UK Poverty

Margot James Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Nandy]

The hon. Gentleman does not seem to be listening: the rules are the problem and make no sense. I have just quoted two examples, one from the Minister and one from the Minister’s departmental website, that contradict one another. Neither makes any sense in the context of what happened to my constituents. I have written back to the Minister to ask what on earth is going on, though I have not had a reply yet. I hope that I will get a reply, and that all the people stuck in the same situation as the one my constituents just went through will get any reply at all.

In “The Trial” by Kafka, the hero of the novel, K, said:

“But I’m not guilty…there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty?”

The priest replied:

“That is true…but that is how the guilty speak.”

That is exactly what is happening to people in the system. There is nowhere to turn; there is no way to fight their way out of the system. That is not an accident of the system; that is the system, and it is time that the Government did something about it.

The saga for the family in my constituency continued—that was not the end of it. After the sanctions were lifted, they were told that they had to sign on every day at an unpredictable time, and that for a family with two-year-old twins. One of the parents said that once her partner

“had to take our two sick, contagious children who were suffering (from hand, foot and mouth disease) with her to a job centre appointment as the adviser said you must come in, bring them on the bus with you. Even when we replied but they have a temperature of over 40 degrees his response was if you don’t come in we will have to issue a further suspension. We live in fear that our money will be stopped and this hell will never end.”

That is indeed a hell.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I have great sympathy for some of the individual cases that the hon. Lady has talked about, but I want to introduce a note of perspective based on my own constituency experience. The last time I checked with my jobcentre, just before Christmas, fewer than 5% of all the people seen there had been sanctioned over the previous 12 months. We are talking about a minority, and she is talking about a very tiny minority of an already small minority. I also want to put in a word for the sanctions regime, because from the experience of what I have seen, the threat of sanctions has been of assistance in galvanising people to maintain their appointments and genuinely to seek work.

[Lisa Nandy]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for trying to bring statistics to the debate, but they do not reflect the reality. Glasgow university has found that across the country, one in five have been sanctioned, and 6,000 families in my borough alone. In the past few weeks, research from Oxford university shows that the majority of people who have been kicked off benefits due to sanctions have not gone into work. So it is simply not true to say that we are talking only about a minority.

Furthermore, although I know that the hon. Lady fights for people and against injustice—I have seen her do so on behalf of her constituents—if such things happen to families, they must be stopped. We should not tolerate what happens to families who are trying to find work and do their best. They might have to drag ill two-year-old twins across town because of the inflexibility and inhumanity that we have somehow managed to build into the system. It is a hell of low-paid jobs, zero-hours contracts and rising living costs. Frankly, the system lacks any compassion or understanding.

Can the Minister comprehend the social isolation being caused? A 39-year-old mum got in touch with me. She is struggling to walk because of spina bifida, which has deteriorated in recent years, and she has three kids. She applied for a personal independence payment, but was told—this is common—that it could take a year. She said:

“We don’t leave the house and I need help.”

A local reverend contacted me about a parishioner who had been sanctioned. She told me:

“He was living on one bowl of porridge a day and glasses of water to stave off the hunger. He sold his TV and most of his valuables. He’s a very gentle man who cannot understand how this has happened to him.”

I was contacted by a woman who took a cleaning job for 25 hours a week in Warrington, involving two buses, a train journey and a four-mile bike ride simply to get to work. It was a minimum-wage job and the travel alone came to £45 a week. When money was missing from the first pay packet—a common experience for many families who work in that industry—she was hit with rent arrears and threatened with eviction. She said:

“We only have £3 a week after our bills are paid meaning we can’t afford any shopping or gas once again.”

People are trying, but their Government quite simply are not on their side. When they ask for help, they are sanctioned. Nothing is done to stamp out the scourge of exploitative zero-hours contracts. There is no action on low pay; the Minister’s own Department accounts for more than half of the directly employed or contracted Government workers who earn less than £7.65 an hour. What could be more symbolic than the fact that her own Department has one of the worst records in Whitehall on paying the living wage? This crisis is of the Government’s own making.

We know what the real problem is: the lack of good, sustainable jobs that command decent pay. But because the Government have absolutely no answers to that problem they hit people hardest. Instead of tackling underemployment, they hit the underemployed. Instead of tackling low pay, they hit the low paid. They pick off those people who are least able to complain and while doing so they haemorrhage money on contracts to the private sector that do little to get people into work but create the living hell that my constituents have written to me about.

