Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit

Wendy Chamberlain Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD) [V]]

The Liberal Democrats fully support the £20 uplift to universal credit and making it permanent, and we will vote in favour of the motion accordingly. It is the right thing to do to ensure that our most vulnerable have a safety net that works for them and their dependants. It is the right thing to do to invest in our social security system and the best way to help people to escape from poverty and help stimulate our recovery. And it is the right thing to do to act now and give families certainty, rather than the approach favoured by the Government, which is to leave families in the dark, in the middle of the greatest economic crisis this country has ever seen.

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed how so many people see our welfare system. People who never thought they would interact with the system are now doing so and will need to continue doing so beyond April. We should therefore not be debating whether we should take away the vital £20; we should be debating whether we can go further. Hundreds of thousands of people receive legacy benefits and many of them are unable to transfer to universal credit. They were excluded last year from the Chancellor’s uplift on an entirely arbitrary basis. This group includes many disabled people and their carers. How can we leave them out of the uplift at a time that is difficult for so many? What happened to “no one left behind”? What happened to “whatever it takes”?

The Government have failed to act on this issue, and my North East Fife constituents who claim legacy benefits feel forgotten. That is why we support uplifting legacy benefits and backdating the uplift to April 2020.

It is the same story for carers. Unpaid carers are doing a remarkable and important job in very difficult circumstances. They deserve our support, but there is an historic deficit in the support available to unpaid carers. Carer’s allowance is just £67.25 a week, the lowest benefit of its kind. That is why it is vital that the Government immediately uplift carer’s allowance, too, in line with the uplift to universal credit. Too often, carers have been an afterthought for many politicians. It is time to stand up for them.

As more and more people access universal credit, it is also high time that we looked at the areas where it is failing to deliver. Last year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a report looking at universal credit in Glasgow. The report highlighted that many people who access universal credit suffer from mental ill-health, but even more damningly, it said that even among people who did not have a mental health condition, many still suffered anxiety caused by their engagement with universal credit. The reasons include challenges in navigating the online system and a lack of face-to-face support with this, poverty and financial insecurity due to the waiting period for the first payment, the stress of managing budgets between payments, housing, conditionality and the fear of sanctions. The whole point of conditionality is to get people back to work, but right now there is simply little prospect of that. The Government have failed to suspend conditionality during the current lockdown even though they suspended it between March and July last year. On the “digital by default” approach, the majority of claimants access the system on mobile technology, and this has issues for my rural constituency.

In short, there is much work to be done.