly speaking we do not allow them an extra bedroom. Why, then, is it fair to have two houses next door to each other, one of which is privately rented and the other socially rented, and give a spare bedroom to the person in social accommodation, who also benefits from subsidised rent, but not to the person in the private rented accommodation?
Mr Byrne
The Minister is being characteristically generous in giving way. Why does he not tell the House the whole story and admit that the DWP has lost its case in the Court of Appeal and that its policy of discriminating against disabled people and not giving them any kind of special treatment has been struck down by the courts? That is why his Department has applied to the Supreme Court to have it looked at again. Why is he taking that to appeal and why will he not come clean to the House about how his policy is suffering at the hands of the courts because it is wrong?
Steve Webb
The case to which the right hon. Gentleman refers is in the courts now—before this policy has been implemented—so it is not specifically about this policy, but about a broader issue concerning the private rented sector. So it is a challenge to the regulations that his party was responsible for.
I will say more in a moment about the specific way in which we are planning to address the position of disabled people, because that is an important issue. Roughly two thirds of all social tenants have a disability as defined by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, based on the measure used in our impact assessment. That is a similar proportion to those affected by this measure, so it is not disproportionate. If we look at the stock of social tenants, we inevitably find that about two thirds of them are in that category, and that is true of this specific measure.
Steve Webb
We got the right one, as it were.
We are all in favour of incentives to encourage people to make better use of the housing stock, and I welcome any measures the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) took to that effect, but they have not worked. We have 1 million spare bedrooms among people on housing benefit. The changes have simply not worked on the necessary scale—
Steve Webb
I have given way three times to the right hon. Gentleman, and I want to make further progress.
Pensions and Social Security
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Steve Webb
No, I want to make some progress.
The right hon. Member for East Ham referred to the triple lock and the increase of 2.5% over inflation, compared with 2.2%, as derisory. I remind him that the extra 0.3% cost the taxpayer £150 million. I remember the funny-money days of Labour when £150 million was considered a mere rounding error. He dismisses it as derisory. When his party was in office, it was borrowing £150 billion a year, so I appreciate that for him £150 million is small change, but I still have the naive feeling that that amount is a lot of money. He and others derided our triple lock as though it were a trifle and of no consequence, but had Labour implemented the triple lock between 1997 and now, we would be spending an additional £3 billion on the state pension. So if Labour had applied the triple lock that he derides as inconsequential throughout their term in office, we would be spending £3 billion a year more on pensions. But perhaps he thinks that that sum is derisory, and a frippery, as well.
We have also been hearing about strivers. This is the classic dog-whistle politics of the Opposition. They accuse us of trying to divide people, yet they suddenly divide people—[Interruption.] It is not our side that has used that language.
Steve Webb
The Opposition have tried to divide people into “strivers” and “somebody else”. I am not sure who the “somebody else” is—a non-striver, perhaps. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) is shouting out, but he is the man who said in his conference speech that Labour was on the side of the strivers, not the shirkers. We know who uses that language.
Why is it necessary to have the fiscal consolidation? It is because of the Labour party’s debts. There was £150 billion of borrowing in the final year of the last Labour Government. Labour takes no responsibility for that but, had the previous Chancellor’s plans been put into operation, it would have had to implement substantial spending cuts on public sector pay—which it has finally now agreed—and on benefits. Have we heard a single suggestion from the Opposition today on how they would make savings? They simply oppose every cut, pretend to be on the side of the poor, and never accept responsibility for how we got into this mess in the first place.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
The Minister will have read about the cases of Becky Bell raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) and of Angel Hooper, the disabled child whose parents have been told that they will lose £20 a week because her specially adapted room will not be shared with another family member. They are two of the 660,000 families being told they will have to fork out extra or move under the bedroom tax. Will he confirm how many one-bedroom properties will be needed for people to downsize to as the bedroom tax kicks in?
Steve Webb
You will be aware, Mr Speaker, that discretionary housing payments are being made available with a specific focus on the needs of severely disabled people—for example, where a house has been adjusted to reflect the needs of a disabled person. We have allocated money to local authorities precisely to cater for those whom it would be inappropriate to expect to move.
Mr Byrne
The Minister knows that 600,000 people will now need a one-bedroom flat, yet the Department’s own assessment states that there are insufficient properties to enable tenants to move to accommodation of an appropriate size, even if they want to move. From the beginning of April, therefore, people in social housing will face a £14 a week extra bill, when those on £1 million a year face a £2,000 a week tax cut. How can the Minister justify this to hon. Members such as the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who said that benefit cuts at a time of tax cuts of this order would send the clearest signal that
“Conservatives were looking after vested interests: not so much a dog whistle—more a full blown trumpet.”?
Steve Webb
Given that the right hon. Gentleman mentions taxation, I will risk straying on to it, but quite why today’s millionaires would rather have our 45p rate than his 40p rate, or our 28% capital gains tax, rather than his 18% rate is beyond me.
