Autumn Statement Distributional Analysis, Universal Credit and ESA

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend is laying out a powerful case for the need to make some very different decisions next week in the interest of all our futures. There is clearly a combined moral and economic rationale for an urgent focus on disability employment. The 30% disability employment gap makes that even more important. Does my right hon. Friend agree that people with disabilities and their families deserve so much more from the Government, who should be on their side, rather than pursuing a strategy characterised by cuts to ESA, the tragic failure of work capability assessments and no strategy for fairness?

[John McDonnell]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. There is a week in which we can overturn at least an element of that brutality. This week, we need to seize upon the chance as best we can, across parties, to deliver change.

From our privileged position in this House, I firmly believe that before we consider cuts to basic support for low earners and disabled people, we have a moral duty, as my hon. Friend said, to fully appreciate the plight of many of our fellow citizens and the impact that any changes that are forced upon them could have. There are some basic facts that we need to face up to—basic facts that depict the harsh reality of the lives of so many members of our community. Nearly 4 million of our children are living in poverty. The scandal is that two thirds of them live in families where someone is working. Thanks to low wages, zero-hours contracts and forced or bogus self-employment, which has been exposed today, the promise that work will lift people out of poverty is a broken one for many.

If a basic responsibility of the Government is to ensure that their population is adequately fed and housed, they are failing. A million emergency food parcels were given out by food banks last year to families who did not have sufficient income to feed themselves. The latest reports confirm that the numbers are rising. This year, 200,000 children in our country will be dependent on a food bank to get a decent meal at Christmas. One survey reported that more than 20% of parents had regularly not eaten so that their children could eat. Others report the frequent choice between eating and heating. This is 2016.

On the duty of the Government to ensure that people are adequately housed, they are failing again. Rough sleeping has doubled in recent years. The equivalent of 100 households a day are evicted from rented homes—a near-record 40,000 in the year to date. Some 1.2 million households are stuck on council housing waiting lists. In my constituency tonight, there will be families sleeping in beds in sheds that have been rented to them.

As for the Government’s responsibility for disabled people, as the UN report concisely summed it up, the Government have—and I quote—systematically or gravely violated the rights of disabled people. Independent research suggested that Government efforts to push people off claiming disability benefits have been associated with more than 500 people committing suicide in three years.

Three years ago, I led a debate following the presentation of the War on Welfare petition, which highlighted the call for an overall impact assessment of the Government’s policies on disabled people. I cited the immense human suffering caused by the brutal implementation of the work capability assessment and the latest round of cuts to benefits and care services. I cited examples of people who had tragically taken their own lives in despair following the WCA and the penalisation through sanctions. We now know that those suicides were not isolated examples, but that there have been hundreds.