Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Marie Tidball and Graham Stuart

Committee of the whole House & 3rd reading
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady should recognise that looking after the public finances, minimising fraud and ensuring that this House keeps control of public expenditure is exactly in the interests of the most vulnerable. Who will pay the highest price as this economic spiral goes downwards? As always under a Labour Government, it will be ordinary working people, the increasing numbers of unemployed people and vulnerable and disabled people—they are always the ones who pay the price for a Labour Government.

When the last Labour Government left power in 2010, youth unemployment was up 45%. That is their record on young people, who are most vulnerable to the negative impacts of unemployment. It is those vulnerable groups who are always let down by a Labour Government—and most of all by a Labour Government that is run not by those with some sense of public finance control but by their Back Benchers who are out of control.

[Dr Marie Tidball (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that it was 14 years of a Conservative Government that led us to a 29% disability employment gap, a 17% pay gap, 4 million disabled people in poverty, and the UN telling the last Government over the first half of their decade that they failed on almost every single commitment in the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities?

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I respect her a great deal. She will be aware that under the last Conservative Government millions more disabled people came into the employment market. Around 2.5 million—possibly as many as 3 million—more disabled people entered the employment market and had the dignity of work. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have no credible plan to get our economy growing. Hard-working families in Beverley and Holderness and right across the country deserve better than another Labour Government chasing short-term headlines at the cost of long-term economic growth and stability.