Universal Credit Roll-out

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

We somehow seem to have bred a society that is too often too reliant on benefits. It is right that as a Government we help to provide a pathway back into work. The children in some parts of my constituency have grown up knowing four generations of unemployed in the family. That is not right. We have to try to break that cycle and help people get back to work. We also have to allocate the funds so that they go to the people who really need it, at the same time making the spending of taxpayers’ money fair. That is what universal credit is all about.

As we have heard, there was a need to change the old, inflexible, multi-agency, over-complicated system. Replacing it with this new all-in-one system run by one point of contact has been praised by everybody I have spoken to in Taunton Deane, including the CAB. Indeed, Taunton Deane is one of the first rural areas to see the full roll-out, so it is very much being watched.

However, I want to raise with the Minister some of the challenges in rural areas. The reliance on online applications particularly affects the elderly. We have a very large elderly population in Somerset, and I ask that we make sure that we help them. Mobile coverage is often poor, as are broadband speeds. We still need to address that in some areas. Once we have aligned all those things—I know that this Government are committed to putting money into that—the whole system will join up and work successfully.

I want to see a whole new system so that children growing up in families where they have seen only unemployed people have a different attitude to life, and people do not think that benefits are there just to keep them unemployed—rather, they see that they are there to help those who need it, but what they really need to do is get a job, and then they will know there is a better life.