Social Security
Debate between Neil Gray and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP) [V]
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Like the shadow Minister, I do not intend to take anywhere near the quota of time on offer.
I thank the Minister for the motion. I dealt with him positively on the Roadchef Employee Benefits Trust issue and I hope we can continue to assist in progressing that matter. However, I must challenge him on his comments regarding the minimum wage. The minimum wage premium is not the real living wage. I encourage the UK Government to follow the Scottish Government’s lead by engaging with business to encourage more employers to pay the real living wage, if they cannot make it the minimum wage, and to remove the age discrimination that means under-25s cannot earn the same as their older colleagues for doing the same job.
As this is my first virtual speech, let me thank all those in the House staff who have gone out of their way to make the virtual House of Commons work and allow colleagues to hold the British Government to account. That includes Mr Speaker, you Madam Deputy Speaker and your fellow Deputy Speakers. Having spent considerable time on a committee with the Leader of the House, the irony of its being this particular Leader of the House who is proving that remote participation and eventually electronic voting can work, is certainly not lost on me.
Regarding the regulations, it is a pleasure to be able to respond on behalf of the SNP. Colleagues will be relieved that I do not intend to speak for very long. The business before us is uncontentious. We of course welcome an increase in employment allowance, but would have liked to have seen it go further. That is not an opportunistic position that we take for the afternoon to nit-pick or find division where there is none; our manifesto committed us to an increase in the employment allowance from £3,000 to £6,000 per employer, per year. Of course, that was the manifesto that helped the SNP win 80% of the seats we contested in December’s general election.
I welcome the shadow Minister to his place on the Opposition Front Bench. Like him, I encourage the UK Government to do more to assist small employers across the UK during the covid-19 crisis. The job retention scheme and business support schemes have massive gaps that so many of our constituents are falling through, and that is before we get on to the unsatisfactory self-employment scheme. I share the calls from the shadow Minister on bringing about flexibility to the furlough scheme. Something I would like to see on top of what he called for would be an appeals process, where an employer refusing to furlough a member of staff, leaving them without an income, can be challenged. The CBIL scheme is also not helping all those who need support. For many, incurring debt is just not an option. There needs to be much more in the way of grants available. Similarly, not all charities are covered in the third sector scheme, such as research-based charities, so I hope they will look at those areas again.
Short of the full powers of independence, we want the UK Government to devolve control of national insurance to Holyrood, so that the Scottish Government can use economic levers such as these measures to make decisions that support employers to create jobs. At the moment, our control over economic policy is very limited and largely rests with the UK Government, who take decisions that may favour other parts of the UK and may not be in Scotland’s best interests.
We will also continue to oppose the UK Government’s decision to restrict eligibility for employment allowance. In our view, it should cover all firms and all employers. The UK Government estimate that about 7% of all employers will no longer be eligible for the employment allowance. By removing this relief, they will be levying an additional £3,000 in tax on those employers.
In conclusion, we will not be forcing the regulations to a Division—I am sure that that will please those still testing remote electronic voting—but we would have liked the UK Government to have been more ambitious to support job creation by halting the eligibility restrictions and by expanding the relief that is available.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I am now introducing a time limit of five minutes. I advise hon. Members who are speaking virtually to have a timing device visible. I call Kim Johnson.
Points of Order
Debate between Neil Gray and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of his point of order. I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard his kind offer and his request for a statement to be made, but I have received no notification about a statement.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to raise a point of order about the Minister’s response to my urgent question on universal credit earlier today, because I believe he may have inadvertently misled the House. I understand that he was defending the Secretary of State from the beleaguered position and shambles that the Department found itself in, which led to the need for the urgent question, and I have informed the Chair and the Minister in question of my intention to raise this point of order.
The Minister first said that he had informed the House about this issue “yesterday”, and went on to say that he had written to the Chair of a yet-to-be-appointed Select Committee in order to do so. Do you believe, Madam Deputy Speaker, that that is informing the House about a major change to our social security system such as this delay to universal credit? My understanding after five years in this House is that properly informing the House is done by a written ministerial statement, or by an oral ministerial statement.
I have since been advised that last night the Minister sent round a “dear colleague” letter, but that is still not informing the House because the Whip’s assistant to whom that letter was sent in our Whips’ Office has been off ill, and I am still to receive a copy. It appears that Ministers sent that letter to people as an afterthought, rather than as a proactive way of informing the House. Do you expect Ministers to inform the House via statements, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I believe has normally been the practice, rather than by letters that can be lost, and do you expect the Minister to clarify the remarks that he earlier put on the record?
Madam Deputy Speaker
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of his point of order. He raised a number of issues about what the Minister said and subsequently did, and I am sure that the Minister will want to check the record of what he said in response to the urgent question. Having looked at the record, if the Minister considers that anything he said was in any way inaccurate, he will want to put the record straight and issue a ministerial correction in the usual way. It is important to be clear about what was actually said and subsequently done.