On the right hon. Gentleman’s specific point, households will respond in a range of ways to the measure on under-occupation: moving is simply one of them; taking in a lodger or boarder, sub-letting, working or working more hours are others, and there are discretionary payments for those in most need.
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Steve Webb
This has been a wide-ranging debate of nearly four hours. Although it has technically been about amendments to clause 1, the generosity of the Chair has meant that we have essentially covered the whole Bill and the issues raised by it.
First, I want to respond to the point about the language in which the debate is constructed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy) and a number of other Members said that we should avoid divisive language, and I entirely agree. I seem to recall that it was the Labour party that used the phrase “strivers’ tax” about this debate—indeed, a year or so ago, the shadow Secretary of State used his party conference speech to create the very divisions that his hon. Friends are criticising. He said:
“Let’s face the tough truth—that many people on the doorstep at the last election felt that too often we were for shirkers not workers.”
The right hon. Gentleman has form on this issue. In 2012, he was at it again. During a speech at the London School of Economics, to what I imagine was a packed house, he said:
“Labour is the party of hard workers not free-riders. The clue is in the name. We are the Labour party. The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.”
Mr Byrne
The Minister will remember that it was Sir William Beveridge who used the phrase about idleness being an evil.
There is a difference between reporting a conversation on a doorstep in one’s constituency and using a line as the basis of a political strategy that seeks to punish those on low incomes while handing out a £3 billion tax cut to Britain’s richest citizens. I am simply not sure how the Minister, as a Liberal Democrat, can support that policy.
Steve Webb
It is good to hear from the true heir of Beveridge. The quotes describing the Labour party that I just read out were in party conference speeches and at a conference at the LSE—
“The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.”
Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
I look forward to coming to Stourbridge and helping to explain to the 6,500 people there who are on tax credits that their Member of Parliament thinks that the money they are getting is unsustainable. I happen to think that those 6,500 people, whom the hon. Lady has just dismissed, need every pound of the tax credits that Labour delivered when we were in office.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
I should like to bring the right hon. Gentleman back to the Bill, and to tell him that when he votes against it tonight, £1.9 billion a year will go missing. Will he compare that £1.9 billion a year with the £3 billion a week that Labour was borrowing during its last year in office?
Mr Byrne
I would contrast that money with the £3 billion a year that the Chancellor is giving away to Britain’s richest citizens, in a tax cut that will kick in next year, at a time when the Government are cutting tax credits and when Britain’s working families are under pressure. How can the hon. Gentleman possibly justify that, either here or to his constituents?
Benefits Uprating (2013-14)
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(12 years ago)
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Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, although from yesterday we had a pretty good idea what he was going to say. Today brings welcome news for Britain’s pensioners. When Labour was in office we lifted 1 million pensioners out of poverty and increased pensioner incomes by 40%. Today the Minister has confirmed that pensions are set to rise, which we welcome, and we look forward to his pensions White Paper, which is now acquiring mythical status—we hope he will soon be able to prove it is a reality and not a myth.
Although the news for pensioners is welcome, news for working people is a disaster. Buried in the small print of yesterday’s Budget is the brutal truth that it was a Budget for unemployment. We already knew that the Chancellor had throttled the recovery, that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government had cut hardest those councils where jobs were fewest, and that the Work programme was worse than doing nothing, but yesterday we saw what that means for the nation’s finances.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised up the claimant count by 340,000 by 2016. This Budget puts up unemployment, and the bill for that failure is enormous. The dole bill in 2015-16 will now be nearly £1 billion higher—£1.6 billion more over the next three years. The bill for failure is not going down but up, and yesterday we learned that working people will pay the price.
This country already has more than 6 million working people in poverty. The Resolution Foundation stated yesterday that 60% of the welfare uprating bill will be paid by working people. It is a strivers’ tax. Her Majesty’s Treasury policy costings state that the 1% squeeze will save £6.7 billion. Provisional analysis this morning by the Library shows that just 23% of that will come from JSA, ESA and income support. The rest of the balance will come from tax credits, maternity allowance, maternity pay, sick pay and housing benefits, which are all claimed by working people. The strivers and battlers whom the Prime Minister promised to defend at his party conference will pay the price for the Government’s failure.
I hope we will not have any nonsense from the Minister about how all that will be offset by the rise in the personal allowance. Already, £14 billion has been taken out of tax credits, and yesterday’s Budget steals another £5 billion from tax credits by 2016-17. The universal credit we have heard so much about—if it ever happens—has been hacked into before it has even started. The price will be paid by 6,000 families in the Minister’s constituency—no doubt they are delighted with him.
In the welfare uprating Bill, what is the value of the squeeze on working people’s maternity allowance, statutory sick pay, maternity pay, paternity pay, statutory adoption pay, working tax credit and child tax credit? During Second Reading of the Child Poverty Bill, the Minister said that he had given up being an even-handed academic, because he was
“appalled at what was happening in our country to the most vulnerable people”—[Official Report, 20 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 625.]
