Disability Employment Gap

Debate between Owen Smith and Mark Spencer

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I am deeply disappointed. I suspect that lots of Government Members, many of whom were sold the ESA cuts explicitly on the promise that the White Paper would come through, will be deeply disappointed. In fact, I may find it in my speech to mention a few of them in a couple of minutes’ time.

[Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Owen Smith]

I am going to make a bit more progress and may give way in a minute.

Let us talk about ESA. Here is what the experts, not MPs, think about the cuts to the WRAG under ESA and how they will affect employability. Parkinson’s UK says:

“The cut to the WRAG will push people…even further from the workplace.”

Muscular Dystrophy UK states that the cut

“will widen the disability employment gap rather than reduce it.”

Mind’s chief executive, Paul Farmer, said

“Implying that ill and disabled people will be motivated into work if their benefits are cut is misguided and insulting.”

I could not agree more. It is grossly insulting to disabled people. I know that many Government Back Benchers feel the same way, because that is why they were so loth to give their votes to the Government on the ESA cut. In fact, many of them—[Interruption.] I am going to finish this point. Many of them did so explicitly because the Government promised to beef up support for disabled people. Let me quote a few Government Members and then I will give way to the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer).

I will first quote the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen), who said before abstaining on the vote:

“To secure my trust, I need to believe in the White Paper and that the £100 million will go some way to help those people. That is my warning shot to the Government.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2016; Vol. 606, c. 215.]

The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said that the

“White Paper is incredibly important to the matter we are discussing, because it is the replacement for what the Government are proposing to remove.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2016; Vol. 606, c. 222.]

The hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) said

“I was about to vote against ESA cuts when he”—

the previous Secretary of State—

“sought me out - he personally and angrily begged me not to”

and that he

“Promised me he was introducing a white paper which guaranteed enhanced and more easily accessible benefits for the seriously disabled”

in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

I agree with lots of it, but the truth, as I have been describing, is that we have seen nothing but cuts. The shift from the Work programme to the Work and Health programme involves an 80% cut in support. Access to Work is dealing with fewer people this year than last year: 31,000 versus 34,000. Those are the facts, and the Government really need to check them. When the Secretary of State was the Secretary of State for Wales, he welcomed the Fit for Work scheme, but he has now scrapped it in my constituency. It is another scheme that is meant to be helping people, as Liz Sayce described, but it is being cut on the Government’s watch. That is the truth of the matter.

Where is this fabled White Paper? Where is it, the one that we have been waiting for all these months? Perhaps the hon. Member for Sherwood knows where the Government have it hidden and can tell us all about it.

[Mark Spencer]

I am grateful to the shadow Secretary of State for giving way. He talks about how strong the feelings are on the Government Benches and how much compassion there is around the issue of trying to get disabled people into work, but it is worth noting that the number of Government Members here to discuss the matter is more than double the number of Opposition Members. The number of Back Benchers here to support him in this debate has just gone down to single figures, which says quite a lot.

[Owen Smith]

Low-brow, low-ball comments such as that really do not help the debate. This is a serious debate. I am taking it extremely seriously on behalf of the Labour Front Bench, and I would expect better from even Tory Back Benchers than that sort of nonsense.

Where is the White Paper that we have been expecting? I will tell the House. A former Employment Minister—the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) may still be on the Front Bench, but I never seem to see her there any longer because I suspect she is too busy campaigning on Europe outside this House—promised it by the spring. The Secretary of State’s predecessor then turned spring into summer. This Secretary of State went one better and turned a White Paper into a Green Paper, kicking urgency, clarity and specificity down the road. It is another insult to disabled people who are seeing their incomes cut and their Motability vehicles taken away. In my view, it is yet another insult. After disabled people have been knocked from pillar to post with the cuts to ESA, PIP, universal credit, student grants and the Work programme, the Secretary of State, for all his warm words, is putting legislation to put some of those things right on the back burner. That is the undeniable truth behind the shift from a White Paper to a Green Paper. It is failing disabled people.

Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition will support the Government when we think they are getting things right, but we will stand up and be counted when they are getting things wrong. We applaud the establishment of the bold and ambitious target to assist disabled people into work, but we will call it a lie—a cruel lie—if that promise is revealed to be a pipedream without the resources and the will to make it come true.

