Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Mohammad Yasin Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)]

Like many MPs, I have heard from many constituents who are dreading the day, in less than a month from now, when they will lose the uplift they are relying on to feed themselves and their families and to pay their bills. The £20 a week is the difference between them holding their heads above water or not. The people who have written to me—some single parents, some living with a disability, but all struggling to manage despite working long hours—struggled to make ends meet even before the pandemic struck.

Analysis by Centrepoint shows that the cutting of benefits next month will hit young people the hardest. The charity has warned that there will be more homelessness when people will have to choose between eating, paying their rent, feeding themselves or feeding their children. It is truly shocking that so many people in the UK and in my constituency are grappling with the reality of these cruel choices every day.

A single mother wrote to me to say:

“It cannot be right for the Government to take away £20 a week from the precarious incomes of families like mine. Instead, it should keep it and ensure that families on legacy benefits are no longer excluded…While I realise some of these measures have to stop now life is returning to normal for many people, there will still be a high number of people like me who will be left struggling to get by. I am very stressed about the prospect of facing a financial crisis and possibly even destitution and homelessness due to this cliff edge in support.”

When the Chancellor announced uplifts to universal credit and working tax credit in March 2020, it was an admission that welfare levels were not adequate to protect families from poverty after a decade of cuts and freezes. In Great Britain, 4.3 million children are living in poverty. That is a shameful number, and I fear that sometimes we do not visualise the trauma, pain and everyday struggles behind such numbers—parents whose bank accounts are emptied on payday, once bills and rent or mortgage costs are covered, leaving the long month ahead over which to stretch the pittance left to cover all other costs.

I would like to know which living costs are going down to mitigate the loss of the uplifts, because we are all experiencing the costs of this Government’s policies. Prices are going up. Food retailers are fighting to keep their prices down as far as possible, but mounting pressures from rising commodity and shipping costs, as well as Brexit-related red tape, mean that their efforts will not be sustainable for much longer, and food price rises are here to stay.

The cut to universal credit and working tax credits will be the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state. Cutting them now, when all other Government support nets that were introduced to help us through the pandemic are also ending, and when some of the poorest in society will disproportionately bear the Government’s new tax levy, is illogical and will be unnecessarily devastating to many of my constituents. It is short-sighted and should be reversed.