Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 18th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

I make no apology for defending consumers against an abuse that has gone on for far too long, with people buying annuities where they will get their money back only if they live until they are 90 or beyond. The Financial Conduct Authority, which was created only about six months ago, has already reported on annuities and will bring forward further proposals. We are working with our colleagues at the Treasury who lead on these matters to make sure that this issue, which has gone long unaddressed by successive Governments, is finally tackled.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

8. What assessment he has made of the effect of universal credit on work incentives for lone parents.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

Universal credit fundamentally simplifies support for working lone parents and our analysis shows that UC will create positive work incentives for lone parents.

[Mr Bain]

But does the Minister not accept that research for Gingerbread shows that two in every five lone parents will lose out in cash terms under universal credit, with lone parents in work fighting an uphill battle to make work pay beyond 20 hours a week? Are not this Government not only botching the introduction of universal credit but breaching the Secretary of State’s pledge that UC would make sure that work paid for each and every hour that people work?

[Steve Webb]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for referring to the Gingerbread report, which I have here. It says:

“Universal credit increases the financial pay off from working of single parents”.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 1st July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

The bedroom tax is causing councils enormous financial strain, as it is for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people across the country. On 11 June the pensions Minister told me that the Government are not making monthly checks on how much discretionary housing payment money councils are spending. What will happen to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people when the money runs out?

[Steve Webb]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman mentions the support we give to local authorities through discretionary housing payments. We constantly hear that it is not enough, so he may be startled to learn that in the year just ended, 2012-13, over 300 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales sent us back money totalling over £11 million because they could not spend it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 20th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bain]

Seven weeks in, the true devastating consequences of the bedroom tax are becoming clear: claims for discretionary housing payments up 338% in a month, and in Glasgow rising to 5,500, the highest in the entire country. Is it not the case that the Secretary of State has not provided local councils with the resources they need to deal with a crisis of his making?

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

We have substantially increased the budget for discretionary housing payment, so it is not surprising that there is a rising number of people applying for it. My officials are in regular contact with Scottish local authorities to look at the issues there, as well as in other parts of the country. We have formal evaluation over the next year and two years, and we are monitoring the situation on the ground to see how these reforms are working.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 11th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend has a good track record of challenging the issue of charges and value for money. The Association of British Insurers has just published its code of practice, to which members have to sign up, to ensure that instead of people just defaulting to the provider they save with, they shop around. We will monitor closely whether that makes the market more effective. [Interruption.] Opposition Members are shouting “Do something”, but they did not do something when they were in power.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

A constituent I met on Saturday is a divorced lone parent who works hard for a low income, and his children stay with him on three evenings a week. Why does the Secretary of State believe that such a hard-working individual should lose £12 a week under his hateful bedroom tax?

Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bain]

My hon. Friend is certainly right to draw attention to the absurdity of the Chancellor’s claim that there is a zero tax band for people on low incomes, who of course pay national insurance, higher VAT under this Government and all the things described in this debate. I should also point out that rents are rising in much of Scotland—by 6.3% in Aberdeen and 5.1% in Edinburgh, for example—which is adding to the pressure this policy will cause.

The bedroom tax will hurt the country in many ways that the Government do not presently acknowledge, for example through its impact on families, the economy, employment and housing. First, these plans utterly fail the test of promoting economic growth. Indeed, by diminishing demand among people who will spend the money, the least well-off, they will have a deeply contractionary effect. Keynes’s paradox of thrift will sadly become a death knell for local shops across the country as people are forced to cut back on spending. The University of Strathclyde’s Fraser of Allander Institute estimates the cost to the Scottish economy to be more than 300 jobs, £30 million a year in lost demand and a reduction in wages in Scotland of nearly £8 million a year.

The Minister claims that people should work longer hours, but do I really have to point out to him that under-employment has soared to 3.2 million under this Government and that there is a slump in productivity because demand has been so weakened by their catastrophic fiscal policies? I also remind him that, with the deficit tracking 7% higher this year than last and our credit rating having been downgraded, these are Tory cuts that he is defending because of the Chancellor’s utter and abject failure on growth.

