Housing Benefit (Abolition of Social Sector Size Criteria)

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Mark Tami

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I shall make a little progress before taking interventions.

We have discussed the needs of carers, but we must also consider people who need safe or sanctuary rooms to protect themselves against the threat of domestic violence. There is the woman whose case is now being heard by the High Court, and whose situation my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) tried to address with her ten-minute rule Bill. Others have kept a room for sons and daughters serving in the armed forces when they are home on leave. In The Daily Mirror this morning we read about the shocking case of Maureen Bland who was forced to move out of her home to avoid the bedroom tax after her son lost his life serving our country in Afghanistan. Quite frankly, people like that should not be forced to pay the bedroom tax because of such grief and tragedy.

The bedroom tax has been cited by the Trussell Trust and others as a key driver behind the shocking growth in food bank use under this Government. A recent in-depth study published by the Trussell Trust, along with Oxfam, the Church of England and the Child Poverty Action Group, found that at one food bank, 19% of users had been hit by the bedroom tax, many of them having applied unsuccessfully for DHP. We will have an opportunity to vote on a motion on food banks later this afternoon, but Members can make a start in this debate by voting to repeal the cruel bedroom tax, which is one of the key causes of the food poverty crisis we see in our country today.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Perhaps the cruellest element of the bedroom tax is the fact that the stress and anguish it causes is making ill people even more ill.

[Rachel Reeves]

People affected by the bedroom tax are facing impossible decisions that, frankly, no one should have to make: whether to pay the bills or put food on the table; or whether to pay the rent, at the risk of getting into debt, or risk losing their home. We have seen the evidence from the Trussell Trust and the Child Poverty Action Group, but we do not have to turn to that report to see the devastating impact of this vicious policy; we need only look at the evaluation commissioned by the Government themselves. It was conducted by the centre for housing and planning research at Cambridge university and slipped out this summer, when the Government no doubt hoped no one would notice. Its findings are clear and damning.

National Minimum Wage

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Mark Tami

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

An investigation by the Low Pay Unit looked at pay rates before the national minimum wage was introduced and back then one worker in a residential care home was paid just £1.66 an hour. I agree that today, too, people working in that sector are too often exploited and that their employers get round the legislation.

The Low Pay Unit considered pay before 1997 in a range of industries. I mentioned residential care but it also came up with other examples, such as a factory worker who was earning just £1.22 an hour in 1997 and a person working in a chip shop in Birmingham who was earning just 80p an hour. That is sheer exploitation. It is poverty pay and it was taxpayers who picked up the bill.

Let us also remember what Government Members said back then. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said in 1997 that a minimum wage would

“negatively affect, not hundreds of thousands but millions of people.”—[Official Report, 4 July 1997; Vol. 297, c. 526.]

The right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague), now Foreign Secretary, said back then that a minimum wage would have to be

“so low as to be utterly irrelevant”

otherwise

“it would price people out of work.”—[Official Report, 17 March 1997; Vol. 292, c. 617.]

The right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), now the Minister of State responsible for business and enterprise, said that a minimum wage

“will add costs to British business”.—[Official Report, 11 July 1997; Vol. 297, c. 1240.]

And the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), now Prime Minister and then a parliamentary candidate in Stafford, darkly predicted in 1997 that a minimum wage would lead to a rise in unemployment.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Conservative Members are very keen on calling for us to apologise for things. Does my hon. Friend think that it is time for them to apologise for such comments?

[Rachel Reeves]

It is not just the Tories who should apologise; the Government’s junior coalition partners should apologise, too, because they were worried back then as well about the impact of the minimum wage. In 1994, their then leader attacked Labour’s

“umbilical attachment to a national, high-rate minimum wage”

and said that

“a national minimum would…force many on to the dole”.

The Liberal Democrats went into the 1997 general election with a manifesto commitment not to a national minimum wage but to a

“regionally variable, minimum hourly rate.”

Let us be grateful that they did not get their way. Despite the then Opposition fighting the legislation tooth and nail, line by line, clause by clause, using every trick in the book to slow, frustrate and obstruct its progress, the national minimum wage became law.

Living Standards

Debate between Rachel Reeves and Mark Tami

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

The list of the Government’s failures could have been an awful lot longer, but we wanted a motion that would fit on the Order Paper. He talks about VAT—[Interruption.] I would be grateful if he listened to my answer. Two years ago the shadow Chancellor said that as an emergency measure VAT should be cut to stimulate the economy. In the two years since, the economy has flatlined. The shadow Chancellor also said that as the economy gradually moved into the recovery stage, the emphasis should be on infrastructure investment, which I think is important. It is because the economy has flatlined for two years that family finances are in the state they are in today.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend not struck by the fact that the interventions from Government Members seem to be addressing everything but living standards? The TUC has shown today that Flintshire, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and I represent, has suffered the biggest fall in living standards in Wales.

[Rachel Reeves]

It is interesting that the interventions from Opposition Members refer to the challenges their constituents face owing to falling living standards. It is a shame that hon. Members on the other side of the House want to talk about anything but that.

I would like to talk about a family I met this week. On my first day back from maternity leave, I visited a family in Thurrock who told me what they were up against. The father, once a partner in a thriving small business, lost his livelihood three years ago during the recession. Desperately trying to keep up their mortgage repayments, he has spent the past three years taking whatever work he could get through employment agencies, often on the minimum wage and often on zero-hours contracts. He recently found a permanent job as a driver which, topped up with evening shifts doing deliveries, gives the family a bit more security, but it falls far short of making full use of his talents and experience.

The wife abandoned her dream of training to be a primary school teacher so that she could hold on to her relatively secure but modestly paid job in retail. Their daughter is studying for university and should do well, but she worries about fees. All of them pointed to a gaping and growing disconnect between their rates of pay and the costs they face for travel, housing and other basic necessities. Under this Government, the situation is getting worse for such families—families who want to get on in life.