We are storing up so many problems for the future. The situation is pushing more and more people in my community into debt, and one of the biggest causes of that debt is the bedroom tax, which affects 4,500 households in my constituency alone. Rent arrears have gone through the roof and the vast majority are caused by one factor only-that callous, ineffective policy. Those families have never been in debt before in their lives. And it is not simply the same households—more and more people are being affected as their circumstances change, including 817 new families in my borough last year. There is quite simply nowhere for them to move to. In towns such as Wigan we built family-sized properties on purpose, because that was what people wanted and needed. We move people into those properties and then hit them with the bedroom tax and tell them to move, but there is nowhere for them to move to.

Many of those families have survived the past few years by claiming discretionary housing payments—in my constituency, the number is over 3,000. But that is senseless. We are burning money—we spent £412,000 on that in the last year alone. So what do the Government do? Instead of reversing a cruel and vicious policy that is ripping people out of their communities and pushing them into debt, they announced on Friday that they are slashing the money for discretionary housing payments by a quarter. Not that long ago, additional money for discretionary housing payments was being announced—with loud fanfare—and was aimed at disabled people and foster carers. I am really interested to hear from the Minister what assessment she has made of the potential impact of the cut on the 14,000 children who are waiting for a foster home or on people with disabilities.

The bedroom tax is senseless. It does not work. The DWP’s own analysis has shown that between May and December 2013 just 22,000 of the 500,000 households affected by the bedroom tax had downsized. It has done nothing to reduce private sector rents, either. The DWP’s figures show that rents have gone down by 76p a week, but the rent shortfall is over £6. The problem does not hit landlords; 89% of the cuts to housing benefit have hit tenants, and just 11% have hit landlords.

What is worse, on top of all that, is that many families—12,000 in Wigan—now have to pay council tax who did not have to do so before. As a result, arrears have gone up in my borough by 91%. To give hon. Members an illustration of the human cost of that, only last week my office staff were on the phone trying to stop bailiffs entering the home of an elderly couple who had got into difficulties with their rent and were desperately frightened.

The impact of all this can be seen right across my high street. Where there used to be shops, charity shops, small cafés and small businesses we now have loan sharks—people who lend at extortionate rates to those too desperate to go anywhere else. Loan sharks used to be seen as a blight on our society, but now it seems the Government are their best agent, stimulating demand and creating business for them. The signs are visible.

I will tell the Minister about the reality. It is not, as Baroness Jenkin said, that poor people do not know how to cook, but that poor people cannot afford the gas or electricity to do so. Many of my poorest constituents are on pre-payment meters. They get charged more and are cut off even if they have young kids. Once they get their benefits back they have to repay the debt before they can get the meter back on. My local reverend said:

“One family we found had no gas or electricity over the Christmas period. I put £20 on their gas card and they got only £8 of gas because it took the rest in fines and arrears.”

[Margot James]

I want to put on the record the context of the quote that the hon. Lady attributed to Baroness Jenkin. She said it as a comment on society as a whole, because she felt that cooking skills had been lost from one generation to the next—that was the context in which she made that remark. The hon. Lady may know that Baroness Jenkin does a huge amount of work on poverty reduction.

[Lisa Nandy]

At the very least, Baroness Jenkin took an interest in the issue, which is more than I can say for the Prime Minister or most of his Front-Bench colleagues. But I would say that that remark came in the context of a stream of remarks made by different Government members and Back Benchers from the hon. Lady’s own party that are hugely offensive to people who are stuck in the position I have described and are trying their best, only to find that the Government are not doing the same.

The head teacher of a school in the same area as the family whose £20 gas card was immediately eaten up by debt got in touch with me to say that the school is now having to use the pupil premium to employ learning mentors not to support children in the classroom but to go to family homes to try to sort out problems with vermin, lack of electricity and all the other things those families are not able to deal with themselves, or to find the families food or refer them to food banks. The former Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), said in 2013 that those families were

“not best able to manage their finances.” —[Official Report, 9 September 2013; Vol. 567, c. 681.]

That beggars belief. He was the Government Minister responsible for child welfare at the time; the fact that he even thinks that those families have finances to manage absolutely beggars belief.

