Universal Credit

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, because childhood obesity is an important issue at the moment. The Children’s Society found that 1 million children growing up in poverty will lose out on free school meals that they would have been entitled to. Incredibly, the Government have the audacity to claim that they are being generous. They want to pretend that no families will lose because the small numbers who are benefiting under universal credit will not lose out now.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

Is it not right that money should be placed where it is most needed? That is where we need the most support. When universal credit is fully rolled out, it is absolutely a fact that 50,000 more children will be getting free school meals. It is not right to mislead about this issue.

[Angela Rayner]

I am sure that the hon. Lady does not believe that I am trying to mislead the House. Let me be absolutely clear: many people, including MPs, wrongly believe that all children in poverty already get free school meals. That is not currently the case. But under the transitional protections under universal credit, those 1 million children would be entitled to the benefit. Through the secondary legislation, the Government are pulling the rug from underneath those families.

Private Sector Pensions

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we are looking for ways to bring to account those who have not acted scrupulously. The regulator has taken measures, and they have proved successful. For example, BHS was prosecuted and we recouped £363 million. We have to adapt to situations as they arise and try to pre-empt other things, because none of the cases that have been mentioned today resulted from the same action. The hon. Gentleman is right that we have to ensure that unscrupulous businesspeople are brought to account, because we need good private business and good entrepreneurs.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I applaud the Prime Minister’s call for tougher new rules for executives who put workers’ pensions at risk. My constituents want to be confident that private pensions are secure and sustainable. After all, we have encouraged them to take them out. To put my constituents’ minds at rest soon, will my right hon. Friend please give an assurance that the Government are taking matters seriously?

[Ms McVey]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that point. The people watching at home who have a pension or are thinking about investing in one want to know that they are safe. They also want to know what the Government are doing to ensure that they will be safe going forward. That is exactly what we in intend to do with the White Paper by reinforcing corporate governance measures and making them tougher.

Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [Lords]

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Once the new body is set up, it will be able to see what is needed in the public arena and shape and craft what it does. That is important, as is debt advice for vulnerable people, who need to be able to plan a path for their future.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

The fact that household debt in this country now stands at £1.9 trillion shows just how important it is to give people knowledge and understanding about the management of their finances. I welcome the Bill. Will the Secretary of State assure us that it will help constituents such as mine in Taunton Deane, who currently have to go to a plethora of bodies to get advice, to make the decisions that we hope will prevent them from getting into debt?

[Ms McVey]

My hon. Friend raises a very good point about how to help those who are most vulnerable—how to help them to get out of debt. Debts are at high levels, but they are lower than they were in the first quarter of 2010. The latest figures, for the third quarter of 2017, showed that they had gone down, but they are still high, and we need to help people understand their finances. Understanding really is key to this—they need to understand what is going out, what is coming in and how to get life on a firmer footer, so that they can go forward with confidence.

Universal Credit Roll-out

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

Fundamentally, we asked taxpayers to spend £30 billion a year putting a ceiling on wages and productivity. That is basically what happened, as I saw. Why would people want to earn more or be more productive, if they were so penalised through the benefits system? We ask ourselves why we have had such flat wage growth and such flat productivity. It is because we are paying people not to work harder.

That has a fundamental implication for the years ahead, because Brexit is coming. We need to remember what the country voted for. I campaigned to remain, but in my view the biggest issue was immigration. We want sustainable numbers of people to come into this country, but if that is to happen when we lose access to this almost limitless pool of very hard-working labour, particularly from eastern Europe, we will have to get the work done by people in the United Kingdom.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an extremely passionate case. I want to mention an incident in my constituency of Taunton Deane. A vegetable farmer recently said that he could not get people to work for him, and has to use eastern Europeans. He knows that there are unemployed people, but because of the 16-hour rule they simply will not take the jobs.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I very gently point out that if Members who have arrived in the Chamber relatively recently intervene, they risk preventing colleagues who have been here for some hours from contributing? I know that the hon. Lady, who is a most courteous person, would not want that to happen.

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.

Housing and Social Security

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

First, I wish to praise the words of my new colleague, the hon. Member for Kensington (Emma Dent Coad). What a week it has been for her to start as a new MP. When I first started I had to deal with the possibility of the hydrographic UK business moving out of my constituency, which I thought was a big job to deal with, but it is as nothing compared with what she has had to deal with. I can only reiterate the comments made this morning by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition crediting the fine work that the hon. Lady has done, and so I thank her.