Indeed, he attacked his hon. Friends for standing “idly by” and watching child poverty reach record levels.
Before the autumn statement, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that 400,000 children will be plunged back into poverty by 2015 because of measures already taken. How many more children will fall into poverty as a result of this strivers’ tax? Will the Minister please justify to the House how the Chancellor can press ahead with a £3 billion tax cut for the better-off—a tax cut of £107,000 for the 8,000 people earning over £1 million—when 6,000 families in his own constituency will see their tax credits frozen or cut? This Budget has increased the claimant count, put up the cost of failure and now working people will pay the price.
Steve Webb
It is not often that Shakespeare springs to mind when I respond to these statements, but the phrase
“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
springs to mind—I missed out the earlier bit of the quote about a tale told by an idiot, out of respect for the right hon. Gentleman. We get a lot of fury and sound, but when it comes to the crunch, he abstains. He described the measures as a disaster, but it was not clear whether that means he will vote against them—answer came there none. If the measures are a disaster, surely he can say he will vote against them, but of course he does not. He sounds sympathetic and angry, but when it comes to the crunch and there is a vote, he disappears and is not to be seen.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the crucial issue of employment, but he does not seem to realise that the number of people in work is at a record level and will rise every year of this Parliament. That is the record of the coalition. He asked about strivers and somehow wanted to waft away the large increase in personal tax allowances. I am afraid, however, that I will not let him waft away a large commitment to Britain’s strivers. This April, the personal tax alliance will rise by a record amount—£1,300. That is worth £5 a week to the hard-working families he claims to support—far more than any indexation impact.
The right hon. Gentleman referred to universal credit and used the phrase “if it happens”. He may not have noticed that yesterday we published the rates of disregard for universal credit, and on Monday my right hon. Friend the Work and Pensions Secretary will publish further details. This bold welfare reform is on track, on time and under budget, and it will be delivered as we have promised.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about three specific areas. When the welfare uprating Bill is published it will be accompanied by a full impact assessment that will deal with the figures he has requested. On child poverty, the Government remain committed to our statutory obligations, and when taken as a whole, our policies will deliver real reductions in child poverty. He will have seen the chart published yesterday on the impact of universal credit, which shows overwhelmingly that those in the poorest deciles benefit most. Universal credit will help us to eat into child poverty. He did not mention the Chancellor’s announcement yesterday of a multi-billion pound tax relief for investment by British business which will create jobs and reduce child poverty.
Finally, the right hon. Gentleman mentioned taxes on the highest paid. I seem to remember that he was a Treasury Minister. In 13 years of the Labour Government —if I remember rightly—the top rate of income tax was never above 40%. He seems to be objecting to the fact that we have a 45% top rate of income tax. If 45% is too low, why was he satisfied with 40% for 13 years?
Universal Credit and Welfare Reform
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(12 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
Members on both sides of the House want this to work, but if the hon. Lady looks at the evidence submitted by the CBI and the Chartered Institute for Taxation to the Work and Pensions Committee on Friday, she will see that there is now a real worry that this is going to be a catastrophe for the many entrepreneurs who rely on tax credits for help to balance the books at the end of the month. What I want from the Secretary of State is clarity about how this is going to work in practice.
This is the start of a whole series of risks that have been brought to the attention of hon. Members here and in the Select Committee. Flagged up in the evidence submitted on Friday was the decision to deny people a choice about who receives the money. I hope that the Secretary of State will reform this before implementation of universal credit, because many people who run women’s refuges say that the system is so badly thought through that refuges for women fleeing from domestic violence will have to close. In fact, Refuge tells us—[Interruption.] This is not scaremongering by me; it is evidence submitted to the Select Committee by Refuge, which says that the idea is so badly thought through that unless changes are made, 297 refuges will have to close. This is not scaremongering; it is bringing to the House’s attention information and arguments provided by one of the most important charities in the country.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
Yesterday in oral questions, at which I think the right hon. Gentleman was present, the Secretary of State gave categorical assurances about refuges, so to repeat the smear after receiving those assurances is scaremongering.
Mr Byrne
If the Minister is accusing Refuge and Women’s Aid of a smear, I am afraid that he has got his facts seriously wrong. This element was not in the original design. Yesterday we finally extracted from the Secretary of State a commitment to change; now we want to know how it, along with a host of other things, will work in practice.
Some of these issues are now bedevilling local authorities. There is a serious risk that direct payments of universal credit, which includes housing benefit going to the individual, will result in local councils’ arrears bills and eviction rates beginning to rise. We are still no clearer about what will happen to the 20,000 housing benefit staff who work for local councils and will no longer have to process housing benefit claims once the DWP takes over the task. Are they going to be sacked or made redundant? Who will pick up the bill? Is it yet another bill that will fall on the shoulders of hard-pressed council tax payers?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(12 years, 8 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
My right hon. Friend is aware that, as Pensions Minister, I am responsible for people who are currently pensioners and for everyone who will be a pensioner, which is everybody, and we have good news for today’s pensioners: not only the highest-ever cash increase but, more than that, year-on-year above-inflation increases whenever earnings grow more rapidly—and, incidentally, an increase in the age-related personal allowance this April of more than £500.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
May I associate myself with the words of tribute to Lord Ashley, who was a formidable champion of the people whom we came into politics to serve? He will be sorely missed in both Houses, but his inspiration will live on.
