Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Simon Hoare and Andy McDonald

Committee of the whole House & 3rd reading
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andy McDonald]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point. We have to raise our heads and look at our brothers and sisters, who are actively and economically engaged in our country, and think about the contribution they make and the payments they make into the Treasury, through tax and national insurance. We must treat them with dignity and respect, rather than trying to other them at every opportunity.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

The hon. Member makes an incredibly powerful and telling point about the disincentive of trying to get into work for people who have a varying and fluctuating condition, such as MS. That is an unanswerable point and I will listen with interest to what the Minister has to say in response. Does he agree with me that in conversations that the Minister has with what we are too lazily inclined to refer to as “the disabled community”, unless we are able to break down disabled groups into those who have a permanent condition and those who have a fluctuating condition, and to individually tailor responses to that, it will be a missed opportunity to get this right?

[Andy McDonald]

The hon. Member makes an important point, and it is critical that that is reflected on the face of the Bill. With all sincerity, we cannot walk away from here thinking that guidance notes are enough. They may change fundamentally in further iterations and say something completely different from what this honourable and decent Minister is saying to us today. Policy for disabled people must be made with them, not imposed upon them.

If we are serious about ending austerity, we cannot keep balancing the books on the backs of the poorest. That means revisiting not just what we spend, but who we tax and how. We have heard about the party of millionaires making their case that this country has done so well by them—they are so privileged to have made a success of their lives and to have flourished—that they are looking at the opportunities they were given and saying, “Please, we can make a further contribution.” It is they who made the argument about a wealth tax that would raise £24 billion. Nigel Lawson, when he was Chancellor, thought that the differential between capital gains tax and income tax was an anathema, and he equalised it, so there are opportunities for us there.

The Employment Rights Bill also presents us with wonderful opportunities. If we could grasp the issue of “single status of worker” and deal with the issue of bogus self-employment, limb (b) employment, zero-hours contracts and the rest of it, that not only represents secure, well-paid, unionised work for people to give them a flourishing life; it also gives us the opportunity to collect currently uncollected tax and national insurance, to the tune of £10 billion per annum. That would also mean supporting people according to their needs. That is not Marx, but the Acts of the Apostles.

This is a moment of reckoning. The country expects better. If we are to lose our nerve now, we will lose more than a vote: we will lose the trust that brought us here. We must reflect that during our discussions about the Bill, each and every one of us has heard the response from our constituents and our offices that this has been a shambles—there is no other word to describe it. Now is the moment to stop the cuts and I implore the Government to rethink the Bill.