Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I am glad to hear that the hon. Lady was able to help her constituent. We are looking at the form, as I mentioned in a previous answer, and we will update the House soon on those developments.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

22. What progress her Department has made on meeting pension credit application targets.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Emma Reynolds)]

The Department does not have a pension credit application target. Published application numbers show that we received around 74,400 pension credit claims in the eight weeks from the end of July to mid-September.

[Sarah Olney]

In the weeks following the Chancellor’s announcements on the winter fuel allowance, the number of pension credit applications doubled, then nearly tripled. Now the DWP is delaying releasing any more data on this subject. I am concerned that the Government know that they will not be able to process the applications on time, and that the information is not being put into the public domain. Will the Minister tell me exactly how many pension credit applications have been submitted since 16 September, and whether the backlog will be cleared before older people start having to make a choice between heating and eating?

[Emma Reynolds]

I gently say to the hon. Lady that we are not delaying the publication of statistics. A new set of statistics will be published soon. As I said in previous answers, we have redeployed 500 additional staff to helping to process pension credit applications. We urge all those who have loved ones who are pensioners, or who are pensioners themselves, to apply if they think that they are eligible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

It is fair to say that my hon. Friend and I have experience of such matters from previous roles. I know that there is no bigger advocate of Disability Confident in Torbay than him. Of course, we want to continue to build on the brilliant work that has happened through that scheme and its success in getting disabled people into work, which I think should be an overarching mission for the whole of Government.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

T5.   I welcome the Secretary of State’s earlier remarks about looking to address the causes of economic inactivity in the over-50s. The people and skills element of the UK shared prosperity fund could be well placed to fund the kind of support that that age group needs to get back into the workforce, but that funding will not be available until 2024-25, which is much too late to address the current crisis. Will the Department work with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to bring the funding forward to 2023-24?

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Lady raises an interesting and important point. We are certainly in discussions with DLUHC about those kinds of matters—perhaps I will leave it at that.

Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill

Sarah Olney Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

It is vital that we provide additional support to those in receipt of disability and means-tested benefits who are covered under this Bill, but in itself it is not an adequate response to the depth and breadth of the cost of living crisis we are currently experiencing. The Chancellor is already hammering families with an £800 tax hike this year, more than wiping out measures in this Bill for those who will benefit from it. The national insurance rise and the freezing of income tax thresholds are unfair tax rises, making the cost of living crisis worse for millions of families across the UK by decreasing employees’ take-home pay. Households are facing the highest tax burden in 70 years; the typical family will see a hit of £1,200 a year through a combination of Conservative party tax rises and soaring energy prices, according to the Resolution Foundation. We welcome the Bill’s provision creating the £650 payment, but call for it to be paid in full in July instead of being paid in two instalments in July and October, because people need that support right now—although more support might still be required in the autumn.

The simplest way for the Government to help people right now would be to scrap the tax hikes to which I have referred. What we most want is an emergency VAT cut. Cutting VAT from 20% to 17.5% for one year would save families an average of £600; it would put money back into people’s pockets right now, boosting the economy and supporting struggling businesses. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that the Treasury is due to take in an extra £8.6 billion in VAT due to inflation, which is £430 per family, so we think the Government could afford to fund that.

Cutting VAT would help to address spiralling inflation as well as keeping costs down for families. A similar VAT cut in 2008 boosted retail sales by about 1% and aggregate expenditure by 0.4%; that shows the difference it could make to struggling businesses right now. At the time of that same VAT cut in December 2008 inflation fell from 4.1% to 3.1%, and a similar saving right now could make a huge difference to struggling families.

In addition to the welcome targeted support announced in this Bill we would like the £20 uplift to universal credit restored. We accept all the arguments that that was an emergency measure, but this is also an emergency. The Government said at the time that higher wages are a better option than benefit increases, but we have seen just this week the tension caused between the historically high rate of inflation and the downward pressure the Government would like to maintain on employee wages, and this debate will be played out in many different circumstances across the summer and into the autumn. The Government’s argument that wage increases are the route to restoring household finances will come under considerable pressure, so I encourage them to think about that £20 a week uplift once more, because it would provide some of the poorest households on UC with an additional £1,000 a year, and we all know from our postbags what a difference that would make to the very poorest in our constituencies.

Much as we welcome the measures in the Bill, some of the most vulnerable groups in our society are not going to receive any additional support in facing the cost of living crisis thanks to these measures. The Government must look at that again. Several Members across the House have mentioned unpaid carers, and I want to add our contribution on that. They have once again been forgotten by the Government, who have provided no additional support despite the invaluable role unpaid carers play; it is difficult to calculate the additional pressures there would be on our care system if they did not play that role. As has been said, unpaid carers face additional costs as a result of their caring responsibilities. Those claiming carer’s allowance are being excluded from the list of eligible benefit recipients, leaving hundreds of thousands of unpaid carers, including 40% of working-age carers in receipt of carer’s allowance, without any additional support as a result of this Bill.