Two years before the election, the Prime Minister gave the pensioners’ pledge:
“The Government I lead will make sure that older and retired people are treated with dignity and given the quality of life they deserve.”
Will the Secretary of State therefore confirm, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said, that pensioners will be £315 a year worse off, thanks to the granny tax?
Steve Webb
The changes announced by the Chancellor in the Budget will increase the age-related personal allowance this April by more than £500 and leave it at £10,500 for 65 to 74-year-olds while the allowance for those of working age is levelled up to that figure, at which point all people will have a substantial tax-free allowance that will be increased thereafter.
Mr Byrne
This is why pensioners on the doorstep are so cross—they know that they have been hoodwinked by the Government. This measure was dressed up in the Budget as a simplification. I think the Secretary of State detains his barbers for about as long as I do. Does he go along and ask for his hair to be “simplified”? I do not think so. A cut is a cut. On top of granny tax 1, we now learn of granny tax 2. Will the Minister admit that from 2014 pensioners will face a further cut of £900, and apologise for trying to keep it secret?
Steve Webb
I do not recognise the figures that the right hon. Gentleman quotes, but I assure him that what matters most to the pensioners to whom I speak is a decent state pension. After 30 years of the pension declining in value relative to earnings, from now on it will rise every year by whatever is the highest of earnings, prices or 2.5%. There will be a guaranteed increase every year that matches inflation or is above inflation. That is something that pensioners value.
Welfare Reform Bill
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Frank Dobson
Will my right hon. Friend take at least a minute or two to try to get across to Government Members that housing benefit is not kept in people’s handbags or wallets? It is paid out to grasping private landlords, and until we do something about those landlords, the housing benefit bill will continue to soar.
Mr Byrne
The Minister with responsibility for pensions asks what we did about it; again, in the Conservative party’s briefing for today’s debate, there are some interesting figures about the rise in housing benefit over the past few years, but of course closer inspection of the DWP forecast for the next few years shows that housing benefit is set to rise, year on year, at the same rate as in the past 13 years. That is why Labour has been right to expose the dangers of cutting investment in new housing and the lack of any policy making from the Government on what should happen to the private rental market.
This afternoon, Labour has set out its proposal for a benefit cap that will work in practice. We hope to press it to a vote and that the Government will think again about giving the other place a chance to vote on it—just to reinforce that point.
Unemployment
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(13 years ago)
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Steve Webb
In a second. So when it is said that the private sector is not expanding, that is simply not right. People say that there are no jobs, but there are half a million additional private sector jobs. The hon. Lady made the point that that is looking over the whole period, so I will take her at her word. Let us look at the last month. In it, the number of people in work has risen by 38,000. Of course, we can all choose different time periods—Labour Members used the last quarter, for example—but my point is that selective use of statistics, such as that made by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), creates a highly misleading impression and talks down the British economy in a way that is in nobody’s interests.
Mr Byrne
The Minister is characteristically generous in giving way. Surely he cannot celebrate the fact that employment over the last quarter has fallen by some 63,000, and that 13 times more jobs are being lost in the public sector than jobs are being created in the private sector. He cannot tell the House today that everything is going well, surely.
Steve Webb
Of course, I did not say that everything is going well, but the right hon. Gentleman cannot deny that in the last month, an extra 38,000 jobs, net, have been created. We can choose different time periods. As my right hon. Friend the Minister of State said, the claimant count rose by 3,000 in the last month, but that is more than offset by the fact that people who were previously on incapacity benefit have been reassessed on to JSA, and lone parents have been required to look for work and moved on to JSA. In fact, without those policy changes, JSA numbers would have fallen in the last month. That is why my right hon. Friend was absolutely right to talk about signs of stabilisation in the job market.
As a number of Members on both sides of the House said—my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen), the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) and others—every single person on the unemployment roll is a person too many, but if we overstate the doom and gloom, we talk down confidence in the economy, which is to the detriment of all our constituents.
Let me respond to the claim made by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley and others that long-term youth unemployment is up—and I quote—“93%”. Labour Front Benchers have clearly supplied all their Back Benchers with figures for their constituencies. The only problem is that all of them are wrong. Labour Members might be interested to learn that what used to happen is that under measures such as the new deal, people had to move off JSA after a certain period and were paid something else—a training allowance—or they got a temporary job; then, when they went back on to JSA, as so many did, the clock started again. Hey presto—a long-term unemployed person had been converted into a short-term unemployed person. They had not got a job; they had just been taken out of the figures. We have stopped doing that. As a result, if all the factors are taken into account—the people who were excluded from the statistics because they were on training allowances or in temporary jobs—the number of long-term claimants aged 18 to 24 is about the same now as it was in 2010.