The reality is that children and young people have been among the hardest hit. Barnardo’s got in touch with me when it saw I had secured this debate to tell me that increasingly it sees numbers of families in its projects who are reliant on food banks because their income is not keeping pace with the cost of living. What a waste that is. I know Barnardo’s really well. I used to work for the Children’s Society and worked closely with Barnardo’s on some of its projects for young people across the country. Barnardo’s unlocks the talent of children and young people, and helps them to develop, thrive and use their energies, passion and commitment in their local communities. Instead, in 2015, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it is diverting its resources to simply feeding and clothing our children.

Barnardo’s told me that the sanctions regime had had a particular impact on young people, especially care leavers, young homeless teenagers and teenage parents—arguably, those young people to whom, as a society, we owe the biggest responsibility. That is especially the case for young people leaving care: we are their corporate parent and hold responsibility for them. Homeless Link told me that 58% of young people seeking help because of sanctions have a mental health problem or other problem. Nationally, 42% of all sanctions relating to JSA affect 18 to 24-year-olds, including over 1,000 young people in my town.

That generation’s wages have fallen by 10% since this Government came to power. Those young people have lost the education maintenance allowance and the future jobs fund. They have seen tuition fees hiked to £9,000 a year and a record 1 million are out of work, yet their Prime Minister has the nerve to tell them that they should be “earning or learning” or they will lose their benefits. How can they? That is my question.

Barnardo’s told me about a young mum who was sanctioned for six weeks because she was attending a school appointment about her child’s behaviour. After she turned to a loan shark, her children, who were desperate to help, went shoplifting to feed the family. Do Ministers have any idea of the desperation that their policies are causing? A local police officer said to me that

“we used to find kids nicking stuff to sell but nowadays it’s more likely to be bread.”

Police forces in Lancaster, Cleveland, Northumbria and my own area of Greater Manchester have said that food and grocery thefts are on the rise. The local chamber of commerce said

“this crisis has been…caused by excessive debt.”

To echo the words of UNICEF:

“It is no accident…It’s possible to make better choices than we’ve made.”

Under the previous Government the number of children in poverty fell by 1.1 million—I know that because I was working with children and young people in the voluntary sector at the time. It also fell, as Ministers are fond of telling us, by 300,000 in the first year of this Government, but please let us not pretend that we do not understand that those figures lag two years behind Government actions.

There is no longer any twisting the facts. Child poverty is widely predicted to rise by 2020 on relative and absolute measures—it does not matter that the Government have made all of us poorer, because poverty is still on the rise. The latest estimates show an increase of half a million children living in relative poverty under this Government and 800,000 more in absolute poverty. None of the figures takes into account rising housing costs. It is not just the lack of material means, but the gnawing anxiety that goes with waking up every day, not having enough food to eat and not knowing what will happen and what the future holds. If Government policy does not change course, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that child poverty will have doubled between 2010 and 2020. The Welfare Benefits Up-rating Act 2013 alone could push 200,000 more children into poverty.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margot James Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

Once again, my hon. Friend speaks sound sense. That is exactly what this Government have been trying to do. We have been working with businesses, finding out what they need to expand and grow and to take on young people. As we have seen, growth is increasing. We are now growing faster than any other country in the G7. We know that not only are wages going up by 2%, but they are destined to go up by 3.4%, and inflation has fallen by 0.5%. If anybody had a long-term economic plan, it is this Government.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

7. What recent assessment he has made of take-up of the new enterprise allowance (a) nationally and (b) in the Dudley metropolitan borough council area.

[The Minister for Employment (Esther McVey)]

The new enterprise allowance supports jobseekers who want to set up their own business through mentoring and a weekly allowance. Through the scheme over 60,000 businesses have been started nationally, including 640 within the Dudley metropolitan area.

[Margot James]

The new enterprise allowance is one of the many ways that the Government are supporting people into self-employment and running their own businesses. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this support has been essential to the thriving business environment which has seen over 2,000 new businesses start up in my constituency, Stourbridge, since 2010?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend is right. When any new business sets up, it needs support, mentoring and access to finance, all of which we are providing. With her background, she knows exactly how to set up a business; she set up her own and won awards for it, and her dad set up his own business in the 1930s which went on to be an incredibly successful manufacturing company. That is what we need to do—support people, provide access to finance and mentoring, and ensure that they have a good business plan. I thank my hon. Friend for that question.

Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Welfare Reform (Disabled People)

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I very much wanted to take part in this debate so I greatly appreciate being called to speak given that I must apologise to the House for not having been here for all the opening speeches. I was at a meeting with the Home Secretary that could not be changed. First, I add my congratulations to the newly elected Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) on her very good maiden speech. I associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) about the importance of her victory, which virtually the whole House will celebrate.

I am surprised that the Opposition are continuing their witch hunt against Lord Freud. I did not agree with the form of words that he used, for which he has apologised. I would have thought that after the drubbing the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), received on “Question Time”, they might have learnt their lesson about the pursuit of this individual for some remarks that he made in answer to a question by a family member of someone who was affected by this distressing issue without rephrasing their words. I think that is about the sum of it. I have spoken to him about this. He in no way marks down the worth of people with disabilities that have nothing to do with the economic value that they might add to an enterprise in the workplace.

We have to face the fact that while many people desperately want to work—to find an occupation where they can be of some value and make a contribution—there is sometimes an issue about whether their value can be recognised economically, and that might call for more Government intervention. The Opposition have not addressed that. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) put this very well, and he reminded the House that only 10% of people with learning disabilities are in work. We should all be ashamed of that and seek an answer to it rather than conducting a witch hunt against a man who is giving his time, without any remuneration at all, to try to help people with disabilities.

The Opposition have a track record in this area. For 10 years, before 2008 or thereabouts, almost 1 million people with disabilities were more or less parked on various incapacity benefits—out of sight, out of mind, with no review.

[Kate Green]

I want to put the record straight. People were parked on incapacity benefit going right back to the 1980s, and in the early 2000s the Labour Government began to explore policies that ultimately led to the employment and support allowance and work capability assessment, which were endorsed by both parties. It is not right to say that Labour policies parked people there only over the past 10 years.

[Margot James]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, which was slightly premature, because I was going to carry on to give the Opposition some credit for what they belatedly started to do in government —with, I must tell the House, the help of Lord Freud, which is an irony not lost on me.

We must not forget some of the things that the previous Government did. They appointed Atos. They left this Government with the legacy of a fairly draconian system that made no allowances for people with mental health issues who took part in work capability assessments in the early days. Some of those people had fluctuating conditions that meant that if they went for their assessment on a bad day, they might get somewhere, but if it happened to be a good day, they would not. No account was taken of that. This Government brought in Professor Harrington, who conducted a number of reviews that have humanised the system considerably. Now we are looking to find a new provider that will take the place of the Atos, which, as I have said, we inherited from the previous Government.

The previous Government did try to start getting people with disabilities into work, but they needed to will the means as well as the ends. It was not enough just to go round closing day centres and pushing people into the community. Their mantra was that everybody had to be in work before they could set about tackling discrimination, tackling the fact that a lot of businesses were ignorant about how to employ people with disabilities, and trying to change public attitudes. As a result of this Government’s more painstaking approach, some of those issues have been tackled at source, working with industry and employers. The number of disabled people in employment is up by 116,000 this year. Over 35,000 people with disabilities have been helped by the Access to Work scheme. I accept what was said earlier about the possibility that not everybody on the Work Choice programme is a proper candidate for it, but that is down to implementation, which all Governments wrestle with. The majority of the 27,000 people who have been helped have been eligible.

The companies that have been brought on board by the Government’s Disability Confident campaign have made a real difference. I pay tribute to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose in my constituency. Nationally, Sainsbury’s has employed 2,000 people with disabilities through its You Can initiative. I pay tribute to the Government for changing the whole ethos—seeing what people with disabilities can do. It really is a credit to the Secretary of State and his team that they have improved those people’s chances of finding work. The results are there for all to see.

