Steve Baker
Main Page: Steve Baker (Conservative - Wycombe)Department Debates - View all Steve Baker's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(4 years, 4 months ago)
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Mike Amesbury
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come on to that later in my speech.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
I am listening very closely to the hon. Gentleman, and, having skim-read the order, I concede of course that some of the increases are very modest, but my hon. Friend the Minister set out the overall cost of even those increases. What would the Labour party do? How big would its increases be and what would the overall cost be to the taxpayer?
Mike Amesbury
Unfortunately, the Labour party is not in government, but I will say to the hon. Gentleman that the cuts have amounted to £4.7 billion per year, so the so-called investment that the Government propose pales into insignificance against that.
As we have heard from the Minister today, the Government intend to end their four-year freeze on benefits by proposing to uprate working-age benefits in line with the CPI rate as of September 2019, which was 1.7%. We welcome that slight step forward. Remarkably, for a range of benefits and not just universal credit, this will be the first cash increase in basic entitlements since April 2015. It is important to point out that there has not been any recent change in policy from the Government: the freeze was always due to come to an end in April this year, as announced by the previous Chancellor.
If we scratch beneath the surface of the increase, we find that, after adjustment for price increases, the four-year benefit freeze has actually meant a cut in the real level of benefits by 6%. In many cases, that has come on top of earlier cuts. The 2015-16 benefits freeze followed uprating by only 1% each year in the three years prior to its introduction. There is, therefore, now a yawning gap between the level of benefits offered and essential living costs. Those political choices have consequences, with child poverty, homelessness and in-work poverty at alarming levels, as evidenced in the recently published Joseph Rowntree Foundation UK Poverty report.
Indeed, under this Prime Minister, children will receive a miserly increase of 75p per week in child benefit, and the second child just 55p per week.