Welfare Reform Bill

Richard Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

I will not.

I end by asking the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), who talked about how people should work, how much more likely it is that that family will be in work when they are in Hull. I mean no disrespect to Hull or its Members, but that family will have been taken away from the schools and community network in Shepherd’s Bush, where they have lived for generations and where there are employment opportunities.

This is about not just intolerance or inhumanity but incompetence. The Government are sundering communities and sending people away from their families and communities, and giving them no prospect of either a decent life or employment.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

It is an absolute delight to join the debate, which is of key interest to my constituents.

I first wish to talk about the people who have had the least said about them today. Indeed, I do not think any Opposition Member has referred to them. They are the people who pay the £175 billion benefits bill that the Government run up each year on behalf of the people of Britain. I wish to speak for some of the taxpayers in Gloucester.

I have done some research on average earnings in my constituency. The figures are not complete, but I think it will be of interest to Members, and relevant to their own constituencies, that of some 20,000 public sector workers in Gloucester, I estimate that 90% have pre-tax salaries of less than the £35,000 that is equivalent to the £26,000 benefit cap that the Government propose. That figure of 90% means that 18,000 people working in my constituency of 100,000 people are in that position

It is harder to get the same figures for people working in the private sector, but based on a straw poll of three companies employing more than 400 workers, I estimate that some 87% are on pre-tax salaries of less than £35,000 a year. I believe that the vast majority of workers in my constituency would be astonished that Labour proposes that there should be no cap on the benefits that people get.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I endorse his figures. Given the scaremongering that we have heard from Opposition Members, does he know how many of those people who earn £35,000 a year are homeless?

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend raises a key point, and I will come on to the definition of “homeless” in a moment, as it is of significant interest.

[Dame Joan Ruddock]

We all appreciate that the hon. Gentleman’s constituents who are in work are hard-working and may be getting less than the national average wage, but will he acknowledge that they may well be entitled to a raft of in-work benefits such as working tax credit, child tax credit, child benefit and housing benefit? It is not a case of saying that people in work have only a certain amount of money and others should not have so much. There is a real difference between people’s overall entitlement and the simple figures about their wages.

[Richard Graham]

The right hon. Lady makes a perfectly valid point. Some workers receive benefits, but I do not believe that any of them will receive benefits for their family equivalent to, let alone more than, £26,000 a year. I stand to be corrected, even immediately by e-mail to my office, but I am pretty confident.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I tend to agree with the hon. Gentleman. I do not know Gloucester very well, but it would be unlikely for people in Edinburgh to reach that cap, which is exactly the difficulty. Not everywhere is the same. Hon. Members have said that some rents are far too high, but we cannot compare the situation of people in Gloucester with that of people in London.

[Richard Graham]

The hon. Lady is welcome to visit Gloucester. We have lots of things to show her that she will enjoy. If her point was that there are specific problems in London, I agree with her, but I shall come to that later if I may.

The second group of people in my constituency whom I want to address is those on the lowest wages of all. The Government have been clear that one of their major goals—many of us campaigned for this long before the general election—is to reduce, and if possible to eliminate, income tax for the lowest earners in our constituencies. They have done a great deal towards that goal—I believe that 1.1 million have been taken out of income tax altogether. What message do we send to those who are not earning very much and whom we would like to take out of income tax altogether if we do not cap the benefits that those not in work can clock up?

We should send the lowest earners the message that this Government are on their side. We want to take them out of income tax when we can, and at the same time, we want to put a cap on those families who, for whatever reasons, are unemployed. That is a very important message to send, for example, to the young worker at Asda in Barton and Tredworth, who finds that the presents she buys her children at Christmas are not nearly as good as those bought for the children of the family next door, who are living more comfortably on benefits. This is a worker-friendly policy and Bill.

The third group in my constituency whom I should like to address is those who are the most worried and the most vulnerable, including the disabled—I have had several mails from disabled people—war widows and those on PIP or attendance allowances. As the Minister has made absolutely clear, the Bill provides protection for the most vulnerable in our constituencies.