Millions of vulnerable adults and children depend upon the efforts of our country’s carers, yet as we see time and again, their voices are not being heard by the Government and again they are being excluded from support; they are being abandoned by the Government. The Liberal Democrats will keep championing the cause of unpaid carers, and I really impress on the Government the need to do more for those families.

Another issue that has been raised by a number of right hon. and hon. Members is families with multiple children in poverty. A flat-rate payment does not take into account the number of people in a household, which means that larger households, particularly those with more children, will face the squeeze much more severely. Of course, it is much more likely that a larger household will be made up of more children, so it is children who will suffer the most from having a flat-rate payment. Families in the bottom half of the income distribution with two or more children spend twice as much as equivalent families without children on food, essential household goods and services, clothing, footwear and transport, which leaves larger families in an especially vulnerable position when it comes to the level of inflation that we are seeing. The presence of younger children in a family exacerbates the prevalence of poverty due to the increased financial pressures that come with caring for a young child. Families with under-fives are therefore especially vulnerable.

My team recently met representatives of Little Village, a baby bank organisation that operates mainly in London. They told me that they are expecting to support an additional 1,000 families this year, and that they helped over 6,000 last year. Families cannot just go along to the baby banks; they have to be referred by education, health and social care professionals. These are only the families that have been identified by authorities as being most in need, so we know that the real impact of the cost of living squeeze on families with young children is likely to be much more widespread. Little Village staff told me that pregnant women are skipping meals in order to feed their toddlers, and that families are cutting toes out of their baby onesies to avoid having to buy new ones. This is what families are already having to do to deal with the cost of living crisis. The total number of children in poverty is predicted to rise to 5.2 million by 2023-24—an increase of 1.1 million children. We really need to do more to recognise the size of the households that are being targeted by some of this help.

I also want to mention rural communities and rising fuel prices. The Liberal Democrats want to see an expansion of the rural fuel duty relief scheme. It is currently available only in a handful of remote areas of the UK, but we know that the huge price rises in petrol across the country are having a disproportionate impact in areas where people cannot switch to public transport, particularly the most rural areas. The Government should immediately think about extending the rural fuel duty relief scheme where public transport options are limited, which would include Devon, Cornwall, Shropshire, Cumbria and some parts of Wales, and they should double the relief to 10p a litre. We are seeing real impacts on the rural economy because people are limiting how much they are driving, which affects not just local businesses and the rural economy, but young people accessing educational and employment opportunities. This is something that the Government really must address as a matter of urgency.

I want to take the opportunity to raise the case of my constituent Edna Price, who lost her right arm in a horrifying industrial accident some 45 years ago. Most of her income since then has come from her industrial injuries compensation fund, but this is not a qualifying benefit. For Edna, it causes a number of practical, everyday problems. The income that she earns from the fund is not large, but because it is income from that particular source, and not from pension credit or a qualifying source, she regularly misses out on some of the other, non-financial benefits that are offered to people who are on qualifying benefits. I have written to the Department about Ms Price’s case and would really welcome the opportunity to speak further to the Minister, because Edna will miss out again on this benefit, even though she already struggles to afford her fuel bills. I would very much welcome the opportunity to talk further to the Minister about how my constituent can potentially qualify for some of the other targeted benefits, to supplement her industrial injuries compensation.

I am pleased that the Chancellor is using the social security system to target this payment to households most at risk of hardship. I make the point again that it is a much more effective method than the use of council tax banding to calculate who is eligible for a rebate. In my constituency I think we have, out of all constituencies in the UK, the sixth-highest average house price, which causes residents who live in social housing in my constituency quite a few issues. They are on very low incomes, but the properties they live in often attract a high council tax band valuation, not least because the valuations were done back in the early ’90s on much narrower value bands than I think we would think about using if they were to be done again today.

Too many of my low-income constituents are living in houses that do not qualify for the council tax rebate, in particular those in a number of socially rented homes in the Kingston Borough part of my constituency. When they were valued back in 1991, they were assigned a market value based on the privately sold homes around them. I am thinking of a particular estate in north Kingston with very small homes that house particularly vulnerable people. Those homes have been valued too highly to qualify for the council tax help with fuel bills. If there is anything the Minister can say in summing up, or that we could hear in due course from the Chancellor, on how that could be addressed, I would be very grateful. I wrote to the Department on this issue back in March and I have not had a response. As I say, in a constituency like mine with high housing values, it is a big issue for my low-income constituents.

I would like to close by saying that we welcome the measure in the Bill, but there is still so much more to do and so much more that the Government can do not just in spending, but in thinking about the way they identify people in need of assistance. I welcome the opportunity to hear more about that in due course.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I am sorry you have had to wait, Mr Mills.

