Universal Credit

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): Will the Secretary of State please use this opportunity to apologise for the three instances where she has dissembled on the National Audit Office report on universal credit?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. That is rather naughty of the right hon. Gentleman. I will say that it was an innocent error, but he is an immensely experienced Member of this House whom we all treat with great respect. The proper form in these cases is simply to read out the urgent question that is listed, not to invest the question with a degree of rhetorical licence. Anyway, I think it was probably innocent.

[Frank Field]

Innocent.

[Mr Speaker]

Very well. We will let him off this occasion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms McVey]

At the end of the letter it says that

“the Department cannot measure the exact number of additional people in employment ”.

We agree with that. We cannot measure the exact number of people in employment, but we knew that there was a plausible range—which we had had support on—of people going into employment. We also know that employment is increasing. Those were the key pertinent points from the letter, and obviously included with my apology yesterday for the phrasing of the words I got wrong—which I fully accept, which is why I came to the House—I will end that bit of the statement there.

[Frank Field]

We are grateful for the Secretary of State’s apology—again—for one aspect of her behaviour where the Comptroller and Auditor General criticised her for dissembling. There were two others. First, she told the House that the Comptroller and Auditor General had advised her to roll out faster, whereas he told her to pause so that vulnerable claimants would not be hit further. Secondly, that universal credit is working is not proven, as she said, with 40% of claimants finding themselves in financial difficulty, 25% unable to make a claim online, and 20% overall, but two thirds of disabled claimants, not being paid on time and in full, hence the demand of the Comptroller and Auditor General, a big regulator in this country, for her to pause the universal credit programme.

[Ms McVey]

We need to separate two parts of this. One bit is where I came myself to the House to apologise for using the wrong words. I used the words “faster rate” and “speeded up” on the premise that the report had said there was no practical alternative but to continue with universal credit and that there had been a regrettable slowing down. My interpretation of that was incorrect, which is why I came to the House yesterday and apologised for my words. We should separate that from the impact of the changes. I said—and I stand by this—that the impact of the changes could not have been felt because it was still being rolled out and those impacts were still being felt and therefore could not have been taken into account. We need to separate where I used the incorrect words, for which I came to the House to apologise, from the impacts of the changes and therefore the conclusions that can be drawn.