I absolutely recognise that people could well be affected by some elements of the Bill, and the vast majority of them probably live in London. It is not for me to speak on their behalf or on that issue, but the Minister has addressed the problem with three measures: first, the 10-month grace period; secondly, a special nine-month grace period for those who lose their job; and thirdly, a package of discretionary funding. That seems to me to be a significant proposal for hon. Members whose constituencies are likely to be affected.

The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) made a good point when he warned of the consequences of the Bill in a year or two. Many Government Members, including me, are new to the House and indeed to the world of politics, whereas he has years of experience. I do not have his experience of debating measures that sound great on the day but do not deliver quite what they intended, but in 2010 the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, of which I was a member, looked very carefully at changes to housing benefit. There were warnings from well-known charities such as Shelter and speeches from Opposition Members such as the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people would be thrown out of their accommodation and have to sleep rough on the streets. A year later, none of that has come to pass, although I may have missed something.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the biggest problems in these debates about welfare is that contributions from the other side, with the exception of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), are characterised by massive scaremongering about every single change? That has been reprehensible.

[Richard Graham]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. I have heard from many charities, whose work I deeply respect in many ways and who are active in my constituency, and the strength of their words on some of these issues does amount to scaremongering. I hope that, as on housing benefit, they are proved entirely wrong.

I hugely congratulate the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) on the ingenuity of his argument. I have no doubt that were he to go more deeply into the private sector, as I believe he is starting to do, he would be a fantastic salesman of unsellable products. Today, we have heard from him an extraordinary, last-minute and uncosted proposal that leaves us none the wiser about what the Opposition really believe. I sympathise with the right hon. Gentleman. He said that if we left matters to politicians, they would make a pig’s ear of it. He is right: he did. From the man who was in charge of the spending of taxpayers’ money and realised that he had spent it all, that was a hugely motivational factor for many Government Members, who realised that politicians had made a pig’s ear of it and perhaps it was time for people from outside politics to come in and try to do something to help.

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman is very generous and I am grateful for his compliments. But he must accept that Ministers have so badly thought this policy through that they have had to face the indignity of coming to this House and promising to spend £130 million solving a problem that they have told us for the last year would never present itself.

[Richard Graham]

As the right hon. Gentleman will have just heard, I came into this House from outside politics, with a background in the public sector, the charity sector and business, where making concessions and being flexible in achieving goals was generally considered to be a merit. Perhaps if he had shown more flexibility in his approach to the handling of taxpayers’ funds, we would not be in quite the situation that we are today. I am sorry, because I enjoy his company, but I came to the conclusion that his approach today does not remotely add up to a policy. It is simply the continuation of a welfare culture by his party that amounts to gross irresponsibility, married to a something for nothing culture.

In summary, the Bill achieves the following goals. It protects the weak, the disadvantaged and the disabled. There are transitional arrangements in place to help families who are unintentional victims of the Bill in places with high housing costs such as London. It does ensure that workers who are paying the tax that goes to support an enormous benefits bill can see that the Government are taking steps to cap the amounts that are paid out. It is the right thing for Gloucester and for this country, and the amendment is a clumsy, last-minute fudge rather than any solution. I have no hesitation in rejecting it and supporting the Government’s proposal.

[Kate Green]

I need only a couple of minutes to ask three questions, particularly in relation to the Lords amendment on leaving child benefit out of the cap.

As has been pointed out many times, families earning £35,000 or £40,000 and families on benefits both receive child benefit—it is a universal benefit. First, then, how can it be right to have the same cap for a single, childless adult as for a family with children? Secondly, why are this Government, of all Governments, importing a new couples penalty into the benefits system? It might make more sense for a couple, each of whom might separately be below the cap, to separate than to stay together and incur it. I have never understood why this Secretary of State, of all Secretaries of State, wants to introduce such a policy.

Thirdly, how will the cap be uprated—if, indeed, it is to be uprated? What will happen if a family is forced to move to cheaper accommodation because its costs exceed the cap, and then rents rise in the new area and it is forced to move again and again and again? Until we know how the cap is to be uprated, children’s well-being and family stability will be put at risk, but I have yet to hear Ministers address that issue.