Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Adnan Hussain

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Cost shunting can work both ways, so it is vital that the Timms review examines that. If this Government are serious about mission-led government and working across Departments, it is crucial that the Department of Health and Social Care and others are closely involved.

We all know that government is about hard choices—no one said that to govern is easy. However, I say to the Government that it is about not just what they do but how they do it. I trust that over the past week the Government have really learned that. I am blown away by the talent of Members of the House, particularly new colleagues I have met since 2024. There are people sitting on the Benches on both sides of the House who have huge talent and experience. We are not just message replicators or voting fodder—there is talent, knowledge and expertise in this House that the Government would do well to harness. It is easy to get into a bunker mentality and feel like government is hard—I have been a Government Minister; there is lots to do and there is never a minute to oneself—but listening and engaging is vital and makes for better policy.

The privilege of this place is that every centimetre of the United Kingdom is represented by a Member of Parliament, so we have reach, which is a valuable tool for anybody who takes policymaking seriously. Parliament has a vital role and the Government need to engage better with Members of this House, particularly those who work on the Committee corridor. I pay tribute to my fellow Committee Chairs. We have a constitutional role to play to challenge and cajole Government, but we also have a role to inform and shape policy.

We live in a world where we see leadership in some prominent countries by people with whom we do not have the same values. The world is being taken in a direction that I do not want to see, and that is a risk in this country. Under the last Government, we saw how division rent the party now in opposition asunder. I have spent more than half of my 31 years in elected office under Governments led by the Conservatives—that is miserable, frankly, because it means that we did not have the power to shape things in the way that we do when we are in power.

[Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)]

The hon. Member talks about the previous Government. Does she agree that politics is about choices? This Government too have chosen cruelty: they came for the elderly, then the children and now the sick and disabled. Who is next?

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I am absolutely clear that government is about choices. When a party is in government, it has to make choices to run the country. Some 14 of my 20 years in this place have been served when other parties have been in government, and I have seen Conservative Prime Ministers pass through a revolving door, but I would always rather see a Labour Government. Divided parties do not hold power or government. If we want to see our values played out in this country, we need to vote for the Bill today.

There is still a lot to do, a lot of discussion to be had and the Timms review to take place, but major changes were made last week that have significantly altered the Bill in a short space of time. We should bank that and continue to fight, with the passion that hon. Members have demonstrated today, for the rights of disabled people and all of those who want a job, whether they are disabled or not, and need support to get into work.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Adnan Hussain

2nd reading
Friday 29th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right. When we see the system working, it is great, but some of what we have heard today has referred to a failure of the system. That cannot be a reason for us to accept the Bill today. For more than 30 years I have been scrutinising the policies and actions of public bodies and seeing the mistakes that they make, both in the care sector when I was in local government and more recently as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

[Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)]

The time for us to make this decision is wrong, frankly. At a time when 44,000 terminally ill pensioners are set to lose their winter fuel allowance—indeed, many of them have lost it—we are discussing whether we will pass a Bill, a state-sanctioned Bill, dealing with a taboo that many of us are reluctant to talk about.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

Where I do agree with the hon. Gentleman is that the time is not right. We have not had the proper discussions about palliative care. Some of us have been trying to talk about it for many years, and we need to ensure that this debate does not stop today, but the Bill must stop today. It is not developed to deliver the palliative care resource that we need. I do want to touch on the policy, but let me first return to the point that I was making before the hon. Gentleman’s intervention.

We have seen many failures in the system, including contaminated blood, and whistleblowing in the NHS repeatedly shows such failures. There is great trust among those who support the Bill that these safeguards will deliver. I will not go into the details, because others have already done so, and I am sure that many more will, but we made coercive control illegal in 2015, and although the Bill refers to safeguards, I fear that that will not pick up coercive control. When we ruled it to be illegal, we thought that was a moment of progress in the House.

Given the time, I will now move on to some of the practical challenges. My constituents are struggling to see doctors face to face, and seeing the same doctor twice seems like a miracle in today’s Britain. My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary is trying to sort it out, but it will take a long time. We need to sort out our battling health service, we need to support palliative care, and we need to discuss what a good death is. Cicely Saunders campaigned and triumphed to ensure that we had one of the best hospice movements in the world.

If Members have any doubt in their minds about the impact of the Bill on people who do not have the same capacity as those who are talking about this in the television and radio studios, they should think of those in my constituency who have poor English, or the woman who came to see me a month ago with terrible pain in her gall bladder. Removing it would have been a simple daytime operation, but she did not understand what the doctor had told her, and she was not going to have her gall bladder taken out because she did not know what it meant to be without a gall bladder. Let me say this to those Members: if someone who was English, a bright woman in her 60s, was unable to challenge what was said to her and to have that conversation with a doctor, just think what passing the Bill today would mean for many more vulnerable people.

I thank the House for its indulgence.