Universal Credit
Debate between Neil Gray and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster(6 years ago)
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Neil Gray
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why we need to call for the changes to follow as quickly as possible.
At my surgeries, I have met constituents desperate for help with universal credit. I will give just two examples. The first is Shelby Bowrman from Airdrie, who has become a casualty of the disgraceful two-child cap. Shelby gave birth to her daughter, her third child, after the roll-out of universal credit locally—she was due to give birth before the roll-out but was late. Shelby has now been migrated on to universal credit, and it has cost her thousands of pounds. She has been told that the two-child limit, which did not apply to the childcare element of tax credits, now kicks in for universal credit. She returned to work just two weeks after giving birth, to provide for her three children, who are aged two and under. She worked as a dental assistant during the day and for Domino’s at night. The two-child cap in universal credit has made it impossible for her to work. After I raised the case with the Secretary of State on Monday, Shelby has been told that she can get support with childcare costs but has to pay up front and then be reimbursed. She therefore has to find £2,000. That is just ludicrous and highlights why the two-child cap is discriminatory, unfair, a barrier to work and needs to go.
Another constituent at one of my Friday surgeries highlighted how universal credit completely fails to support people with mental health conditions. Her son Jordon, from Airdrie, is currently receiving acute mental health treatment but needs his universal credit application to progress, for obvious reasons. Jordon’s mental health condition is such that he is in crisis and in hospital.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. I am simply pointing out that a lot of Members wish to speak, and that the hon. Gentleman has now been speaking for longer than the official Opposition Front Bencher.
Neil Gray
The Opposition Front Bencher obviously made a decision about the length of their speech, and I am doing my best to get through what I have to say.
Yet jobcentre staff told Jordon’s mum that his claim could not continue until he signed his claimant commitment—[Interruption.] I think it is important that Members listen to this, because I am talking about someone with an acute mental health condition. If he did not sign, he would have to apply for jobs from his hospital bed if he was to avoid a sanction. At what level is that not an abuse? I am not criticising jobcentre staff; they do the very best they can while implementing a disastrous policy from this UK Government. I suggest that the experience of frontline jobcentre staff rather differs from what Ministers would have us believe.
Universal credit, in its current form, is doing real damage to individuals and families. It is not just me saying that; experts are calling for change. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that cuts announced in 2015 will mean that 3.2 million households will typically be around £50 a week worse off on universal credit compared with tax credits.
Policy in Practice said this month that almost two in five households on universal credit will lose an average of £52 a week and that some 2.8 million households will see their income cut. Gingerbread says that the cuts to work allowances mean that the average single parent will lose £800 a year, and some will lose £2,000. Figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that 91% of single parents are women, so they are being disproportionately affected once again. Trussell Trust data from March shows that in areas of full universal credit roll-out foodbank use was up by 52%, whereas analysis of food banks in places yet to receive the roll-out showed the rise to be 13%.
Shelter Scotland submitted evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government and Communities Committee last year, stating that the UK Government’s
“ongoing roll out of Universal Credit, the benefit cap reduction and the capping of housing benefits...directly threaten tenancies and risk pushing more people into homelessness.”
Other expert groups are demanding change, included the Resolution Foundation, Macmillan Cancer Support, Together for Short Lives—I could go on and on. The Scottish Government are using what limited powers they have to influence change, but as I have already said, we cannot continue to mitigate the mess forever.
So what needs to change? At the Budget, the Chancellor should start by investing to lift the benefit freeze, restore work allowances, scrap the two-child limit, lift the application waiting time, reduce the clawback from advances, sort the self-employed income floor, cut sanctions and restore the ESA work-related activity group and the disability components of UC. There should then be a halt to the roll-out until a fundamental review of universal credit is carried out, which should look at areas such as the digital-only approach, implicit consent, introducing split payments, rethinking the way people with mental health problems interact with the system and fixing the problems with the assessment period.
The problems with universal credit are fundamental and are causing misery, but they are problems that can be fixed with political will. This afternoon is the first test of that political will. We need to see the Government’s analysis and the papers should be released. When that confirms what we all know, this House should unite and force the desperately needed change.
Johnny Mercer
No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. The other thing I will not accept in this House is the illusion that Conservative Members come to work to keep the poor poor and to feather their own nests. You gave the impression that nobody on the Conservative Benches cares about getting people out of poverty, but that is simply wrong. Individuals like me would not speak up against universal credit—and so become the lightning rod for abuse whipped up by some of the creatures on social media—and do something about it simply for our own ends. We would not be able to change this policy if we listened to you—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. Obviously this debate is heated, but it is important that the hon. Gentleman not refer to other hon. Members using the word “you”. If you use the word “you”, it is to me.