Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Sarah Teather and Gareth Johnson

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather (Brent Central) (LD)]

People who come to my constituency office these days for help with some kind of error in their benefits often spend the first few minutes trying to justify their worth. They usually begin by trying to explain their history of working and that they have paid tax. They are desperate to get over the point that they are not like other benefit claimants—they are not a scrounger. It is perhaps a feature of the way in which the term “scroungers” has become so pervasive in social consciousness that even those on benefits do not attempt to debunk the entire category, only to excuse themselves from the label.

Language matters. Politicians in this place know that, because all of us spend a good deal of time worrying about how everything we say will be reported by the media, just as journalists pore over every fact, comma and noun we give to look for power shifts and personal divisions. Any modern political party devotes considerable money and effort to testing messages with focus groups to see how they would influence voting patters. However, I am afraid we often spend less time considering how our language actually affects people’s lives, choices, values and sense of worth, how they rub up against their neighbours and how society itself functions.

In an atmosphere of uncertainty and limited resources and where every family in this country is struggling, there is a natural tendency to try to find someone to blame for our woes. A fissure already exists between the working and non-working poor. Hammering on that fault line with the language of “shirkers” and “strivers” will have long-term impacts on public attitudes, on attitudes to one neighbour against another. It will make society less generous, less sympathetic, less able to co-operate. The marginalisation of the undeserving poor will place one group outwith society entirely over time and leave them less able to make choices about their lives and to participate. That fragmentation of society, for me, is the spectre of broken Britain, and it is one that we hasten at our peril.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady not recognise that the nub of the whole argument is that if we allow benefits to be increased by more than salaries, that will increase the number of people on benefits who are trapped in poverty and unable to afford to go to work?

[Sarah Teather]

I will return to that point in a moment, because I want to make another point about public attitudes first.

For those of us in this place who care about social justice, long-term changes in public attitudes to poverty should give us other causes of concern, because they will make it more difficult for any politicians who come after us to argue for any option for the poor, because public opinion will simply not support it. The irony, of course, is that, as many have said, many of those affected by the Bill are actually in work; many are the same group who have already had a negligible pay rise and are already bumping along at the bottom of the poverty threshold. For me, that is the first of a number of disingenuous comparisons used to argue for the fairness of the Bill. The first is that those affected are out of work, when many more are in fact in work but on low pay. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) mentioned a moment ago, many of those are part of the group of people who cycle in and out of work all the time; I see that in my constituency.

The second disingenuous point is about percentages themselves, which fail to take into account the cuts to housing benefit that families in my constituency will be experiencing in the next six months or so as the changes filter through. There are also the changes in April to council tax benefit; they will affect the same families affected by the uprating provisions in the Bill.

The third point is whether percentages mean anything at all. Whatever goal posts are used to measure the percentage change in benefit across time, it is clear that the monetary value of rising average wages is significantly more than that of benefits. Percentages do not buy milk, bread or school uniforms—pounds and pennies buy those things, and it is in pounds and pennies that people will experience a cut.