DWP: Performance

Margot James Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

We take full responsibility for ensuring that that benefit is rolled out carefully, so that when we do the full national roll-out of the whole benefit, we will know that it works. We have made a series of adjustments and also have more recruitment going on and more staff going in. I will give some pointers about where we will be when I return to this point. I simply say to the hon. Gentleman that when Labour rolled out tax credits, more than 400,000 people failed to get their money and the Prime Minister had to make a personal apology. I do not want to repeat that in this case. I want to ensure that those most in need will get the benefit.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Amid the litany of failures of the previous Government, which my right hon. Friend was recalling, and their dreadful legacy in this area, does he remember that of all the new jobs that the property boom-fuelled growth generated, three quarters or more went to foreign nationals? Is that not a circumstance which this Government have reversed entirely?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Well over 70% of new jobs now go to British nationals, as opposed to 90% that went to foreign nationals before.

I want to repeat the figures: there were 5 million on out-of-work benefits, youth unemployment increased by nearly half, long-term unemployment doubled in just two years, and one in five households—it is worth stressing that—was workless, and the number of households where no one had ever worked almost doubled under Labour. Now, as the Opposition themselves seemed to admit over the weekend, as I noticed in the papers, they have no plans, no policies and no prospects—only, as the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) put it put rather succinctly, an

“instrumentalised, cynical nugget of policy to chime with our focus groups and our press strategies and our desire for a top line”.

I agree. Today’s debate is just that—a cynical nugget of short-term policy to put to the unions.

Jobs and Work

Margot James Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak in support of the Queen’s Speech, which contains several measures that will impact positively on employment. The Gracious Speech builds on a record of achievement: the deficit will be cut by 50% this year; unemployment is down from the 8.4% that the Government inherited to 6.6%, as announced today; and our economy is growing faster than that of any other country in the G7 and across the European Union. Unsurprisingly, business and consumer confidence has returned.

There have been difficult decisions and people have made many sacrifices to bring about this economic turnaround: people working in the public sector have endured pay freezes or redundancies; people relying on savings have endured low interests rates that have been vital to the recovery; and many private sector employees have voted to take a salary cut, to safeguard employment among the wider group. Let their sacrifices not have been in vain. We on the Government side of the House, as evidenced in the Queen’s Speech, will work hard to ensure that there is no return to boom and bust or to tax and spend, when “more of” was the answer to every question and every challenge.

Earlier this week, I hosted a reception in Parliament for the Federation of Small Businesses. This year is its 40th anniversary. I am proud to represent so many specialist manufacturing companies in Stourbridge, particularly in Quarry Bank, Lye and Cradley. Most of them are family firms that have excellent employee relations, but their main concern is that their employees are ageing and they will have to replace that skilled work force.

I run a programme in my constituency to encourage young people to broaden their career horizons. I lay on university, apprenticeship and career events, and I always aim to get across the opportunities in engineering and manufacturing. Employment in the manufacturing sector declined from 5.7 million to 4.3 million between 1981 and 1996, and then it plummeted by 2.5 million up to 2011. Finally, after 30 years of continuous decline, the number of people employed in manufacturing is on the increase again, up by almost 100,000 since 2011. That is proof that the strategy of rebalancing the economy towards manufacturing and regions outside the south-east is working.

The problem for the sector is the image of manufacturing and engineering in the minds of so many young people, especially girls. That has been a problem for most of my life; it is nothing new. What is new is the opportunity in the sector. I have mentioned the growth in jobs, but output is also buoyant, with growth of over 4.4% in the past 12 months. Technological advances, innovation and export opportunities make for a very different working environment from the machine tool business that my father ran in Wolverhampton during the 1970s. We have a shortfall of 40,000 engineers every year. Several Members have mentioned women in the workplace. Fewer than one in 10 engineers is a woman. If we could treble the number studying science, technology, engineering and maths, we could really address the skills shortage.

Today’s news on employment is an excellent platform from which the measures in the Queen’s Speech can impact even more on people’s employment opportunities. I hope that with the help of businesses, schools and colleges, we can transform the image of manufacturing and engineering and attract the talent that the sector needs further to boost the economy and add to the great work that it has been doing over the past few years.

amendment of the law

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling).

Four years ago, I promised my constituents that if we were elected our first priority would be to repair the public finances. No longer could we go on borrowing £1 for every £4 we spent. Reducing the deficit has involved tough decisions, and I pay tribute to the Chancellor for sticking to the necessary path, which has seen the deficit come down by a third. It is forecast to fall by 50% next year.

