Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

“I will not have enough money to buy food or heat my home…I don’t know how I will eat...I am afforded no dignity...I am thrown on the scrap heap”—

those are the words of Joan, a woman in her 60s who wrote to me about the effects of the cut to universal credit. She said:

“I am ashamed to be in this situation”.

Another person who wrote to me was a single mum who told me about her beautiful daughter. They escaped domestic violence but now, even

“with the uplift... life is crushingly hard”,

she wrote. She continued:

“But losing 20 pounds a week will send us spiralling down.”

She said that she does not know

“how the Conservatives can do this to people”.

That is a tiny snapshot of the correspondence that I have received about the cut to universal credit and working tax credits. “How can they do this to people?” was the question. It is the single biggest overnight social security cut in the history of the welfare state, hitting more than 6 million families, including around 10,000 households in Coventry South. It is expected to push 700,000 more people, including 300,000 children, into poverty, with more than 500,000 pushed into extreme poverty.

Let us look at who is pushing this through. In the words of Amy, another person who wrote to me:

“I truly wish the Conservatives understood the impact of this cut. I don’t want to be on benefits”.

But what makes it “really humiliating”, she said, is

“that we have to prove we’re worth an extra 20 pounds a week to people who say they can’t survive on 150,000 pounds a year.”

That is the truth. The Conservative party is from a different world from those who are being hit by this cruel cut.

In one of my first speeches in Parliament, I called for an end to the inequality in opportunities that exists between working-class children and those born to wealth and sent to schools like Eton. For that simple demand, a Government Member accused me of “class warfare”. But if there is class warfare in Britain, this is it: led by an old Etonian, a Chancellor who is the richest member of the House, a Cabinet that is two thirds privately educated, and funded by the super-rich. The Conservative party is launching one of the biggest ever attacks on the living standards of the working class in this country, pushing millions more into desperation and misery. If Government Members have even a single scrap of decency, they will vote against this cut and instead, at the very least, extend the uplift to all legacy benefits.