The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted in November 2011 that the economy would grow last year by 2.5%. It has been confirmed today that instead, it grew at less than a tenth of that rate. The impact assessment on these changes also reveals the truth: if people are able to change their behaviour, as the Minister vainly hopes they will, these plans will save little or no money for the Exchequer. His other policies to cut the benefits bill are failing, because unemployment is 340,000 higher than the OBR predicted in 2010 and living standards are falling in a low-growth economy. He can generate the savings he is seeking with this policy only if people cannot move or work longer hours and so are forced to pay the tax. He is making the poorest suffer for the Chancellor’s manifest incompetence in securing less than a tenth of the economic growth we were predicted to have over the past two and a half years.

Secondly, these proposals are a byword for absurdity. The Minister believes that people can simply uproot themselves from homes they have lived in for three decades or more, and from friends, family and jobs, to go and live in parts of the country where there are smaller houses and perhaps fewer opportunities to work. He says that alternatively, people should take in a lodger—a step that is actively discouraged in the registered social housing sector in Scotland, where stock is allocated on the basis of need. The sheer absurdity is further heightened by his refusal to admit until this afternoon that his plans will potentially remove money from up to 96,000 members of the armed forces, nearly 8,000 Army trainees, carers and foster parents in Glasgow, while nearly 1,000 prisoners on remand in Barlinnie jail in my constituency will be exempt.

[Steve Webb]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Bain]

No, because I am compliant with Mr Speaker’s strictures on those who wish to take part in the debate. The Minister will have an opportunity to deal with this later.

All age groups in society will be affected. People over the age of 61 could be drawn into this tax too if they have a spouse or a partner living with them who is under that age and they apply for universal credit after October.

Thirdly, these plans hit the most vulnerable the hardest. Two thirds of the 660,000 people affected across the UK have a disability. Last week I met disabled people who told me that they will be caught by the tax and asked to pay an extra £14 a week for having a room in which no one sleeps but that is used to provide physiotherapy and medical treatment within their home. I spoke to the friends of a young person with a learning disability who is co-operating with the local housing association and who would move into a small house if he could, but there are simply none available. Through no fault of his own, he will be forced to pay the bedroom tax on income support of £47 a week.

Fourthly, there is a lack of available properties for people to move into. Some 540,000, or 81%, of those losing out will be people who cannot move because there are no one-bedroom properties in their areas. According to Glasgow Housing Association, there is a waiting list of 13,000 in Glasgow for one-bedroom properties because housing associations, and the council before them, responded to local housing demand by building homes with two or more bedrooms. With a social housing shortfall of 156,000 properties for Scotland’s housing needs, there is no way the required properties could be built so that people can avoid destitution through having to pay this tax from April.

Fifthly, these plans will cause enormous uncertainty for our housing associations. They now have no clarity about their future revenue levels or the investment decisions they can make on social housing. They are unsure whether they should be building one-bedroom houses. They are fearful of managing a surge in rent arrears, with the cost being paid by all tenants in the form of lower priorities for refurbishment of existing properties or reduced budgets for repairs.

The wider issue is this Government’s lack of empathy with those who live in social housing. This is a further attack on that very concept from a Government who have cut the social housing budget in half. This is not an issue that divides people in Scotland from those in England and in Wales: it is about a feeling that Ministers are losing their sense of what is morally right or wrong for people across the United Kingdom. What best sums up what ordinary people feel about the injustice of this absurd tax is a conversation that I had with a 69-year-old constituent on the way to my constituency office last week, who stopped me to see whether she would be affected by the bedroom tax. When I explained that she would not, she told me how troubled she was that other people in her community would have to pay it. She said that this has been the worst Government in her lifetime and that the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) is the most arrogant and out-of-touch Chancellor in history, but that of all the cruel things they have done, this is by far the most vicious. She was right.

The voice of ordinary people has been heard in this debate, but it must also be reflected in the votes in the Division Lobby tonight. I particularly urge the party of Lloyd George and Gladstone not to vote for a policy that even the party of Thatcher would have shrunk from in the 1980s. It is the duty of all Members to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to nearly 700,000 people by opposing this cruel tax in a strong, clear vote tonight.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

T10. The Minister has failed to justify to the 430,000 women in the rest of the country, or to the 500 women in my constituency, born between 5 April 1952 and 6 July 1953 why they will receive a state pension of up to £1,900 a year less than a man born on the same day as they were.