Even after all that work, the OBR estimates that we will still be spending more than we earn by £108 billion this year, so the job is not yet done. However, people are at last starting to enjoy the fruits of progress. Earnings are projected to exceed inflation this year, and the increase in employment has been huge. In my constituency, unemployment has fallen by 25% since the election. Contrary to the Labour party’s predictions, the 1.6 million private sector jobs created since 2010 have exceeded the number of jobs lost in the public sector by a factor of three.

There was a time, 18 months ago, when the International Monetary Fund, which was broadly supportive of our policies, looked on nervously as Britain was the one country that was serious about tackling an out-of-control deficit. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and UK unemployment stands at just over 7% and falling. That is in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe, where unemployment averages 10.9%. Likewise, the OBR has raised its forecast for economic growth from 1.8% to 2.7%, which makes the UK the fastest-growing economy in both the EU and the G7.

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

It is fascinating that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) resorted to quoting the old Etonian George Orwell during her peroration.

It is interesting to note that in today’s Treasury Committee meeting, the economists there predicted that growth would exceed that 2.7% figure, and even the Bank of England’s projection of 3.3%.

[Margot James]

I heartily agree, and I would not be surprised if things got even better than that over the next few years. We have momentum now, as my hon. Friend’s point shows.

Our economic strategy has been about far more than reducing the deficit: how we do that matters. The Chancellor set out a strategy to rebalance the economy, and we wanted to see growth that was more balanced between London and the south-east and the other important regions, between the service sector and the manufacturing sector and between the public and private sector. We also wanted to build an economy made more secure by savings and investment, instead of one built on excessive debt.

This Budget marks another milestone—it capitalises on the hard-won and sustainable economic progress to secure radical reforms that will restore the incentive that has been so recklessly destroyed over recent years. Scottish Widows estimates that fewer than half of us are saving enough for our old age, and that one in five are saving nothing at all. The bold increase in the ISA tax-free limit to £15,000 is welcome. There are more than half a million ISA savers in the west midlands alone. Not all of them will be able to put away the maximum every year, but the fact that they will now have complete freedom to invest cash as well as equities will encourage more saving among people who just want their cash to grow in a tax-free environment.

Before 1997, Britain had one of the best-funded occupational pension systems in the world. That proud state was totally undermined by the last Government’s decision to end dividend tax relief on pensions. Incentives to save were also undermined by the growth of means-testing of the state pension. The welcome pension reforms that the current Government have already introduced were given a further boost last week by the Chancellor’s dramatic announcement that we are no longer to be forced to buy an annuity. That is welcome news for everyone who is saving into a pension scheme, regardless of their age.

Just under 20,000 people in Stourbridge are of pensionable age, and many have been badly hit by the poor annuity rates and exceptionally low interest rates of recent years. I was therefore delighted on their behalf by the new pensioner bond, which from next year will offer a much better return than anything available on the market today. Low-income savers will also benefit from the abolition of the 10p tax rate on savings from income of £5,000 or less.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Does my hon. Friend agree that unchaining annuities is likely to encourage more people to save into pensions and pension funds, so that contrary to what was said by the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), that is likely to mean more money for infrastructure funds and other forms of investment?

[Margot James]

I know that my hon. Friend is an expert in these matters, and I strongly agree that the change will definitely encourage more people to save into pensions. The forced way in which people have had to invest so much of their pension savings into annuities was a disincentive, certainly to my generation.

In my last couple of minutes, I want to turn to opportunities for young people. The number of people aged 18 to 24 claiming jobseeker’s allowance in my constituency has fallen since 2010 by 18%, and we can all agree that we would like such falls to accelerate. The vast majority of young people on JSA gain employment within six months, but a small group do not. They face very real social problems, but this Government’s Work programme and their reforms in very much improving jobcentres and supporting young people—and those of all ages—into work will make and are making a difference.

Unfortunately, an even smaller minority of young people have been conditioned to not want to work. For too long, they have perhaps been allowed to be too choosy about their first job: if it is not the one they really want, they would rather have none. I am talking about a very small minority. There is no doubt, however, that the changes introduced by the Government—I give the credit to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—have made people realise that they are entering a contract with the jobcentre and the taxpayer, and that they need to put in the effort to make a serious attempt to find work, with the state providing the necessary support.

