Universal Credit

Paul Masterton Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Thelma Walker (Colne Valley) (Lab)]

It is time to be frank. Universal credit is currently a failure. It is not working how it was meant to. It is not supporting the people who need it. Its roll-out happened too fast, which meant that there has not been time to fix the many issues that have been brought to the House’s attention.

Twenty-four per cent. of children in my constituency live in poverty. In some areas, that figure increases to 40%. For some of the children whose parents are on universal credit, the hot, nutritionally balanced meal they have for lunch at school will be their main meal of the day. In no way is that a good situation to face, but at least those children are being fed. Well, not if Government Front Benchers have anything to do with it. Removing free school meals from those families who are claiming universal credit and who need them the most is deplorable. What kind of society do we want to live in? What Government in their right mind would take a hot meal off a child in need?

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Thelma Walker]

I am going to make progress.

Let me take hon. Members back to the 2016 Conservative party conference, where the Prime Minister said:

“I want to set our party and our country on the path towards the new centre ground of British politics built on the values of fairness and opportunity where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person—regardless of their background, or that of their parents—is given the chance to be all they want to be. And as I do so, I want to be clear about something else: that a vision is nothing without the determination to see it through. No vision ever built a business by itself. No vision ever clothed a family or fed a hungry child. No vision ever changed a country on its own. You need to put the hours in and the effort too.”

Why are the Government not following the Prime Minister’s vision? Is it another sign of how she is in position but not in power? If she still believes in her own words, she must stand up and stop this attack on the poorest in our society.

My local authority, Kirklees Council, has seen a 20% increase in pupils claiming free school meals over the last four years, which goes to show how hard the Government’s austerity programme is hitting families. There has been a huge spike in food bank use, which also shows that we are a country on the cliff edge. Food banks do an amazing job of supporting those in need, and I commend the work of local food banks such as the Welcome Centre, which serves my constituency.

What kind of country do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a country where a child clings to a teacher’s hand as the school holidays approach, not wanting to leave school because they know they will be hungry for the next six weeks? Do we want to live in a country that chooses to let disadvantaged children go hungry? Do we want to live in a country where a child comes to school with a lunchbox filled only with a slice of stale bread? I have witnessed those things, and I can say that it is certainly not the kind of country I want to live in. Some 6,400 children in Kirklees will lose their free school meals because of the Government’s actions. I will bring my remarks to a close with a thought from Buzz Aldrin: if we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

I cannot. No child who is receiving free meals now or who gained them during the roll-out of universal credit will lose their entitlement during the roll-out, even if family earnings rise above the threshold, as my hon. Friends the Members for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) and for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) mentioned. Once roll-out is complete, those children will be protected until the end of their phase of education—primary or secondary—as my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar) reminded us.

The protection arrangements will enable hundreds of thousands of children to continue to receive a meal during the roll-out, even if family earnings exceed the threshold. The £7,400 threshold relates to earned income, and it does not include additional incomings through universal credit. Depending on their exact circumstances, a typical family earning around our threshold would have a total annual household income of between £18,000 and £24,000.

The hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) said that the threshold was arbitrary. It is not arbitrary; the thresholds for these passported benefits are set at such a level as to hold the eligibility cohort steady, except that in the case of free school meals we took the decision to make it somewhat more generous than the previous system. The threshold is comparable, by the way, to that in the approach in Scotland, where there is a net earnings threshold equivalent of £7,320.

It is simply not true to say that we are introducing a cliff edge; there has always been one. The simple fact is that a child either gets a lunch or does not. A plate of food does not lend itself well to being tapered, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) has said. Some have suggested that we could convert the benefit into cash—that is true, of course—so that we could have a taper, but the whole point of free school meals is to guarantee that an individual child will receive a nutritious and healthy lunch.

Extending eligibility to all children in households on universal credit would result in around half of pupils becoming eligible. We estimate that that would cost in excess of £3 billion a year more by 2022. The additional meal costs alone, excepting the deprivation funding, would be in excess of £450 million a year—quite close to the figure mentioned by the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West. I reiterate that eligibility is going up, not down, as my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) said.

I am running short of time, so I will turn to the regulations on universal credit. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions earlier outlined the changes in these regulations for UC. They include the removal of waiting days, which will put an average of £160 extra in people’s pockets and get them into the monthly routine sooner, and an additional two weeks of housing benefit to smooth the transition to universal credit. That one-off, additional, non-recoverable payment is worth an average of £233 to 2.3 million claimants over the roll-out period. Those measures form part of the £1.5 billion package of reforms that the Chancellor announced at the Budget. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) said that he was surprised to hear that Labour Members would be voting against those measures. I suggest that their constituents will be even more surprised.

[Paul Masterton]

Wil my right hon. Friend give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not; we are very short of time. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) reminded us in her unique style, the Government are committed to tackling injustices, removing barriers and widening opportunity. Because of the strong economic management that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor recapped for us earlier, we are able to continue our bold and ambitious programme of social reform extremely quickly.