Let me turn to today’s debate. Although we face issues in places such as Kensington, on the whole this Government’s record on housing has been good, and I want to talk about that. Investment in housing has now doubled to more than £20 billion to support the largest affordable housing programme by any Government since the 1970s, and we have seen this in my constituency. The Government have delivered more than 300,000 affordable homes since 2010. When the coalition Government came into power in 2010, house building was at its lowest level since the 1920s. We cannot escape the fact that for years the Labour Government did not address that, which has exacerbated the situation we now find ourselves in. However, I always say that there is always room to do more, because everybody deserves a home of their own. While on the issue of housing, I want to pay tribute to the former Housing Minister and Member for Croydon Central. I had the pleasure of working closely with him during the last Parliament and he was a fantastic champion for the housing industry. He will be sorely missed, but this is only Downing Street’s gain.

I want to talk about the renewed commitment to housing supply in the Queen’s Speech. Thousands of new homes are being built in my constituency, many of them in new estates. I knocked on the door of hundreds during the election campaign, from Monkton Heathfield to Killams, Wellington to Wiveliscombe, and I was very struck by the type of people benefiting from Conservative policies and the investment in housing that has enabled the building of all these properties. Undoubtedly, the people living in them are, on the whole, first-time buyers; they are young people, often with young families. Those are the kinds of people this Government are helping, especially through our Help to Buy schemes. There are all manner of schemes under which one can now get into owning a property—or a bit of it or a share of it. There are so many different schemes and they are very popular. There are great advantages to buying or moving into a new home, because they are energy-efficient and they cost less to run.

Let us not forget that the people living in all these houses, particularly those around Taunton Deane, all have jobs and are all working in the constituency. They are all contributing to the economy and paying their taxes—low taxes I might add, to which we are committed in the Gracious Speech, unlike the Labour party. All of this is working for the economy as a whole. One thing I have noticed is that among these new housing developments we need to address the infrastructure and the traffic generated by all these new homes. We need to make sure we get the right facilities in the right places to accompany all these houses. I am very pleased that in the last two years I have been able to be part of a group of stakeholders that has managed to attract an incredible £300 million to Taunton Deane, largely for these infrastructure projects. That will make these developments much more viable. We have the developments at the Toneway, Creech Castle and the railway station, and they will all help to make the economy work and to make people’s lives more sustainable. We also now have garden town status, which I played a role in securing. With that, Taunton Deane will now be able to bid into the £2.3 billion housing infrastructure pot of money, to make these homes and the whole infrastructure around them more sustainable. So it is very important that we build the right homes in the right places and make them sustainable.

The excellent housing White Paper contains lots of ideas about the types of homes in which we might live: should we have container homes, or homes on water, for instance? We need to take great care if we are going to build up, as we know from the recent tragic events. Careful thought needs to be given to these matters, but we have got the building regulations and building controls. We have established an effective, new, high-quality system that will enable us to live in the homes that we want, and with sustainable drainage, because in Somerset flooding is a big issue so I urge the Housing Minister to be very conscious of including that as well. I applaud the introduction of the electric vehicles Bill, because all these initiatives will help to make our neighbourhoods better places in which to live.

Finally, I look forward to the introduction of the agriculture Bill. I hope we will build into this new Bill not only a Brexit that works for all our land use and agriculture—because this is a huge industry—but measures that work for the environment, too. We must attract and bring in all the environmental protections that we need to make our country sustainable. That brings us back to housing, because, of course, without a sustainable environment we do not have a sustainable future.

I welcome the Queen’s Gracious Speech; I welcome everything in it to make Brexit work and the fact that we will have the tools in place to continue to have a positive economy moving forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for holding a Disability Confident event. We are looking at what further support and, in some cases, incentives we can provide for employers. We need to raise the profile of the fact that these individuals have much to offer any business. We will be holding events in March in this place to enable all Members of all parties to become Disability Confident employers and to ask for their assistance in signing up 30 targeted organisations in their constituencies. I hope all Members will take that opportunity.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

This question is highly relevant to what Members have been saying. I am sure that the Minister will agree that to change attitudes towards disability in the workforce, we need more businesses to become role models in this area. In Taunton, sadly, very few businesses have signed up to the disability awareness register. Will the Minister join me in encouraging local businesses to attend a special event to be staged by Taunton jobcentre on 13 March to promote the Disability Confident initiative?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for what she is doing in her constituency to promote the scheme. It is important that employers realise not only what opportunities are presented by employing these people, but the support and advice that go alongside it. The more people who know about that, the closer we will be to achieving the goal of ensuring that every citizen in this country can reach their full potential.

