Universal Credit

Debate between Neil Gray and Mhairi Black

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray]

I will give again later, but I will make some progress now.

When universal credit is thrust on people, it is catastrophic. The Secretary of State said as much last week. For many people on universal credit, incomes will fall by £2,400 a year, which is £200 a month or £50 per week. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that taking all working age social security cuts together since 2010, they reach £37 billion. The benefit freeze is the single biggest cut, as support has failed to match rent or inflation rises for years. Over the decade, this will cost the poorest 10% of households over 10% of their income, and by far the worst hit are families with children and particularly those with more than two children.

Some 500,000 disabled people have lost £30 per week from the ESA work-related activity component cut, while 100,000 disabled children and 230,000 severely disabled adults will also have their money cut via universal credit. Bringing that together, the CPAG estimates that a single parent with a disabled child is set to lose £10,000 from tax and benefit reforms this decade. That should bring shame on every single Government Member. We cannot sit back and allow that to continue; we have to act for proper change. This does not need tinkering at the edges, but fundamental reform.

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

Talking about the incredible losses under this policy, is it not tremendous that the Scottish Government are continually being asked by the UK Government to mitigate the policies and mistakes this UK Government have made and that Scotland never even voted for?

DRAFT National Minimum Wage (Amendment) REGULATIONS 2017

Debate between Neil Gray and Mhairi Black

Tuesday 14th March 2017 General Committees

[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan, and it is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington, who made a very good speech setting out our shared views.

We must be clear that the UK Government’s so-called national living wage is not the real living wage and it should not be referred to as such. It is not national, because disgracefully it does not cover under-25s, and it is not a living wage, because it falls well short of the real living wage, which is independently set by the Living Wage Foundation and based on living standards, the history of which was set out so well by the hon. Gentleman. The current real living wage is £8.45 an hour outside London and £9.75 an hour in London. The minimum wage premium rate under discussion is £7.50 an hour, which is a welcome rise from £7.20, but it is almost £1 an hour short of the rate outside London and more than £2 short of that in London.

I also note the proposed percentage pay rise for the different age brackets. The rate for over-25s will go up by 4.2% annually, which is welcome, but why is there not a fair rise across the board, to match that for over-25s? The apprentice rate will go up by 4.5% annually, which is fine, but that is the only special age-related rate that matches the rise for over-25s.

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

As hon. Members may know, I am under 25. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be ridiculous to suggest that I should be paid less than anyone else in this room, purely on the basis of when I was born?

[Neil Gray]

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, which highlights perfectly the flaws in the Government’s argument—we will probably hear it shortly—that, somehow, someone who is under 25 does not have the experience or expertise to carry out their job. She personifies the argument that someone who is under 25 can be more than capable of doing their job just as well as, and possibly better than, someone who is over 25. She has made my point perfectly.

Turning to 18 to 20-year-olds, they will get a 0.9% rise of 5p an hour, which is an annual increase of 3.1%, while that for 16 to 17-year-olds will be just 2.8% annually. Given that they are already receiving significantly less, often for doing the exact same work, how can the Government justify a proportionately lower increase in their minimum rates? I refer again to my hon. Friend’s intervention.

This is important. In response to last week’s Budget, Katherine Chapman of the Living Wage Foundation said:

“Low-paid workers will be the worst hit by the rise in inflation set out in today’s budget forecasts.”

Rowena Mason from The Guardian has suggested that the rise in the minimum wage is not enough even to hit the Government’s trajectory to reach £9 an hour by 2020. We also need to consider these rises in the context of what Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies said last week:

“On current forecasts average earnings will be no higher in 2022 than they were in 2007…This is completely unprecedented”.

The Resolution Foundation has said that the period from 2011 to 2020 will have the worst record for pay growth in 210 years.

Although everyone accepts that employment is the best route out of poverty, it is no longer enough. We are seeing sharp rises in in-work poverty as the perfect storm of poor wage growth, social security cuts and rising inflation squeezes family budgets. For our part, Scotland remains the best performing of the four nations in the UK with the highest proportion of employees getting paid the real living wage—79.9%. That is because the Scottish Government have embraced the real leaving wage and championed it. We now have about 750 Scottish-based accredited living wage employers and we are pushing hard for more to sign up. We have championed the real living wage campaign while this Government try to undermine it by labelling their minimum wage premium in such a cynical way.

Requiring employers to pay their staff the living wage is a key part of Scottish public sector pay policy and since 2013-14 we have invested more than £1.5 million a year in the living wage rate across the public sector where the Scottish Government controls the pay bill, benefiting about 3,000 workers each year. I urge the Minister to look at the example being set by the Government up the road and to go further than what is being proposed today.

Concentrix

Debate between Neil Gray and Mhairi Black

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black]

I appreciate the Minister’s point, but we need to remember that HMRC and the Government were supplying information to Concentrix, so a lot of the fault lies with the Government.

[Neil Gray]

I was talking earlier about Government responsibility—before Mr Speaker rightly encouraged my pithiness. Does my hon. Friend agree that the only way for the UK Government to take proper responsibility is not only by providing substantial and appropriate compensation, but by offering full apologies to those constituents who were wrongly dealt with by Concentrix and this Government?

[Mhairi Black]

I could not agree more.

Concentrix was saying that 95% of mandatory reconsiderations were upheld, but in the next panel before the Select Committee, the chief executive of HMRC said that it was not as bad as 95% and that 73% were upheld. He said that as though it was some kind of problem that—