To hear Labour Members, one would think that the numbers had doubled. The right hon. Gentleman was very angry about that, and had they doubled he would be right to be so, but they have not doubled—in fact, they are roughly the same.
Living Standards
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(13 years ago)
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Mr Byrne
No, because what comes with that is the biggest raid ever on the benefits of children and families. Let us consider the bill that will be paid by families under yesterday’s announcements. An average family on the minimum wage with two kids will lose £320 a year as a result of the changes made yesterday. They would only ever gain £120 a year through the increases in tax thresholds to which the hon. Gentleman referred. Overwhelmingly, poorer families and children in this country are now getting poorer as a result of his Government’s Budget.
No wonder Save the Children said yesterday:
“For many families the scrapped £110 increase in Child Tax Credit could mean the difference between putting food on the table for their children or having them go hungry.”
The Child Poverty Action Group said:
“Britain’s poorest families have been abandoned today and left to face the worst…the government has actively decided to let child poverty rise.”
Those on the Treasury Bench should be ashamed of themselves; they should be ashamed of what they have done to children in this country. Labour will be the party that stands up for a fair deal for working parents.
The scale of the cuts to children’s benefits is not the only story. There is more. Let us consider the cuts to working tax credits for working families. Working families are already in line for seven big cuts to their tax credits next year. That was going to lose them more than £1.7 billion, but that was not enough for the Chancellor, so yesterday they got an eighth cut to their working tax credits. They will now lose almost £2 billion next year. That is almost double the cuts they received last year.
Some 2 million families in our country now face a double hit, with the cuts to child tax credits and the freezing of the working tax credit. There is therefore a great deal of extra squeeze that will hit working families, but I want to flag up one cut in particular. It is the subject of a Westminster Hall debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), and I want the Secretary of State to reflect on it further, as I think it will have consequences that he would not intend. One of the changes he will make next year is to increase the number of hours a working couple must work in order to get tax credits. At present, they can qualify for tax credits if they work 16 hours a week. From next April, they will need to work 24 hours a week. At present, however, companies are not handing out extra shifts. Many families that will be affected work in the retail sector. If anything, big retailers are cutting back on their employees’ hours, not increasing them. A family that is on the minimum wage for 16 hours a week might bring in just over £5,000. Working tax credits and child tax credit might increase their take-home pay to about £11,000. If they cannot get an extra shift, all of that working tax credit will be gone. Those families may well find themselves better off on jobseeker’s allowance.
We must not create a situation in which cuts to tax credits mean families are better off on benefits than in work. I am sure that is not the Secretary of State’s intention, and I urge him to look at this matter in more detail before those cuts bite in April next year.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
I am trying to follow the right hon. Gentleman’s reasoning. I think he has argued so far that people out of work should not face cuts and that people in work should not face cuts, so who should?
Steve Webb
I can understand why the right hon. Gentleman did not want to deal with the issue that I raised. I can point out to him, however, that the total number of people in employment will rise from 29 million last year to 30 million in 2016 under the projections. There will be more people in employment, and a rebalancing towards a vibrant private sector, which we want to see.
As well as mortgages, Members on the Government side have talked about the council tax. Labour Members did not seem to want to talk about the council tax, as though it did not matter. The council tax is one of the most regressive taxes that we have. This Government froze it and will freeze it again. That is real help for hard-working families.
A number of hon. Members talked about fuel prices and petrol. It is this Government who cancelled the 3p rise in January. It is Labour that had the escalator, year after year, with above-inflation increases in petrol prices. Under our plans for duty, petrol prices will be 10p a litre less than under Labour’s plans.
Steve Webb
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for intervening, because I asked him the question when he was speaking, and he said that he opposed cuts for people who are out of work and that he opposed cuts for people who are in work. When I asked him whom that left, he said nothing—he never answers the question—and his Back Benchers said, “The bankers”. He was in the Treasury when, before the general election, the Labour Government introduced a “temporary” bankers’ bonus tax. If Labour thought they were going to win the election, why did they not make the bankers’ bonus tax permanent? It was a one-off, pre-election gimmick, whereas this Government have introduced a banking levy that, every year, will raise more than his temporary banking tax raised in any year.
Pensions Bill [Lords]
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for decoding the Secretary of State’s remarks and putting on record that there will be transitional arrangements. I heard about that only by looking this morning at certain blogs written by Liberal Democrat Members, who also expressed great confidence that there would be a compromise on this. We look forward to hearing a lot more about what that compromise will be. It is a shame that it is not in the Bill in time for this Second Reading debate. We would all understand the logic of this if we heard a little more from the Secretary of State about why the Government are introducing this measure.
