Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Sajid Javid Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

It is good to hear from the true heir of Beveridge. The quotes describing the Labour party that I just read out were in party conference speeches and at a conference at the LSE—

“The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.”

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Sajid Javid)]

Disgraceful!

[Steve Webb]

It is disgraceful, as my hon. Friend says.

The second question that has arisen is why the Bill is necessary. It has been suggested that the Bill is simply a political device, but that draws a veil over the fact that we are dealing with one of the biggest deficits in peacetime history. To listen to the Labour leadership, one would think that they took such matters seriously. The leader of the Labour party said on “The Andrew Marr Show”, in an interview, I think, with James Landale:

“So when it comes to the next Labour government, if I was saying to you, ‘I can absolutely promise to restore this cut or that cut’, you would say ‘Well, where is the money going to come for that?’...We are absolutely determined that Labour shows we would be fiscally credible in government.”

We have not heard a lot of that today. The shadow Chancellor has said:

“The public want to know that we are going to be ruthless and disciplined in how we go about public spending”.

In fact, we have heard speech after speech calling for the Bill to be scrapped but there has not been a hope of hearing where the money would come from.

The Bill and related measures save £3.6 billion. When I challenged the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), about where that money would come from, he said—I paraphrase—“We wouldn’t start from here.” I am afraid that the Opposition have to do rather better than that.