Supported Housing

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I applaud the hon. Gentleman for bringing to the House this debate on a very important subject. Does he not agree, however, that it is local authorities that know where best to place the money and whom to help the most? That is what the new funding model will address. I am a firm believer that money should not come from the top, but locally. That is how best to spend it. I would welcome clarification about whether the funding will be ring-fenced. I believe that the Minister will promise that, but I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would like to hear that that is the case.

[Neil Coyle]

I will come on to ring-fencing. The trust that the hon. Lady puts in local authorities is, I am sure, welcome, but often that trust comes without the resources to meet the demand, and that has been a continual problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Derek Thomas]

Certainly. I will come to the work that the YMCA is doing in my constituency to increase the amount of housing it provides for vulnerable young people, even in these supposedly uncertain times. There is a real opportunity to do something significant. There is work to be done, but the Government are heading in the right direction. What the people who provide the housing solutions need is confidence and a secure footing, and this is an opportunity to achieve that.

[Rebecca Pow]

Is it not then important that we commend the Government for opening up a consultation? I have met many housing associations in my constituency, including Yarlington and Knightstone, which build across the south-west. Although one or two of those associations have projects on hold, they have certainly got some good ideas about how we could succeed in this area and make it better for the vulnerable people who need support and who we absolutely must support.

[Derek Thomas]

I welcome that intervention and completely agree. I delivered supported housing in the past, and there were decisions made, or done “to us”. The current situation is exactly as my hon. Friend says: an opportunity to get the people who understand the situation, the challenge and the solutions to work with the Government to deliver those things. We need confidence in three areas: that we will continue to deliver these essential services, that money awarded for supported living is spent on supported living, and that funding will keep up with demand—that is extremely important.

Long before I came to this place, I worked with people with severe learning disabilities and often with very elderly parents who were looking after adult children. The stress and pressure on the parents were enormous. The worry about where their adult children would end up when they could no longer look after them was significant. They had no confidence that the current arrangements would ever provide housing in the right place that their adult children needed to help them to live full and free lives. It is important that we use this opportunity to focus our attention and to address how we can provide the housing needed to support the whole family as they look to move their adult children into secure, independent housing that looks after them as whole people. We worked hard to do that. Local people put in their money to buy a property where we could house up to five people, close to their families, with the people in place who could support them to live there, but the barriers were so immense that we could not continue that service. The property is not lost because it is supporting homeless people, but we were unable to provide a secure arrangement for those people, where they felt they had a home for life.

Particularly in Cornwall, to which people gravitate because of the quality of living, many people with learning disabilities are living with older parents. We need to meet that housing demand now and in the very near future. We are not discussing the built environment, but it is important that the Government use every resource available to Departments to increase the supply of housing for people who have learning disabilities, to ensure that they are in the right place, with good transport links, close to home, where they can still be in close contact with their families and where they are part of the local community.

Devon and Cornwall Housing run foyers in my constituency, which are places where vulnerable 16 to 18-year-olds with quite horrendous backgrounds are supported. They are invited to live there. Alongside the housing—the roof over their heads—they receive support on growing up and the skills needed to become independent and to live lives that we all take for granted. The YMCA also works in my constituency. Years ago, I was on the board of YMCA Cornwall and sat on a panel that interviewed young people to ensure that the housing we provided was for them and would give them the tools that they needed to move on. They are only ever allowed to live in one of those properties for two years, so it is important that in that time they are supported to learn the skills and have the resources and abilities to go and set up homes of their own.

The challenges facing young people who qualify for such supported services are considerable. For years, both Devon and Cornwall Housing and the YMCA have been influential in helping young people to gain a firm footing in their lives. As I have said, there is good news, despite the uncertainty referred to by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark. Two weeks ago, I attended the annual general meeting of the YMCA. Bearing in mind that this is a rural, west Cornwall constituency where there are enormous housing challenges, the YMCA is being ambitious and is setting out to build 19 extra units in the constituency—it already has several—to support vulnerable young people. While the Government are focusing on what supported housing looks like and how we can respond appropriately and effectively to that important demand, will the Minister also pay attention to the barriers for young people in supported housing environments? A safe place to live is essential, but so is the right support to help them to move on from supported housing.