The truth is that the Secretary of State used as a justification for his argument the idea that women in this position will somehow be living that much longer to enjoy their new pension. Well, they will draw cold comfort from that. The point is that it is simply not realistic for women in their late 50s, who are truly fearful about being given no time to adjust to their loss of income. Surely that is the critical point for us this afternoon. Women in their later 50s will have earned less over their lifetime; they have lower state pension and private savings than men; many have been unable to join a workplace pension and have interrupted their careers to look after their family; many will have stood down from jobs on the understanding that they would get that state pension early.
These are not simply my assertions; they are the Government’s own facts. The Pensions Minister was forced to tell my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) that 40% of women aged 56 have no private pension wealth:
“The proportion of women aged 56-years-old who have no private pension wealth”,
he told the House on 10 March,
“is estimated to be 40%.”—[Official Report, 10 March 2011; Vol. 524, c. 1266W.]
What on earth are those women supposed to do with the measures in the Bill? On 4 February he admitted that the median pension saving of a 56-year-old woman is six times lower than that of a man, yet he tells us not to worry because he has a plan. He has a word of reassurance—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State should listen to the plan of the Pensions Minister. I think he will be rather pleased with it, as we were offered words of reassurance and comfort. On 14 February, the Pensions Minister said:
“One reassurance I can offer is that those women…will be eligible to apply for jobseeker’s allowance”.—[Official Report, 14 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 681-82.]
They might, I think, call that the final insult.
There is not much that unites the House these days, but concern about this Bill is fast becoming one of those causes. I understand that even the Department for Work and Pensions Whip, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), who is not in her place on the Treasury Bench has said:
“I’m pressing Ministers on this because a number of women have raised it with me, and it so happens that members of my own family are in this group. It’s certainly an issue I sympathise with greatly.”
Her concern is widespread. I believe that the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) has told no less than the Deputy Prime Minister:
“I agree with the Age UK protestors: these changes should be reconsidered.”
Nearly half the Liberal Democrat MPs have signed an early-day motion that says that the Government should
“rethink its retirement timetable in the Bill so that these women have a fairer chance to plan and save for their retirement.”
Tonight, there is a chance to put a vote behind those words.
Who will vote to support the Pensions Minister? Once, he never tired of telling the Tories about the error of their ways. He was the man who once said:
“Pension policy needs to be stable and predictable years ahead, not made up on the back of a cigarette packet.”
That was still there on his website, www.stevewebb.org, on 6 October 2009. Alongside it, I found another rather apposite quote:
“It is typical of Tory policy to hit the poorest the hardest.”
That is still there on his website. This is the Pensions Minister who said:
“As ever when it comes to pensions, it is as if women are an afterthought. That is clearly not the way in which to change state pension ages.”—[Official Report, 9 March 2010; Vol. 507, c. 33WH.]
That was not on his website. That is what he said in the House of Commons in March last year. Tonight, we have the chance to help the Pensions Minister stand by his words and his record. I think that we should help him with his honour.
This is a Second Reading debate. We are supposed to be debating the principles of the Bill and we are then asked to vote on those principles. We are being asked to do this when it is perfectly clear that the Government no longer believe in the Bill. We are privy to reports in the newspapers that the Government might be working on another U-turn. I am not sure whether it is Conservative or Liberal Democrat Members who are behind it, although I know who will claim the credit. The Secretary of State told the Financial Times today that there are “issues and concerns” that need sorting out, while senior Ministers, says the Daily Mail,
“are telling the Chancellor he must think again.”
The Secretary of State, it says, is “sympathetic”. I have to ask, then: why are we voting on a Bill that the Government do not believe in? The Chief Secretary does not believe in it; the Pensions Minister does not believe in it; half of the Liberal Democrat Members do not believe in it; the Tory Whips do not believe in it. What on earth are we doing going into the Division Lobbies to vote to punish half a million women through a Bill that no one believes in? Will the hon. Gentleman answer that question now?
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
It is unclear whether the right hon. Gentleman is going to vote against Second Reading—he has not said so yet. On the assumption that he is, he would have to find not just the £10 billion that his hon. Friends want to raise, but the £30 billion that this Bill saves. Where will he find £30 billion when all the money is gone?
Mr Byrne
I am glad that the Minister has raised that point. His own consultation, which closes on Friday, is examining the question of how savings can be made through acceleration of the granting of the state pension age later in life. That is an issue that should have been brought to the House for debate before we were asked to debate egregious measures that will hit half a million women. We should re-examine the timetable for the raising of the retirement age to 67, but that must be done on the basis of equal treatment of the sexes, and the principle that people should be given time to prepare.
We are sick of this confusion. We are sick of this chaos. We say to the Government today, “No more: you need to get a grip. Take this Bill away, and bring us a plan that you have had the decency to half think through.”
“The critical factor in pension arrangements is certainty. People need to be able to plan with certainty”.—[Official Report, 11 January 2011; Vol. 342, c. 179.]
Those are not my words, but the words of the Pensions Minister who is responsible for the Bill. Tonight the House will be asked to vote on a broken promise. We urge the Government to think again. We shall vote to oppose the Bill, and I urge others to do the same.
