Mike Penning
Main Page: Mike Penning (Conservative - Hemel Hempstead)Department Debates - View all Mike Penning's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberI will give way; I haven’t had any letters from this one either.
This one! The shadow Secretary of State should look behind her, and she will see many, many of her colleagues nodding when I say that I have written personally, and dealt with cases personally, and when there was a mistake, I admitted there was a mistake, so the generalisation she has just made about party political bias is fundamentally wrong.
The Minister for disabled people has never replied to the letters I have sent to the Department for Work and Pensions about people in my constituency. I have given two examples today. [Interruption.] He says he has; can the right hon. Gentleman stand up and say he has ever replied to a letter from me?
Letters from a Privy Counsellor, which the right hon. Lady is, will be responded to by the Secretary of State. [Interruption.] Well, if you’re not a Privy Counsellor, it would be me responding, but look around behind you—I apologise for the “yous”, Madam Deputy Speaker—and see that I have responded in depth to colleagues. They may not have liked the reply, but I have done that, and if the hon. Lady had written to me directly, I would have replied.
Maybe the letters got lost in the post, but I have never received a letter from the Minister for disabled people.
May I just say that the Minister last week did contact my office, because I was sent a letter by an official, not him—
And he apologised. But I have to say that the Secretary of State clearly does not know what is going on in his own Department. He is not even listening to the debate, and, frankly, let me say this about the views expressed by the Conservative party about the vulnerable people who are coming to us for help: they are being disregarded and treated with contempt by the laughing cavaliers opposite. They should be ashamed of themselves.