The Secretary of State says he wants to start a new dialogue with disabled people. Well, we are waiting to hear it. More importantly, he says he intends to make a difference and halve the gap in employment that they face. Well, I am waiting to see it.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Mark Spencer

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I rise for a second time to speak to new clause 1 in my name and those of my hon. Friends the shadow Chancellor, the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury and my shadow Work and Pensions team. The new clause is very straightforward. It would repeal the Tax Credits (Income Thresholds and Determination of Rates) (Amendment) Regulations 2015.

It is a shame that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is not in the Chamber to debate this important measure. I do not know what else he is doing, but he has been noticeable by his absence from the debate on tax credits in recent days. I have been to 25 studios and other arenas to debate the issue. I have looked high and low for any Minister of any stripe with whom to discuss it, and they have been noticeable by their absence. I am therefore delighted that there are three Ministers of the Crown on the Front Bench to contest the issue. That is a first in recent weeks, and I am very pleased to have this opportunity.

It is a shame that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is not in the Chamber. If he was here, I would have started by reminding him of something he has said in the House—indeed, he has said it on several occasions over the years—which is that he is a great believer in second chances. He has said that he believes that Britain should be

“a nation of the second chance”.

Opposition Members entirely agree with the Secretary of State. Indeed, that is one of the very few things on which I do agree with him. We should believe in second chances. I therefore say to Ministers and to the House that we have a second chance today. We have a second chance following yesterday’s vote in the House of Lords, which has called on this House to think again. In doing so, I think that the other place spoke not just for itself but for the entire country. It has asked us to think again and to give a second chance to repeal tax credits regulations that will hit so many people across this country.

In touring the studios in recent days, I have quite often heard the suggestion that the vote in the other place yesterday presaged a constitutional crisis in this country. In truth, what it did was to stop a financial crisis for the 3 million families who will be hit by the tax credits regulations when the changes are implemented next year. The message to us from the other place is quite simply to pause: for Ministers to pause before they lick the envelopes of the 3 million letters that they intend to post out at Christmas to tell such families across the country to anticipate a 10% reduction in their incomes, which is an average reduction of £1,300 for each of those 3 million working families. If the Government proposed to cut the salaries of Members of the House by 10%, there would be uproar on the Government Benches—indeed, on all Benches. Working families in this country, and people who are doing difficult low and middle-income jobs—there are 3 million of them, or more—are being told that next year they will face a 10% cut to their incomes at a stroke of a pen. It is not adequate.

[Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

In 2010 the tax credit system supported people on wages in excess of £60,000. Will the hon. Gentleman say what level of income should mean that people can no longer get support through the tax credit system? How much would someone need to earn before they do not need that support?

[Owen Smith]

I will start with a different figure, because 5,000 of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who will be hit by this change should ask him what he thinks is fair or just about asking them—hard-working families in his patch—to take a 10% cut to their income. That to me is the substantive issue, and the smoke and mirrors produced by the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members about the constitutional crisis or the offsetting mitigating prospects for other changes elsewhere in the Government’s finances do not answer the central question: is it right or fair to ask hard-working families to take such a cut to their incomes?

Tax credits have changed enormously. It is untrue to say that they were simply the creation of the previous Labour Government because successive Governments have helped family or income support to evolve over many years—arguably, such measures were first introduced in this country in the 1920s and they have gone through different iterations. Different Governments have used different ways to try to do what we all believe in, which is to make work pay and keep people in work. Thresholds are flexed and levels have changed, and the amount of money we spend on tax credits has changed over time. However, it is a net positive for us as a society and for our economy to keep people in work, and this cut will diminish work incentives for the people that the hon. Gentleman and I hope to support.

[Mark Spencer]

The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. He must recognise that the system creates circumstances in which some employees turn down promotions and overtime because that would dramatically affect their tax credits. Surely it is better to have a system where people who want to work extra hours or take a promotion would be better off if they did so.

[Owen Smith]

I have heard that argument a lot recently, and there is no evidence to support such a contention. It is nice to believe that were we to reduce the amount of money people have—withdraw the subsidy, as the hon. Gentleman would say—some employers would increase their payments to people and wages would go up, but I do not suggest that that is true or that any evidence supports it. Tax credits have been a necessary subsidy for low wages, and I welcome and applaud the decision by the Government to increase the national minimum wage. That is the right thing to do, which is why Labour called for it before the election—the Government could get on with it a little faster and stop spinning it as a national living wage when we know it is not, but it is a welcome step. There is no evidence to suggest that if we withdraw the subsidy at a stroke, employers will think, “I’d better put up wages for my workforce because they will struggle to survive on what they earn.”