Steve Webb
In a little while; I want to make some progress first.
The Bill’s third key element—which, again, voting it down would stop—is making judges put some money into their pensions. I think that Members were rather shocked when they discovered that the taxpayer put 32% of a judge’s salary into a judge’s pension, and that the judge in respect of their own pension entitlements puts a big fat juicy zero. This Bill will correct that. If the Opposition succeed in voting it down, they will stop us doing so. We need to make progress with the Bill, therefore. Second Reading is about the principles, and we stand firmly behind them.
In the debate, the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)—who has rejoined us now—glossed over the auto-enrolment provisions and said the Labour party will vote against the Bill. That would leave £30 billion to be found, as that is what the Bill would put into the Exchequer. When asked where the money would come from, he replied, “Well, we’d move a bit faster on age 67” and then added, in brackets as it were, “in the 2030s.” For a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury to tell us that the way to find money for a problem in the next Parliament is to look to somewhere in the 2030s sounds vaguely familiar. The answer is always, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”—
Steve Webb
In a second. [Hon. Members: “Give way.”] I will give way. The reason there is no money, as the right hon. Gentleman said, is because difficult decisions were always deferred to tomorrow.
Mr Byrne
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. He is making his remarks with his customary eloquence. As the following figure has not been presented this afternoon, will he remind the House precisely how much the acceleration of the state pension age for women before 2018 will save? Is the sum about £1.2 billion—yes or no?
Steve Webb
Interestingly, the right hon. Gentleman and his colleague the shadow Minister are saying two different things. The right hon. Gentleman knows that the sum for the changes up to 2020 is £10 billion. His shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), says we should delay to 2020 and find £10 billion while he wants to vote against the Bill and find £30 billion at some time in the 2030s. I think the House knows where we stand on that.
I am grateful to those Members who took the trouble to address auto-enrolment, but the shadow Secretary of State glossed over that issue. He said we ought to enrol at £5,000, which is not the right figure, but let us accept it for the sake of argument. He then said we should not put up the threshold. Therefore, under his scheme with the threshold at £5,000, someone who earned £5,100 would be auto-enrolled on that £100, and as we start at 1%, they would have to put in £1—not £1 a week, but £1 a year, or 2p a week. That is what will happen if we do not let this Bill make progress. We will be requiring employers and employees to put 2p per week into the employee’s pension. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that might in any sense undermine the credibility of our proposals?
Steve Webb
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for recognising that there is a long-term problem, which not all his colleagues have done.
My hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) made the point that this is not about the deficit. That is quite true—these measures do not save us money in the current comprehensive spending review period. However, I have a figure to present to the House: £1.3 trillion. That is the national debt at the end of this Parliament, even after our austerity measures. That is the legacy; that is the reason we need to get a grip on these matters.
As well as the 25 Members who spoke today, there were two almost silent voices—especially silent in the Opposition’s contributions. The first silent voice was tomorrow’s taxpayer. Labour wants to put the Bill into the 2030s. If we delay the changes, all these things will have to be paid for by someone else. As long as it is not the people who write to us—somebody else will pay, and they do not write to us, so that is fine. That voice needs to be heard.
The second voice that was not really heard much in the debate—although a few coalition Members did raise it—was that of employers. Of course, many of the Bill’s measures on auto-enrolment are about easing the burden it imposes, particularly on smaller firms, which are crucial to our recovery and the fundamental improvement of the economy. These measures strike a balance. The waiting period gives employers time to get people on the payroll. The threshold enables employers to take on people on a lower wage, with less bureaucratic burden. The voice of the employer and the costs and burdens on business were issues that the Opposition almost did not raise at all.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) was very generous in her remarks, supporting the measures on judges and on auto-enrolment. She quite properly raised concerns about the state pension age, but she made an important point about our state pension reform agenda generally. There are two sides to the state pension deal—when people get it and what they get. One Opposition Member this evening described the state pension as a pittance, but who oversaw it at that level for 13 years? We have brought forward, in our Green Paper, proposals for a single tier of state pensions set above the level of the means test. That is one of our reform options and that is the pension, if those proposals go ahead, that every one of the women we have been talking about today would get, so there is an issue about when they get the pension, but there is also, crucially, an issue about what they get. We are actively looking into that and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising it.
