Oral Answers to Questions

Rosie Cooper Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend raises yet another good point. Under Labour, the number of people living in households where nobody had ever worked doubled. We therefore needed not only to do a lot of work to bring us back to the regular standards of what we had before Labour came into office, but to build on that to get more people into work. That is exactly right. We have helped hundreds of thousands of those people who were left unemployed for a long time.

[Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

10. Whether universal credit will be available to migrants from the European Economic Area when it is fully rolled out.

[Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)]

16. What recent steps he has taken to stop welfare tourism.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

Citizens of the European economic area who choose to come here without a job to start will not be able to access universal credit. We have introduced several restrictions to benefits to ensure that our welfare system focuses support on those who are contributing to the economy. These include strengthening the habitual residency test, banning access to housing benefit for new EEA jobseekers, and introducing a three-month residency requirement for income-based jobseeker’s allowance.

[Rosie Cooper]

The Secretary of State originally predicted that 1 million people would be on universal credit by April last year. The latest figure is 26,000. I understand that last October he predicted a figure of 100,000 by May—does he still believe that?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The universal credit programme is working well. It is now completing its roll-out to all the areas in the north-west, to all singles, couples and families. In the next month, it will start rolling out across the country, and that will bring universal credit to more jobcentres. By the time that process is completed, one in three jobcentres will be running universal credit. The key thing is to make sure that we get this vital reform, which helps people to get back into work faster, that we land it correctly and safely, and that we learn the lessons of the past when things like tax credits, brought in under the previous Government, were absolute disasters wasting billions of pounds in lost money and fraud.