Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Liz Kendall and Toby Perkins

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall]

I will come on to this point in a moment, but the purpose of the PIP review is to have a wider look at the assessment. It has not been looked at for over a decade since it came in. I understand the sequencing point, and I will come to that in a moment. It is extremely important to have a very clear message that existing PIP claimants will now be unaffected by the changes in the Bill.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for the fact she has listened this week, but she knows that many disabled people watching our proceedings today will remain very worried. She is absolutely right that the existing system is not working. Can she say more about the Minister for Social Security and Disability’s review and about how we can rebuild the confidence of disabled groups and the people who are worried, because every welfare reform seems to have been bad for them, in the fact that we can have a system that assesses who really needs it?

[Liz Kendall]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. I will come on to say a little more about that in a moment. The review will be co-produced with disabled people, their organisations, clinicians, other experts and MPs, because we must ensure that we get this right. I have been a long-standing champion of co-production, including when I was the shadow Minister responsible for social care. I think we get the best decisions when we work closely with people.

Trident

Debate between Liz Kendall and Toby Perkins

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins]

Once again, that makes it clear that this motion is all about the Labour party’s position. I have attempted to clarify the difference between the decision this House will be facing shortly and the wording of the motion before us.

[Liz Kendall]

Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that even though the SNP called this debate, it has failed to set out its position either on how it would replace jobs or how it would dispose of the weapons? Should not the debate have been about its policy, as it called this debate today?

[Toby Perkins]

For the second time today, my hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. There is, of course, a whole series of inconsistencies in the SNP position. Today we were hearing that a decision to go forward with Trident would be choosing to buy nuclear capability on the backs of the poor, yet only half an hour before that we had heard SNP Members saying all the money being spent on Trident would instead be spent on conventional weapons. Either the money they are saving from Trident is going to be spent on hospitals, schools and transport, or it is going to be spent on conventional forces.

No one can blame the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute for being so confused, however, because if we look back through the history of the SNP, we see that this confusion is very long standing. In 2012, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) was saying all the savings would be spent on conventional defence, then he and Nicola Sturgeon were saying in 2014 that they would be spending the money saved on Trident on childcare, then on “Good Morning Scotland” it was instead going to be spent on tackling youth unemployment and on colleges, and the Scottish Parliament motion in 2012 said it should be spent on welfare. So there is a long history of the SNP being utterly baffled about what this money is going to be spent on.