Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Hendrick Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We are committed to taking decisions, supported by a hard-headed, technically-informed assessment of the risk. We discuss security issues very closely with our allies. We have put in place a review of the 5G supply chain to ensure that we have a secure and resilient roll-out of 5G, and the decisions of that review will be announced in due course. Our priorities for the future of telecommunications are stronger cyber-security practices, greater resilience in telecoms networks and diversity in the market, and those priorities drive our thinking.

[Sir Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q11. Three weeks ago in this Chamber, I informed the Prime Minister that nearly 8,000 children in Preston are living in poverty—a significant amount of which is due to the roll-out of universal credit last year. In her response, the Prime Minister used the hackneyed phrase that families where both parents are in work are “five times less likely” to be in poverty. That is not an answer; it is a misleading statistic. Both parents working is not a guarantee that the family will not be living in poverty because of low pay. And what if only one parent is working, or it is a one-parent family? The Prime Minister knows that universal credit is not working for thousands of people in my constituency and millions of people up and down the country, and I believe the truth is that she does not care.

[The Prime Minister]

The reference I made to the impact of poverty on children living in a household where both parents are working is a correct one—that is a fact. What is also the case is that there are more people now receiving the full benefit to which they are entitled as a result of universal credit being introduced. We see disabled people in the household actually having access to more funding as a result of universal credit. Universal credit is ensuring that people not only get encouraged into the workplace, but when they are in the workplace they are able to keep more of the money that they earn. This is in direct contrast to a legacy system from Labour that meant that over a million people—1.4 million people—were left on benefits for nearly a decade.