Universal Credit

Debate between Ruth George and Paul Masterton

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

There are currently about 330 claimants of universal credit in East Renfrewshire. We moved to full service last month and there are about 5,200 people on legacy benefits who will be migrated to it in the coming months and years. There is no doubt that the phased roll-out has identified a number of issues which need to be addressed. My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) set out very well why the Government were right to proceed cautiously through test and learn. I start by paying huge tribute to the work of the team at Barrhead jobcentre, whom the Secretary of State visited over the summer. They really are changing people’s lives for the better, and we in this House cannot pay testament to the frontline staff in jobcentres enough.

The principles that underpin universal credit were well set out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) and it is very easy to see why they have carried near-universal support. One of the reasons was that under the old system, as we have heard today, people who wanted more work would be penalised for doing so, which was a completely ridiculous situation.

One group who have not been mentioned today but who will benefit from universal credit are injured veterans. Under existing legacy benefits, those in receipt of such benefits, as well as payments through the war disablement pension or the armed forces compensation scheme, receive a statutory £10 disregard, but under UC, unearned income such as these benefits is completely ignored. There are 12,000 veterans across Scotland—120 are in East Renfrewshire—who receive compensation because of their injuries, and they will be better off under universal credit. That is something we should all welcome.

Other Members have set out the improvements that were made to universal credit last year, particularly in the Budget. Those have gone a long way to helping things. Coupled with the recent introduction of the two week run-on of housing benefit, this will help to safeguard those migrating from housing benefit to UC from rent arrears.

Despite these improvements, further progress is still required. In the lead-up to the Budget, the Government should now reinstate work allowances for single-parent families and second earners in families with children back to the level they were before the 2015 Budget, because the changes to those groups undermined the fundamental purpose of universal credit—to make work pay. This would provide targeted support to 9.6 million low-income families, like many in my constituency, and it would be the best way to ensure that UC is truly transformative, as it was always intended to be.

[Ruth George]

There never were any work allowances for second earners in couple households. Is the hon. Gentleman proposing that a new allowance should be introduced, which I am sure Opposition Members would absolutely support because of the high marginal tax rates on such families?

[Paul Masterton]

I was mainly talking about single-parent families, but I know of the work that the hon. Lady has done. We have both had discussions with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation—I think we sat around a table together when we were talking about some of its Budget asks—and I warmly welcome the work that it does and support a lot of its asks in advance of the Budget.

As MPs, we always see the worst of a system—nobody comes to our surgeries or pops into our offices to say how wonderful things are, how easy their application process was or how great it is—and those cases are frustrating and maddening, and we do our job to fix them. However, we also need to take account of the many, many people for whom this has worked. I am very pleased to be hosting a UC information event later this month, working with the citizens advice bureau, the jobcentre, my local credit unions and my local housing associations. I want people to know that they can come to me if they have a problem and that they can sit on the day and get help with their application. If they are having an issue, we will have lines set up directly to the DWP hotline and the HMRC hotline so that when people come—on Friday 26 October—to the Voluntary Action on Kelburn Street in Barrhead, they know that they have an MP whom they can come to for support if it is not working.

UC is a good benefit. It is the right thing to do. To scrap it and to go back to a system that traps people on welfare would be a mistake.