Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Meg Munn and Karen Buck

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Over the past hour and a half, the parties on the Government Benches have thrown various lines of argument into the mix, but possibly the most absurd is that the whole agenda and the Bill are about deficit reduction. That argument is already in tatters. We have seen the economic recovery deferred and a double-dip recession possibly turning into a triple-dip recession. The rate of reduction of unemployment has been so slow since 2010 that it will not return to pre-recession levels until 2019, and we have seen a systematic and structural increase in under-employment. It is no wonder that total expenditure on welfare, despite the protestations, has been going up.

Let us take one example about which there has been a great deal of sound and fury over recent years—the housing benefit bill. Over this comprehensive spending review period, this Government will spend £12 billion more on subsidising private tenants than was spent by the Labour Government during the previous CSR period, so let us not hear anything from the Government about their successes on welfare reform and reduction and our failure.

For the first time in decades we see more working than workless people in poverty—now a record 6.1 million. It is no wonder that the new head of the Secretary of State’s favourite think-tank, the Commission for Social Justice, told an interviewer:

“I would say we have missed in-work poverty”.

Yes, the commission did, and yes, the Government did, but rather than the Government facing the evidence, we have been subjected to a barrage of rhetoric about the people behind the closed curtains and the shirkers rather than the strivers.

[Meg Munn]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that in half the workless households the adults are under 25, which is a reflection of the growth in unemployment among that age group?

[Ms Buck]

That is correct; I recognise that figure. We have seen from the Bill and the debate behind it a political debate and a set of wheezes that the Government think will pay off for them. The problem with wheezes is that they tend to fracture when they come into contact with reality. The Government cannot make serious money out of an assault on out-of-work benefits, whatever the Conservatives like to say. Just 3% of all welfare spending goes on jobseeker’s allowance. Indeed, all out-of-work benefits account for only 3% of GDP between them. The House of Commons Library advises me that if only out-of-work benefits were subject to the 1% cap, but in-work benefits were uprated as normal, 80% of the proposed savings would disappear. If one factors in the changes to the personal tax allowance, one finds that working people, as the Resolution Foundation demonstrated to us, take 60% of the hit.

If the Bill is passed, 2.5 million workless households will lose out by about £215 a year by 2016, and of the 14.1 million working-age households with someone in work, 7 million will be hit: 30% of all households will take a hit on their income because of this Government’s obsession with the tiny minority of long-term or multigenerational workless.

The distinction between those in and out of work is far less rigid than the Government would have us believe. That is an extraordinary piece of rhetoric, given that the universal credit, the centrepiece of the Government’s welfare agenda, is designed to blur the distinction still further, and it has that one significant advantage of seeking to do that. Millions of our constituents, in Conservative and Liberal Democrat constituencies as well as in Labour ones, churn between those states of being in and out of work. Last year there were between 244,000 and 357,000 new claims every month for jobseeker’s allowance, while between 242,000 and 370,000 left benefit every month.

It is a myth that the welfare reform agenda put forward by the Government is about tackling worklessness. It is an assault on low-income working families far more than on working households. It is an assault on both, and on very low-income families, but it is real and not mythical families who will be hurt as a consequence. It is real children who are at increasing risk of going to school hungry, as teachers unions are already reporting, and it is real children who will return to homes that cannot be heated by parents who cannot manage to balance all the bills.

We live in a country that apparently can afford tax cuts for millionaires but requires low-income, working families to go to food banks and pay their mortgages with payday loans. Every day in London 100 homes bust the £1 million value level, yet 70,000 children were homeless this Christmas. Today we should not be reducing the capacity of 9.5 million families and households across the country to pay their bills.

What the crash and its aftermath demonstrated beyond doubt was that the future cannot be like the past. We want everyone who can work to do so, we want that work to be secure and fairly paid and for the costs that consume an unsustainable element of people’s incomes to be reduced.