I would like to read a letter that I received from The Coach House, a foyer run by DCH in my constituency. It is right that we focus on supported housing, but we should also look at the barriers created by Government policy that hinder young people from getting the skills and tools they need. The letter says:

“Further to our conversation last week”—

I went along and sat in on one of the house meetings—

“about the young person I have that would like to do a university course at Cornwall College.”

This gentleman is 19 and has

“completed a level three music course at Penwith college. He completed it with triple distinctions. We went to Cornwall College to talk about him doing the foundation degree and was told that he would have to apply for student finance. I looked into how this would affect his benefits and was told that he couldn’t claim benefits if he had student finance. The rent at the Coach House is £230 per week student finance would not cover this. So he is now in the position that living in supported housing is holding him back. He still needs a lot of support so isn’t ready to move on. I think that if we could support him through the first year of his course he would be more than ready to move on. This would be a fantastic opportunity for this young person. He is more than capable of doing the course.

Since being told that he couldn’t do it because of funding his mental health has spiralled to the point that he hasn’t been getting up, washing, eating properly he is very depressed at the moment. I have just come back from the doctors with him and he has been referred to the mental health team”.

We could do more to help that young person to have a fantastic life—to get the skills and the degree he needs and to find the job satisfaction that we enjoy, but at the moment the system is hindering him from doing that further training. I would be interested to hear what work the Government can do across Departments to remove those unintended barriers.

In summary, can the Minister ensure that money given to local authorities will go in its entirety to supported living? Recently, we have heard about extra money for social care from an extra precept on our council tax. We are a year into that, but in my constituency I have struggled to be absolutely sure that the money has gone to social care. We would not want a repeat of that, so if the Government are to give money to local authorities to deliver locally based, locally driven solutions, we must be absolutely sure that it goes to where it is intended so that the people we are talking about receive the supported living they need and deserve.

What more can the Government do to increase the supply of supported housing for people with learning disabilities? How can we ensure that those homes are in the right places so that tenants can play a full part in local society and, equally importantly, access public transport? Finally, will the Minister address the difficulties faced by young people who want to gain skills but risk losing their support by doing so?

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

It has been said many times, but the powerhouse has become a power cut. As time goes on, many—not just in the north but in the midlands—will see through the rhetoric to the reality that they are experiencing.

The Government are undercutting, not supporting, a productive economy. It says everything about the Chancellor that the impact of his Budget has been to worsen the outlook for productivity in our economy over the rest of this Parliament rather than to improve it. The OBR has done the calculations and its prediction is on page 77 of its report. Its conclusion is stark. The Opposition know that more productive businesses, and a more productive economy, are the key to a virtuous circle of higher growth, higher living standards and, as a consequence, more effective deficit reduction. For the Conservatives, productivity springs magically from thin air, but for us it is decent infrastructure and decent public services that can make all the difference to business success.

In his March Budget, the Chancellor did not even mention productivity, so perhaps we should be glad that he at least found time to mention it yesterday, even if we are still waiting for the much trumpeted productivity plan. I gather that it will be published on Friday, although the House is not actually sitting that day so we will not be able to scrutinise the details. Under this Chancellor, UK productivity has, in the words of the Office for National Statistics, undergone a period of “unprecedented” stagnation.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I have spoken to leading businesses in Taunton Deane this morning and the Chancellor’s Budget has been broadly described as “great stuff”. It will load the scales in favour of hard-working people. Surely the shadow Chancellor must consider that a positive policy, unlike the disarray of the Labour party’s economic policy, as mentioned today by the former Labour Chancellor.

[Chris Leslie]

I am astonished: a Conservative Member of Parliament reports positive feedback on the Chancellor’s Budget. I never thought I would hear that: I am aghast.

Child Poverty

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The purpose is to get income inequality down, and it actually fell over the last Parliament. The way to do that is to improve the numbers going into work, to get them to go further and into full-time work. Universal credit helps that enormously.

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I invite the Secretary of State to come to Taunton and to Halcon, where he will see how the Government’s long-term strategy to address the root causes of poverty is working. Halcon is among the 4% most deprived parts of the country and has four generations of unemployed families. The One team’s project with police, education and everybody working together is working, so may I urge him to come and have a look?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I welcome my hon. Friend to this place. I absolutely will—it would not take much to get me out to Taunton. As my right hon. Friend the Chief Whip is sitting next to me, I hope that he will be tolerant when my hon. Friend asks me and I ask for a slip.