Universal Credit Roll-out

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker. It is always good to have that discipline behind one.

Let me start with a point about process. I listened carefully to what the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), said. In the House, she resisted temptation and accurately quoted what the House had decided last week, but I am afraid that outside the House the Labour party is misleading people. It is saying that Parliament voted to pause and fix universal credit, but the motion last week did no such thing. I mention that because it is important to the substance of today’s debate about the Government’s response.

As the hon. Lady said, the House did ask the Government to pause, but what the House did not do was provide a single reason in that motion why the Government should pause. [Interruption.] I was at the debate last week, and I spoke in it. The hon. Lady set out some reasons in her speech, but the motion, which is what the Government have been asked to respond to, contained not a single reason why the Government should pause.

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

It may well be that if Her Majesty's Opposition had added just a couple of words to their motion so that it read, “That this House calls on the Government to pause the roll-out of universal credit full service in January 2018, as announced in the written statement by the Government in November 2016”, we could all have agreed.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention.

Let me run through, very briefly, one or two of the points made by the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth. She is fond of saying that she completely supports the principle of universal credit and wants it to be implemented, but she then goes on to list innumerable reasons for her fundamental disagreement with all the key strands of the benefit. She cannot have it both ways. If she does not want universal credit to be implemented, let her just stand up and say so. She should not pretend that she agrees with the fundamental principles, and then say that she disagrees with almost every important aspect of it.

I listened to and read very carefully what the hon. Lady said during last week’s debate. I shall pick just a couple of reasons for the fact that I could not support that motion. The hon. Lady referred specifically to housing. The Minister set out the position very clearly today, as the Secretary of State did last week. If there are universal credit recipients who have issues with managing their rent, they can arrange for their landlords to be paid directly, but I do not think we should patronisingly assume that every single person receiving universal credit is incapable of managing the rent. Most of them are perfectly capable of managing their finances, and we should treat them accordingly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The Opposition Front-Bench winding-up speech of three minutes must begin no later than 4.52 pm, so the final two speakers have a maximum of three minutes left—a bit less.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

I hope to end the debate on a note of agreement. Everyone in this Chamber wants people to have the opportunity to work, if they are able to work, and to be supported in the process of finding work. And when they do find work, we all want them to be paid properly. That, I hope, we can all agree on.

I hope we can also agree that the old system was a nightmare. I do not speak just from my experience of working in this place. In my previous career I worked in criminal courts across the country as a prosecutor for the Department for Work and Pensions. I would work through a whole load of cases when I visited a magistrates court, such as Camberwell Green magistrates court, and I cannot say how many single working mums were being prosecuted by the DWP because they had gone one or two hours over their 16 hours. Members of this House talk about being caring, but I dropped those cases myself—I took the decision that it was not in the public interest to prosecute. When did those cases happen? In the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

When people speak about a caring welfare system, let us not pretend that the old system cared. Let us instead work together to make the new system work better for our constituents. Let us take advantage of the pause in January 2018 to address some of the issues that have been raised in these debates, but please let us not pretend that the old system worked, because it did not. Universal credit is an effort to design a better system for our constituents, and I support it.