Welfare Reform

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I can give the undertaking to my hon. Friend that all those issues will be reviewed with that team. If there is an issue about that, and if it affects anybody, we will want to try to bind that into the whole assessment. The assessment’s objective is not to penalise people. The truth is that when we undertook the flow—putting people through a process that the Opposition undertook when in government—we learned a lot. We found that a large number of people who went through it have come out the better for going into work. No one ever saw them, cared about them or discussed anything with them, so we are trying to ensure that we give them help and support, not to penalise them.

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

Is it fair and reasonable to impose a fixed arbitrary limit on the total level of benefits that a family can receive, irrespective of the level of rents in inner-city areas, when that rent could well constitute 70% of the £500 per week ceiling? A family cannot possibly live on the remaining 30% alone.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The right hon. Gentleman refers to the benefit cap, as announced last week. I think that it is fair. It is fair for us to offer an explanation to the public, most of whom work for low incomes and pay their taxes. They do not want to see somebody on benefits disincentivised from work because of the very level of money that they receive. I repeat what I said in the statement: to net-out £26,000, somebody in employment would have to earn about £35,000. So, I do not think that the measure is effective, in the sense that we are bearing down too hard. It is fair.

On housing, over the next few years we will manage the process with the changes to housing benefit. After all, over the last five years of the right hon. Gentleman’s Government, housing benefit costs ballooned by £5 billion a year, and they were set to balloon to £20 billion a year. I have one last point for him: his Government had the lowest number of houses built at any time since the 1920s. I wonder whom he blames for local authorities having had to place people in those expensive houses.