Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

I suppose £20 a week may not seem like a great deal of money to many Members on the Government Benches. It is the sort of sum they might spend on a bottle of wine or leave as a staff tip in a fancy restaurant, but for 8,923 people in my constituency of Edinburgh East, it is a very great deal of money indeed. I am talking about people like Nicola, a 33-year-old mother of two, whose partner is in work but does not earn enough to get by without the support of universal credit. The £20 uplift over the past 18 months has been vital for her. She has used it to buy formula for her newborn baby. Then there is Megan, a single mum, who works 24 hours a week as a cleaner and cannot get by without universal credit. She wrote to me to explain that the uplift for her meant that she could stop using the local food bank. If it is taken away, she will have no recourse but to go back to it.

I know that it is probably difficult for a Cabinet made up of so many spivs and millionaires to empathise with people like Megan and Nicola, but it has a responsibility to do so and it shirks that responsibility if it does not pause this policy and reconsider its impact—an impact that will reach to almost 6 million families in every part of this kingdom. I agree with the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) who spoke earlier when he pointed out that this long, difficult last 18 months has not been a situation where everyone has borne the misery and the burden of the pandemic equally. There are some indeed who have done quite well. I know the wealthy were fearful at the beginning when they saw the share prices tumble, but, perversely, the share prices are now at record levels and dividends have never been better. For those without capital, this has been a very, very difficult time.

I want in particular to look at the army of low-paid workers who have been responsible for getting us through this crisis: the people who have cleaned covid away; the people who have cared for our sick; and the people who have delivered and maintained essential lifelines during this pandemic. These are people who have not benefited from the furlough scheme; they have been working every day. They are people who have not had business grants or rates relief, and, such is the shameful wage inequality in our society that many of them are in receipt of universal credit and the only thing that they got was the £20 a week uplift and now that is under threat of being taken away. These are people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. The Government should give these people their applause and their thanks and give them a reward. Instead, these people are getting a kick in the teeth.

There has been a lot of talk about the cost of this. A figure of £6 billion has been suggested as what it would take if this resolution were passed. That is the maximum estimate, by the way, assuming that everyone who is claiming at the minute continues to claim. Six billion pounds is a lot of money, but it is 1.5%—one and a half per cent—of the £400 billion that this Government have deployed during the pandemic. It seems ridiculous that this should be the first thing that is withdrawn, especially when we consider that this measure was brought in as an emergency measure to deal with problems arising from the covid pandemic, because the covid pandemic is most definitely not in the rear view mirror. The covid pandemic is still with us, which is why this policy should be cancelled.

Finally, let me mention the situation in Scotland. It is particularly cruel that, just as the new Scottish Government are bringing in a remarkable ground-breaking new benefit in the form of the child support payment in Scotland to tackle child poverty, the effect of that policy will effectively be wiped out by this cut in the universal credit uplift. There is not much that the Scottish Government can do about that when 85% of all social security spending rests here, but there is something that the Scottish people can do about that: they can choose not to go on living in this state with this Tory Government. They can choose to govern themselves, and that is another reason why they will choose independence in the referendum that is shortly to come.