Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Debate between Stephen Timms and Andrew Bridgen

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

As the hon. Lady well knows, the big impact on child poverty will come from the huge cuts in working tax credits and other changes not in this Bill but elsewhere. I hope that she will join us in fighting very strongly against those changes when the House has the chance to do so.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The shadow Secretary of State is making a brave effort to defend whatever his party’s policy is on this, but he has very little credibility because the country knows that under the previous Labour Government the number of workless households doubled, so Labour policies not only trap people in welfare but trap people in poverty.

[Stephen Timms]

Child poverty fell dramatically under the previous Government; now it has plateaued. I fear that because of measures announced in the Budget, it is going to rocket, and we are determined to stop that happening if we can.

Another reform in the Bill that we support in principle is the provision to turn support for mortgage interest into a repayable loan. That is a sensible step, in principle, given that the benefit enables homeowners to retain an asset and potentially gain substantially from rising house prices. However, it must not make affordability problems worse for people struggling to stay in their homes. Repayments must not tip people into repossession and homelessness. The Secretary of State did not tell us what arrangements are proposed for repaying these loans. We will argue that those who access that support should be able to defer repayment until they sell the property without pressure from the Government to do so. The Budget announced an increase in the waiting period for support for mortgage interest from 13 weeks to 39 weeks. That is too long. As it is a loan scheme, why make people wait, particularly as that could force them into the hands of loan sharks? With support for mortgage interest becoming, in effect, a form of low-risk consumer credit, it should be readily available without nine months of delay to those struggling to make repayments.

We welcome the plans to reduce social rents, which will save 1.2 million households £700 a year, but we have grave concerns about the impact on housing associations and local authorities. They will face a huge reduction in rent revenue, drastically undermining their capacity to borrow and to build. The Office for Budget Responsibility says that many fewer homes will be built; the National Housing Federation puts the figure at 27,000. We will table amendments to address that.

Compulsory Jobs Guarantee

Debate between Stephen Timms and Andrew Bridgen

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to put a strict limit on the amount of time that people can be left on jobseeker’s allowance without being offered, and required to take up, paid work, by introducing a compulsory jobs guarantee that would ensure that anyone under 25 who has been receiving jobseeker’s allowance for a year, and anyone over 25 who has been receiving jobseeker’s allowance for two years, would be offered a paid job, with training, that they must take up or face losing benefits; and further calls on the Government to ensure this compulsory jobs guarantee be fully funded by a one-off repeat of the tax on bankers’ bonuses and restricting pension tax relief on incomes over £150,000.

This is a debate about the kind of recovery our country needs to see, about who is being left behind, about the kind of future we are building for the next generation and about whether this Government are using more than just warm words when they talk about full employment, as the Prime Minister has done recently.

Our challenge to Ministers today is to put a strict time limit on the period for which someone can be left on jobseeker’s allowance before they are offered, and required to take, proper paid work. The compulsory jobs guarantee, funded by a tax on bankers’ bonuses and restrictions to pensions tax relief on incomes over £150,000 a year, would mean a new start and new hope for the more than 29,000 young people who have been out of work for over a year, and for the 130,000 over-25s who have been out of work for more than two years.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify whether this will be the 10th or the 11th time his party has spent the bankers’ bonus tax?

[Stephen Timms]

We had a bankers’ bonus tax in the past, but this will be the sole purpose for the new bankers’ bonus tax to be introduced after the next election. We will all be committed to the guarantee that I am setting out for the House this afternoon.

Those people I have described are the ones this Government have left behind. They are the people whom Labour Members are not going to forget, not only because we owe them a fair chance to escape long-term unemployment but because we cannot afford, as a country, to leave them on benefits for years on end. Nor can we afford the consequences of the low wages that they are likely to earn if they do find work after such a long period of unemployment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

I will in a moment, but I wish to make a little more progress first.

