Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Mel Stride(1 year ago)
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Mel Stride
The hon. Lady’s question is best directed to the Department for Business and Trade rather than DWP, as it relates to employment legislation and regulation. However, I am pleased to tell her that we have our 50PLUS champions, work champions in our jobcentres, the Midlife MOT and many other measures that are there to help exactly the people she describes.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)
We have a number of projects that use artificial intelligence within the Department to drive performance, efficiency and the service we provide to our customers. One important point to bear in mind is that we never replace a human when it comes to judgments relating to a claim or an appeal.
Stephen Metcalfe
Will my right hon. Friend tell the House what assessment he has made of the potential merits of the use of AI in fraud protection? How will his Department ensure that appropriate safety measures are in place?
Mel Stride
Let me take the second of my hon. Friend’s points first. As I have outlined, there is always human intervention when it is appropriate. None the less, he is quite right to raise the issue of fraud and error. We have seen a reduction in the Department over the past year of some 10% across the benefit system, and much of that has been driven by machine learning and data analytics.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Mel Stride(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mel Stride)
The latest data from the Office for National Statistics indicates that some 21% of the working-age population are economically inactive.
Stephen Metcalfe
As my right hon. Friend will be aware, the staff at Basildon Jobcentre Plus are doing incredible work to help people back into work. That has led to a local inactivity rate that is 12.6% below the UK average. Events such as its large employer-unemployed connection event, bringing together organisations with hundreds of jobseekers, are leading to really meaningful job opportunities. Can my right hon. Friend tell the House what else the Government are doing to get people off out-of-work benefits?
Mel Stride
May I first commend my hon. Friend for all the good work he is doing locally? The 12.6% figure for economic inactivity is extremely low and is a great tribute to the work he has just referred to. Other things we are doing include: the provision of job interventions for over-50s who have retired early; the childcare provision I referred to for parents with childcare duties; and a great deal of work on how we better facilitate getting the long-term sick and disabled back into the labour market.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Mel Stride(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mel Stride)
In the last Budget we abolished stamp duty for first-time buyers for the first £300,000 of a property’s value up to £500,000 in total. That has meant that 95% of first-time buyers have paid less stamp duty and a full 80% of first-time buyers have paid no stamp duty at all.
Stephen Metcalfe
Last November the Chancellor announced an ambitious package to tackle the broken housing market. How many first-time buyers have benefited from that package, particularly in Essex, and where can people find further information about this so we can make hopefully impressive numbers even greater?
Mel Stride
Some 69,000 individuals have already benefited from this vital tax relief and over 1 million will do so over the coming five years. We do not have disaggregated data specifically for Essex, but I can tell my hon. Friend that within the south-east 12,900 individuals have benefited from first-time buyer tax relief.