British Sign Language Bill

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Brown]

I absolutely agree. The story about a child of a parent—we are all children of our parents—having to tell the parent about a terminal diagnosis when they are obviously coming to terms with it themselves, having heard it for the first time, is just so devastating. I genuinely do not think I would have been able to sit with my mum or dad and explain what a doctor had said, and tell them that their life was about to close. I just do not think I could have done it. To think that that is something that those in the deaf community have to experience often is tragic. It is unfair and it is discriminatory.

Discrimination in all its forms has to be tackled, because it harms us all. What my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire talked about most eloquently was the fact that there is so much talent in the deaf community that is simply not allowed to be unlocked.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I am enjoying listening to the hon. Member’s speech. I was first made aware of the issue of British Sign Language not being an official language by one of my constituents, Feras al-Moubayed. He came to see me because he was really keen to impress upon me, as his local MP, the barriers that he is experiencing in getting work, keeping work and engaging as a full member of society. He is a very talented tailor. He has worked in the past for Harrods and other high-end manufacturers of clothing. He has so much to offer, yet he faces barriers daily. He faces barriers when dealing with local government and with the banks. He frequently finds himself in positions of great stress and anxiety because of the situations that he routinely finds himself in, but he has so much to offer. I am here today because I really want to support this Bill—I am so glad that the Government are supporting it—on behalf of Feras and so many other people like him who have so much to offer.

[Ms Brown]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She reminds me to name-check Lister Community School. The pupils of the deaf community from that school spoke to me earlier this year and requested that I come here today to support the Bill. I am glad that the hon. Lady reminded me to name-check them, and she is absolutely right: frankly, if we are not allowing parts of our community to participate fully in culture and the economy, the whole of our community and all of us are the lesser for it.

I am really grateful that this Bill will allow some very basic and practical steps to be taken to right this wrong. I want to enable it to proceed today, so I am going to sit down now and hope that it passes as quickly as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

I have heard it all. How on earth the Scottish Government, were they in any event to get independence, would be able to pay ongoing state pensions is a mystery that no Scottish politician has ever been able to answer. The factual reality is that the state pension, by reason of the triple lock, is up £2,000 per person, something that would never happen under an independent Scotland—that is for sure.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

3. What steps she is taking to support families affected by the end of the uplift to the standard allowance of universal credit.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (David Rutley)]

The Government have always been clear that the £20 uplift was a temporary measure. Universal credit recipients in work will soon benefit from the reduction in the taper rate from 63% to 55%, with work allowances increasing by £500 a year, meaning that nearly 2 million working households will keep about an extra £1,000 a year on average.

[Sarah Olney]

My constituent Simon Holroyd lost his mother to covid and is a single father to 10-year-old twins. He worked in the hospitality industry all his life to a senior level, but since the pandemic he has struggled to find work and is reliant on universal credit. His life before the uplift was removed was, in his words,

“a revolving mess of balancing debts”.

Now his situation is desperate. The Minister and the Secretary of State have both referred to the uplift as temporary, but for claimants such as my constituent who were not claiming universal credit before the uplift, the removal of the £20 is experienced only as a loss. Will the Minister commit to reintroducing the uplift?

[David Rutley]

With 1 million vacancies and above in the UK and with a comprehensive plan for jobs, our focus absolutely has to be on helping people into work, particularly in the hospitality sector, where there are vacancies. I hope that there might be a vacancy for the hon. Member’s constituent.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

Absolutely. I am grateful to all the stakeholders and those with real-lived experience, including disabled people themselves, who have been working with the Department on: the proposed changes to SRTI; our forthcoming health and disability Green Paper, which will look at both disability benefits and support and disability employment, of which we have delivered record amounts; and our national strategy for disabled people, which has the Prime Minister’s personal support and will, for the first time, bring genuine cross-Government focus to create more inclusivity and remove barriers. All of those are due very soon, and I am confident that they will be well received.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

What recent assessment she has made of the potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to provide British Sign Language with full legal status.

[The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Justin Tomlinson)]

On 18 March 2003, the UK Government formally recognised that British Sign Language is a language in its own right. Provision for accessing services by users of BSL are already covered by the Equality Act 2010 and the public sector equality duty.