In addition, I strongly welcome the continued support for the apprenticeship programme. My constituency has had a 90% increase in apprenticeship starts in the past couple of years. Last week’s Budget gave further support to apprenticeships by providing £85 million for the employers’ apprenticeship grant scheme and £20 million extra to support apprenticeships right up to postgraduate level, which carries on the good and vital work of creating greater parity of esteem between apprenticeships and degrees.

None of the support—for exporters, manufacturers, taxpayers, savers, pensioners—announced in the Budget last week would have been possible without the work done on restoring the public finances. There is a very long way to go to overcome our indebtedness, but the fact that we are now so clearly on the right road, with results starting to come in almost daily across every single economic indicator, means that the Government can provide support where it is most needed. That was amply demonstrated by last week’s Budget, which will make Britain truly competitive once again. I am delighted to support it in the Lobby tonight.

Housing Benefit

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Hospital care costs more, but so does making adaptations to a new property, which is what will have to happen if people are moved.

People up and down the country are asking why. Why are we putting vulnerable families through this? Why are we hitting some of the hardest-pressed households in our country? Why are we hitting disabled people like this? Why did the Prime Minister introduce this policy on exactly the same day as cutting taxes for millionaires? It shows how out of touch this Prime Minister and his Government are.

The Government would like us to believe that the bedroom tax is cutting the benefits bill and dealing with under-occupancy in social housing, but it simply does not add up.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

The shadow Secretary of State is providing a litany of cases, half of which are exempt under the legislation while many others will be beneficiaries of the discretionary housing payment, which this Government have trebled to £190 million per year. Did not her party in government introduce the local housing allowance to cover tenants in the private sector? Why is it one rule for them and one rule for others?

[Rachel Reeves]

First, as the hon. Lady knows, the Government’s policy is retrospective whereas in the private sector it is not. Also, the discretionary housing payments are not nearly enough to cover this. In my constituency in Leeds—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady has asked the question; perhaps she will listen to —[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

In debating today’s motion, it is instructive to look back at the manifesto on which Labour Members stood at the last election. They talked about the need for “tough choices on welfare” and stated:

“No one fit for work should be abandoned to a life on benefit, so all those who can work will be required to do so.”

They also promised reforms to housing benefit so that the state does not subsidise people to live on rents that working families could not afford. As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), when they were in government they intended to introduce the very same measure. So what happened?

Labour has reverted to type, defending those who are getting more than their fair share out of the system, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of others who are worse off through no fault of their own. They include the 6,687 households on my local authority of Dudley’s housing waiting list. That is why Labour has opposed every single measure this Government have taken to reform the welfare state.

The public know that the catalyst for the reforms we have introduced was the ballooning deficit left to us by the previous Government. The overriding mission behind the reforms had a much wider moral purpose: to make work pay, to end the something for nothing culture, to ensure a strong safety net for those who cannot work and, in the case of the reforms to housing benefit, to reduce overcrowding and homelessness.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is talking as though the only people in social housing are those on benefit or not working. It is an in-work benefit. More importantly, many people in this country who work for the minimum wage and work very hard will never be able to afford to purchase a property. That is why we have social housing and why we have homes for life for those people.

[Margot James]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention and I agree with much of the principle behind it. Of course, some people will never be able to afford to buy their own homes—although this Government are intent on helping as many people as possible to own their own homes—and that is the purpose of social housing and housing benefit. There is no argument with that principle, but we must be cognisant of the number of people who, at the moment, cannot even get council housing or privately rented social housing. That is one of the driving purposes behind the reform.

The subsidy has become something of a totemic issue for the Opposition. They want to position the end of the subsidy and the creation of a level playing field between all recipients of social housing support as a modern day poll tax. Whatever the merits or otherwise of different systems of raising taxes locally, there is no doubt that the poll tax lacked public support. That is the difference, and it is worth exploring why the policy we are debating today enjoys public support.

The MORI poll that my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) mentioned found that 78% of respondents supported the need to reduce under-occupation and overcrowding in social housing, whereas 54% of them agreed that people of working age who live in social housing should receive less housing benefit if they have more bedrooms than they need. Some 60% of those polled believed that those affected should seek work or work longer hours if they could.

[Emily Thornberry]

The hon. Lady drew a parallel between the bedroom tax and the poll tax, and said that the difference between the two was that the poll tax was not popular. Does she therefore accept that the bedroom tax is a tax?