[Steve Webb]

To risk repetition, I say to the hon. Gentleman not only that those women will receive potentially up to two years more but that, on average, the new system is costing no more than the one it is replacing. So it is simply not the case that we are taking new pensioners and spending more money on them than we were in the system that we are replacing.

State Pension Reform

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 14th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

Yes, I can give my hon. Friend the assurance that he seeks. If a pension document says, “You have already built up a pension of £160, £170 or whatever”, people will get at least that amount. Going forward, people will not be able to build up those sorts of pensions in the future, but when they have built them up already, we will recognise those contributions.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

The 1.4% rise in employee national insurance contributions and the 3.4% rise in employer contributions appear to involve an initial windfall of about £6 billion a year for the Treasury. What guarantees will there be in the Bill that current members of public and private sector pension schemes do not lose out in real terms as a result of these changes?

[Steve Webb]

We have already given a guarantee that, having renegotiated the public sector pension schemes, we will make no further changes in rights under those schemes for 25 years. While we are changing the national insurance state pensions of public sector workers, we are not touching the public sector pension. Private sector workers may—indeed, probably will—find that their employer adjusts the private sector scheme in response, but, as I have said, even with that adjustment—even with the higher national insurance payment—the vast bulk of workers, certainly those within 20 to 25 years of pension age, will still be net beneficiaries.

Benefits Uprating (2013-14)

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Thursday 6th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

We inherited a situation in which approximately £80 billion a year of spending reductions and tax increases were needed simply to balance the books. I have not heard anything this morning from the Opposition—not a single word—on where, now there is no money left, that should come from. If the hon. Gentleman voted against our proposals he would have some credibility, but of course when the crunch comes he will not—he will sit on the fence. He wants his constituents to think he cares, but when it comes to casting his vote in this place he will be somewhere else.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

The Treasury’s own analysis shows that the measures announced yesterday and today are regressive towards people in the seven lowest income deciles. Given that three-quarters of the cuts in tax credits will affect people in work and that the Government have made no steps to deal with the looming work disincentives that will be faced by second earners in couple households with children, are the Government not making a mockery of their pledge to make work pay for everyone?

[Steve Webb]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the distribution impact that was published yesterday, he will realise that he has mysteriously forgotten about the large amounts of additional tax that will be paid by the top decile through the restriction of pension tax relief, who will, by far, lose out the most, and that seems a very progressive thing to do.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 18th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the fact that the Government do not want people in low-paid work put at a disadvantage relative to people who are unemployed. We believe that they should face no worse a situation. That is why we have introduced a housing benefit cap that will particularly affect central London and reduce the local housing allowance from the 50th to the 30th percentile—to make things fair between those who are on benefit and hard-working people in low-paid jobs.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

T6. Does the Secretary of State accept the analysis of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that, with child benefit being frozen and child care support through the tax credit system being cut by 10%, families with children will need to earn 20% more this year than last to meet the soaring costs of child care? What will he do about universal credit to ensure that lone parents, in particular, do not face an unacceptable financial burden because of his changes?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 10th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve Webb]

The consultation that we undertook on the RPI-CPI change was about occupational pensions, and the majority of responses were from occupational pension organisations. Unsurprisingly, as CPI is generally lower, members of the schemes were not so keen and those who have to pay for the schemes were rather keener.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware that, at the weekend, the disability charity Scope described her plans to remove the mobility component of disability living allowance as “a callous decision”, which would

“result in people being prisoners in their own homes”,

and that disability lawyers have expressed concerns about the compatibility of the changes with the European convention on human rights? When will the Minister join the growing national consensus that the plans are unfair and unacceptable, and withdraw them?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Webb and William Bain

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

T9. Is the Minister aware that his own Department’s statistics show that the impact of restricting local housing allowance to the 30th percentile in Glasgow is that 92% of recipients in one-bedroom properties will lose out by, on average, £7 per week? The Glasgow Housing Association told me on Friday that that is likely to lead to higher levels of rent arrears and lower levels of available investment for its properties. Does not that show how unfair and badly designed the proposals are?

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)]

I can only agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman on the manifesto on which he stood for election, which stated that we have to cap the rents that we are paying. His analysis assumes a static situation in which rents do not change. The Department puts more than £21 billion into the local housing allowance. If we changed the rules for that, we would change the market. We are trying to put pressure on rents so that they will go down, which will improve the situation.