[Sarah Olney]

My constituent Feras Al-Moubayed is engaged in a dispute with a high street bank but has been unsuccessful in his attempts to secure time with a BSL interpreter to sort through and categorise evidence documents for his case. As a result, he has missed several Financial Ombudsman Service deadlines, which has caused considerable stress and anxiety. If the Minister will not commit to bringing forward legislative proposals to provide BSL with a full legal status, will he commit to making more provision available to support people such as Mr Al-Moubayed in my constituency in the interim?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Member for raising that matter; I encourage her also to raise it with our Treasury colleagues, because it sounds like additional support is needed. On the broad principle, I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), who has a great deal of personal experience in this area, is looking at a potential private Member’s Bill, for which I have offered my full support by hosting a roundtable with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, stakeholders and cross-Government officials to look at how the public sector equality duty and the Equality Act 2010 are or are not providing sufficient support for those who rely on BSL. I welcome all support in that area.

Income Tax (Charge)

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD) [V]]

In common with so much of what we have seen from this Government during their handling of the pandemic, this was a Budget for selected beneficiaries. Carefully picked groups are going to do well, but it was quite clearly not a Budget for the nation as a whole.

We could have had, for example, a bold move on business rates. Real reform in this area to level the playing field between high street and digital retail has been long overdue. Consumer behaviour is changing, and that change has been accelerated by the pandemic. What is the long-term future for our town centres? How will our communities thrive without the retail businesses that traditionally provide the heart of our towns? We need to lower the barriers to entry to retail and other town centre businesses, and invite new entrepreneurs to try new ideas.

But instead of business rates reform or devolution of power to local authorities, which could have allowed for real change across the whole country, a select few high streets, mostly in Tory-supporting constituencies, get a cash bung. The Chancellor’s bold new plan is for a super deduction that will enable cash-rich firms to get an extremely generous tax deduction on expenditure on plant and machinery across the next two years before being hit with a corporation tax hike. I can tell the Chancellor that after 12 months of little to no trading, many firms in my constituency simply do not have the cash in the bank to make these kinds of investments. Many of them will be burdened by a great deal of debt and unable to take on any more, and will face a long, slow road back towards profitability. Demoralised and exhausted after the effects of the past year, their reward will be a huge hike in corporation tax rates. I am concerned that many will consider it not worth their while. It would have been better to have a windfall tax now on the companies that have continued to prosper during the pandemic and then cut rates again in a few years to encourage those who are rebuilding. Again, only a select number of businesses will benefit from these changes.

We need to see policy for real stimulation and growth in the green economy. We know that we need to transition from carbon-emitting industries if we are to achieve net zero, so we must grasp the nettle of investment in green jobs. There is real opportunity for growth there, but the private sector is waiting for Government strategy and policy to set a direction. The Chancellor could have set that direction yesterday with promises to invest in green technology or to come up with a bold new plan for retrofitting to replace the green homes grant, but he did not.

What is the Chancellor’s plan for investing in sectors that will create jobs in the future? It is freeports, in selected sites, yet there is little evidence that they create economic activity rather than displace it. Again, we see the benefits concentrated in preferred areas of the country rather than a strategy for the country as a whole. The one advantage of freeports, of course, is that they can avoid customs duties and paperwork, currently creating such a barrier to trading thanks to the Government’s terrible deal with the EU. I find it extraordinary that the Chancellor made no mention of how he plans to offset the OBR’s projected 4% hit to the UK’s GDP as a result of leaving the EU. The Chancellor is bringing forward planned economic activity or concentrating it in specific areas of the country rather than investing in new sources of wealth and future jobs. This Budget ignores the real needs of our economy, both for the immediate challenges of the pandemic and for its long-term future.

Universal Credit: Delayed Roll-Out

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and the constructive way in which he put it, but I must respectfully disagree with him. There is no five-week wait. People are able to access their advance on day one.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Can the Minister tell us whether we can now expect to see an improvement to the kind of delays that many applicants are experiencing in their applications being processed? Will the Minister commit himself to publishing some statistics so that we can see whether the impact of this delay has resulted in an improvement to those kinds of delays?

[Will Quince]

I am a little confused, because my understanding is that those performance stats are indeed available. The Department has a very good record on payments and payment timeliness. Can we improve? Of course we can, and I meet with officials on at least a weekly basis to discuss that. In many cases, it is down not just to the Department but to how the claimant provides information. We are putting in additional resource, where appropriate, to help people to help themselves to get us that important information that we need to process the claims.

Jobcentre Plus Offices: Closure

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. We should celebrate not only the high number of people in Kettering in work, but the additional skills with which they have been helped by our hard-working work coaches.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Unemployment may be falling now, but numerous forecasts suggest that the effects of Brexit might reverse or stagnate this decline. What assessment have the Government made of the ability to scale up support in the already overstretched jobcentre pluses if, as many expect, unemployment begins to increase in the future if the cuts go ahead?

[Caroline Nokes]

I would like to direct the hon. Lady’s attention to the National Audit Office report of 2005, which says:

“One of the Department’s main needs is flexibility in the amount of accommodation it uses.”

I reassure the hon. Lady that we are ensuring that we retain enough flexibility within the system to be able to cope with future changes in the jobs market.