[Margot James]

I certainly do not. It is not a tax. A tax is a Government levy on somebody’s income, whereas we are clearly talking about reducing a subsidy.

Let me return to the subject of work. Many groups are exempt from the measure, including people in receipt of state pensions, families with disabled children, foster carers and other groups. Those who are in a position to seek work or extra work should either do so or try to swap their property for accommodation that meets rather than exceeds their needs. If their accommodation exceeds their needs, that is not a tenable or fair position for the long term. We are talking about only a few extra hours of work a week at the minimum wage. Instead of conducting a campaign of misinformation against the reforms to housing benefit—reforms that Labour accepted were necessary at the last election—local authorities should instead be helping people to downsize to accommodation that meets their needs, freeing up much-needed housing stock for the 2 million families on housing waiting lists.

I commend the Government for taking the tough decisions and, moreover, for their commitment to build 170,000 new social houses by 2015. In addition to this measure, that will help to ease overcrowding in many homes. I also hope that the Government will take a lead in encouraging housing associations and local authorities to convert some of the excess of large properties at their disposal so that we can begin to meet the needs of the 60% or so of people applying for social housing for single occupancy. I hear far more complaints from constituents who endure overcrowded accommodation than I do about ending this spare-room subsidy. I find the contents of my postbag quite instructive in that regard, so I shall support the Government amendment.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margot James Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

Of course I will meet the hon. Lady, but there is an appeals process, and I suggest her constituent goes through that full process—in case he has not—before we meet, as we do not want jeopardise an appeal in any way. This was a problem we inherited from the previous Administration. Occupational health assessments were set up under Atos in 2008; it was not great, but we are working hard to sort it out.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

6. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the benefit cap in encouraging people back to work.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

It is my strong belief that there is a connection between what is happening with the benefit cap and getting people into work. The findings of polls we conducted show that of those notified or aware that they would be affected by the cap, three in 10 then took action to find work. To date, Jobcentre Plus has helped some 16,500 potentially capped claimants back into work.

[Margot James]

Some of the few families in my constituency affected by the benefit cap have particular issues in accessing employment. Does my right hon. Friend feel that the Work programme has the specialist knowledge required to deal with some of the difficulties that this group sometimes encounter in accessing employment?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It does, which is the whole point of the Work programme—to get more individuals to involve themselves and to help such people find the right courses, the right application and then the right skilling. The Work programme is able to do that in a more intense way than Jobcentre Plus is, so it should provide enormous help. The reality is that the benefit cap is enormously popular, which may account for why the welfare party opposite has come and gone on this issue from the beginning. First, Labour Members say they are opposed to it; then they say they are for it: we have no idea what they will do about it.

Universal Credit

Margot James Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am afraid that that is not a question for the Secretary of State. I decide whether an urgent question should be granted or not. I am fully conscious of what other parts of the House are doing and the judgment I have to make is whether the matter should be aired on the Floor of the House today. The answer is yes. That, to be honest, is the end of the matter.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I was delighted to hear my right hon. Friend say that he thought that the cultural change afforded by the introduction of universal credit was even more important than the financial savings that it will offer. In my part of the world in the black country, we have a higher than average rate of workless households. Will he talk to his officials about ensuring that some of the pathfinder pilots that he has in mind take place in the black country?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I thank my hon. Friend for her support and I will ensure that she gets the earliest possible roll-out.

Oral Answers to Questions

Margot James Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

I am pleased to be able to say that performance is improving. Across the country the performance of Work programme providers has improved, and about half of providers have significantly exceeded the minimum standards. That is why people are getting into work; that is why we are seeing lives transformed. I wish the Opposition would stop carping and congratulate the work the providers are doing to get people into work.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

18. Until recently, a significant part of the labour market, including young people, was referred to as unemployable. May I congratulate my hon. Friend and the Secretary of State on challenging this deeply negative assumption? To be getting 132,000 previously unemployed people into employment is a considerable achievement. Does my hon. Friend agree that the payment-by-results model has been instrumental in this achievement?

[Mr Hoban]

Under previous schemes, money was paid upfront to providers without much attention being paid to whether people got jobs and work. Under this scheme, the interests of taxpayers, the unemployed and providers are closely aligned, because providers get paid only if they get people into work for six months.