DWP Policies and Low-income Households

Richard Graham Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, you would not know from the speeches made by Scottish National party Members this evening that welfare spending in the United Kingdom was £264 billion in 2015-16. That made up 35% of public spending and 14% of GDP. All those figures are higher than they were in 2010. We rose from being 20th in the world in terms of welfare spending in 2000 to 13th in the world by 2013, yet there are some who think that we should be spending still more. I say to the Members from Glasgow who have spoken today, and to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), that if their constituents are struggling to afford telephone calls to their Jobcentre Plus, why does their party in Scotland not pay for the calls instead of spending £6 million a year on baby boxes for every child born in Scotland? The Scotsman has said that

“for the vast majority of the four in five Scottish children who are not living in poverty, it seems to be an indulgent use of state cash.”

In contrast, our Government have focused on opportunity, education, skills and jobs, doubling free childcare, providing far more outstanding schools and 2.5 million apprenticeships and creating more jobs than in the whole of the rest of the EU put together. The result is that unemployment is down from 7.9% to 4.8% while free allowances for the lowest paid have almost doubled and salaries under the new national living wage have gone up by more than 6% in the past year alone.

There are parties that believe in the hand up, and there are those that focus entirely on the handout. Every party must decide where it stands. When Beveridge wrote his great report in 1942, he said:

“The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility…it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum”.

That was the right balance then, and it is the right balance today. Let me finish with these wise words:

“If you let yourself be put in the ‘soft’ box on welfare, then it’s almost impossible to do anything to tackle disadvantage and unfairness—because it will always be more grist to the mill of those who want to caricature you as weak and interested only in spending more taxpayers’ money and undermining the work ethic upon which so much depends.”

Those wise words were written by an enlightened Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, John Hutton. It is a message and a warning that the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, and all his colleagues, should heed as they gallop along the road of irresponsible spending.