Inequality and Social Mobility

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Amber Rudd)]

I am grateful to the Opposition for giving me the opportunity, on behalf of the Government, to talk about our commitment to reducing inequality and to improving social mobility.

I know I came into this House to help people improve their lives. In my experience, so did every single Member of Parliament sitting across this House. We do that every weekend in our surgeries in our constituencies, and we do that on whichever side of the House we sit—addressing different policies and trying to use the levers we have and the financial stability that we hope to have to improve the quality of people’s lives—because supporting social mobility, fighting poverty and giving people a chance is not distributed along party lines. That is why I always want to hear from colleagues who are fighting to improve people’s lives, from the vision of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who introduced universal credit, to the tireless work of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) in championing the most vulnerable in society.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

When she came to office, the Secretary of State rightly delayed the two-child policy limit along with the universal credit roll-out, and she deserves credit for that. Does she agree that she should scrap that limit altogether to prevent millions of children from being forced into poverty? That would be one way in which she could honour the commitments that she is making today to tackle child poverty.

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Lady must bear in mind the context in which some of those welfare reforms were made. The Government came to office in 2010, in the midst of an economic crisis. Reforms were needed, and if we had not made those reforms, the consequences for the national economy could have been so destabilising that they might have reduced the funds that are now available for us to spend on social security.