There are serious causes for concern in the labour market and much more needs to be done to build a recovery that works for everyone. Long-term unemployment remains much too high. The long period—three years—after the general election when there was almost no growth in the economy has left too many people locked out of employment and now left behind even as overall employment is rising. The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance for more than two years is 224% of what it was in May 2010, and young people remain at high risk of unemployment. Strikingly, the relative position of young people has become steadily worse since 2010 The most recent figures show that the youth unemployment rate is almost three times the overall rate—it is 2.9 times that rate—and for the past three months, while overall unemployment has been falling, youth unemployment has been going up. The total is now back above three quarters of a million, and we just have to hope that that is not the new trend. Action needs to be taken now to make sure that it is not and that young people are able to share in the benefits of the recovery.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Would the right hon. Gentleman like to comment on the words of James Sproule, the chief economist of the Institute of Directors? He said that

“Labour’s job scheme does not bear much scrutiny as a solution. No government can pull a lever in Whitehall and expect youth unemployment to disappear.”

Is not the truth that only the private sector can create sustainable jobs but that it needs a business-friendly Government to do so?

[Stephen Timms]

Jobs are being created. The question is: who is going to get them? At the moment, the evidence clearly shows that young people disproportionately are not. We know that the future jobs fund worked—I will discuss that in a moment—and we are going to be repeating that approach with this jobs guarantee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

I have just mentioned the FSB. My hon. Friend will know how active it has been in demanding change of the kind he describes and makes a telling case for. I agree: more should be done to support small business in that way, and in other ways. We need to reform how the banks deal with their small-business customers too.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The right hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. He has expounded a great deal on his belief in Jobs Growth Wales. His party’s socialist policies have been implemented in Wales, but figures from the Welsh Government show that only one in three of the young people who have applied for Jobs Growth Wales got a job, so it is nowhere near guaranteeing a job for all young people.

[Stephen Timms]

We will be delivering a guarantee, exactly as we did with the future jobs fund. Anyone can look back at the record of the future jobs fund, where a guarantee was delivered. It will be again.

I shall say a little more about how the guarantee would work. Participants would be required, if their employer did not plan to keep them on when the subsidy ended, to pursue intensive job search for a permanent opportunity at the end of the six months. Any jobseeker who refused to take up a job offered under the guarantee would, in the normal way and in line with the long-standing conditions for benefit claims, lose their benefits. That is always the case.

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Debate between Stephen Timms and Andrew Bridgen

Thursday 13th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

This is what the Prime Minister called for in November:

“The right framework, so it’s easier for new companies to start up”.

That is what he wants to happen in the east London tech city initiative. My question to the Minister is why is the Bill not doing that which the Prime Minister has so clearly called for? If it were my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn appealing to the Minister to do that, I could understand why he would not be willing to do it, but it is the Prime Minister, who appointed the Minister to his job. Why is the Minister not doing what the Prime Minister said?

I commend to the Minister the Prime Minister’s speech of 4 November, in which he went on to describe what different parties are doing to help to secure this vision of a new high-tech city in east London:

“But what about here—in the heart of east London where there’s already so much to work with? We’re working with business to make sure the infrastructure and advice you need is in place. Imperial Innovations, the venture capital arm of Imperial College London”—

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman welcome the coalition Government’s reintroduction of the enterprise allowance scheme, which we have opened to people the length and breadth of the UK who have been unemployed for six months or more to help them get into self-employment?

[Stephen Timms]

I have always taken the view that self-employment is a very important vehicle for helping people not in work to get into work. That is why the new deal for self-employment, as an element of the new deal in the past, was so valuable, and I welcome other initiatives to achieve the same thing.

The Prime Minister went on to say that Imperial Innovations

“is going to advise on making sure this accelerator space is attractive to spinout companies from academia and beyond. Indeed, they will be encouraging some of their own brilliant companies to be based here.”

I very much welcome that. I look forward to those start-up companies being established.