The hon. Member for Arfon asked about Allied Steel and Wire workers and the financial assistance scheme. I can confirm that I met them along with the Secretary of State for Wales and Dr Ros Altmann, who has done a huge amount of good work in this area, back in November and that I wrote to update the Secretary of State last week. We are aiming to provide forecasts for financial assistance scheme members once the wind-up process for schemes is completed. In the case of ASW, the scheme is still winding up, so the financial assistance scheme is not yet in a position to provide forecasts, but we hope to make progress later this year. The hon. Gentleman also asked about Dr Altmann’s ideas for getting money into the scheme and we have looked at trying to release value from annuities. That is not looking as hopeful as we had hoped but we are working hard to see if that can be done and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making the point.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) gets the prize for making the sharpest intervention. He pointed out to the shadow Secretary of State the legal advice and comments made by my noble Friend Lord Freud in the House of Lords on 30 March. I know that my hon. Friend reads little else and I am grateful to him for drawing those comments to our attention. [Interruption.] As the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill has asked the question, let me tell him the answer before he asks again. My noble Friend was responding to an amendment that would have slowed the process at which we equalise the men’s and women’s state pension age. The right hon. Gentleman will know that we are on a process of equalisation, and the legal issue is that we deviate from equalisation if at any point we widen the gap. The coalition reference to moving men in 2016 and women in 2020 would widen that gap. The issue is directive 79/7, which
“deals with the progressive implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security…Any change we now wish to make needs to be considered in relation to the position left by the 1995 Act.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 March 2011; Vol. 726, c. 1279.]
That is on the record and has been for several months.
Steve Webb
If it had been self-evidently not possible, I think that the right hon. Gentleman would have pointed it out in the past 12 months, but I have not heard him do so.
The right hon. Member for Croydon North (Malcolm Wicks) made a characteristically thoughtful speech and I hope that he is on the Public Bill Committee. That would lengthen our proceedings, but in a very nice way. He raised the important issue of the entitlement of people with long years of national insurance payments to a national insurance pension. He generously referred to the fact that I taught his daughter at university; I hope that I contributed in some way to her social mobility as a result. He raised the serious issue of using long periods of national insurance records. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State pointed out, the records before 1975 are a mess, which the right hon. Gentleman will know as he is one of my many predecessors. Our ability to use those records is very limited and one of my concerns about his proposal, which I am happy to discuss with him in a genuinely open way, is the position of women, because they would have to be credited for times when they were not in paid work. Some of that paid work will have been before home responsibilities protection was introduced and so we simply would not know who to credit. That is only one of the issues, but as I have said, we are happy to engage with him in the spirit of openness.
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Liam Byrne and Steve Webb(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
But the challenge from this Budget is that there are simply not enough winners, because the bills for sending people to the dole queue rather than back to work are now going through the roof. Surely the hon. Gentleman recognises that more than £2.5 billion in extra dole bills does not constitute a wise use of public money. If only the Chancellor would do more to get people back to work, the squeeze on working families would not be anywhere near as hard.
Finally, we must ask what the Budget means for some of the most vulnerable people in our country—the people who are in need of help from the wider community, and those who need extra support in order to live a full life in one of the world’s biggest economies. I know that, like me, the Secretary of State believes that a country as rich as Britain should have high, not low, standards of civilisation and compassion—but the Chancellor is pressing ahead with measures that will deny thousands of people their independence. The question that the House must ask is: what is the Secretary of State doing to stop it?
The right hon. Gentleman told the House yesterday that after his review of DLA had been completed the mobility component for people in care homes would still exist, but he still cannot explain why the Chancellor announced that he was taking £400 million more out of the mobility component than previously planned. The Budget confirmed that he would press ahead with his abolition of DLA. I repeat that we support the right kind of reform of DLA, but no matter how he tries to dress it up, he is taking £2.9 billion out of a well-targeted benefit, and he himself is saying that 170,000 fewer people will receive the benefit by the end of the Parliament. That is £8,500 per family. With figures like that, surely he can understand why so many people with disabilities up and down the country are so worried.
Finally, it was confirmed in the Budget that the Government are pressing ahead with their plans to limit employment and support allowance to just one year. The Secretary of State has a chance to fix that in Committee on the Bill, but the Budget confirmed an ambition to save £3.5 billion from people on ESA. However, he knows as well as I do that many people do not recover from cancer in under 12 months, and he also knows that cancer charities up and down the country are now asking him to think again.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Byrne
No, because I want to make an important point to the House. The Minister’s Department knows that three quarters of cancer patients still need ESA after one year. The message from the charities to the Front-Bench team was blunt. They say:
“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.”
Will the Minister confirm that he will withdraw this terrible measure?
Steve Webb
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He tried to frighten disabled people by saying the average DLA loss was £8,500 per year. Does he think that figure is right?
Mr Byrne
Well, the Minister will know as well as I do how much he is cutting from DLA, and he knows as well as I do how many people he anticipates will receive the benefit in the future. He can do the maths as well as I can. The obligation is on him to come clean and be straight with people with disabilities. What will the reform of DLA mean for them? Will he drop this measure from his Bill?
This afternoon we have heard a pretty poor defence of a Budget that puts more people out of work, fails to deliver on ambitions for our young people, and hits families harder than ever to pay the bills of economic failure. Worse still, it begins to endanger the contract of a proud and civilised country with the people who need help most. This is not a big society; it is a society in which the bonds that tie us together are weaker and weaker. This is not a Budget that is working; it is a Budget that is hurting—and the Chancellor should think again.