Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Masterton and Damian Hinds

Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman and I have had a chance on previous occasions to discuss and correspond on the Thomas Hepburn school, and of course I will meet him, as he suggests.

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

A not insignificant number of parents feel compelled to take their children out of school and into home-schooling as a result of bullying. Will the Department’s call for evidence on home education look at the support being given to these children to try to get them back into mainstream schooling as soon as possible?

Universal Credit

Debate between Paul Masterton and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[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.