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Mr. Evennett: Ah, the hon. Gentleman is going to give us some information.
Mr. O'Brien: It is annoying me that the hon. Gentleman says that we have policies to spend lots of money and also says that we have no policies. That sort of argument is intellectually idle. If he can say what he is charging us with, I can answer him.
Mr. Evennett: The hon. Gentleman has fallen straight into the trap. The Opposition say that of course they will spend more, because we are not spending enough on health, education or whatever, but on the other hand they say that they will make no spending commitments. He has answered his question, because he has not given us the answers. He is riding two horses in different directions and hoping that the electorate will not notice. I notice that the hon. Gentleman is grinning--
Sir Terence Higgins: For the cameras.
Mr. Evennett: The television cameras should perhaps show the hon. Gentleman. He knows that he cannot ride two horses, as do all the Opposition Front Benchers. They cannot and will not get away with that because the electorate will see through it.
I strongly support the commitment by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security to improve the social security system and to ensure that the Government's commitments--to pensioners and the people in need, who need benefits--are kept.
We believe in the uprating of pensions and in increasing benefits for those who are really in need, and the taxation and benefit policies that the Government have set out will be beneficial to those in real need. The jobseeker's allowance has been necessary, and it is effective. The housing and council tax benefit reforms proposed will mean more effective use of the money that is available to spend on the system.
Many people who come to my constituency surgeries need benefits but do not get them. Yet we know that many people work in the black economy and get benefit when they should not. The reforms are part of a comprehensive package to make the system more efficient and effective, so that it targets those in need.
I was amazed by the statistics given by the Department of Social Security, which show that 300,000 more people were receiving housing benefit in 1995 than were receiving it in 1991. I strongly question that staggering figure.
I believe that the benefit and tax systems that the Budget and the public expenditure round are producing are good. I have always believed that tax and benefits should help married people rather than discriminate against them. Of course, no Conservative Member wants
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I believe that when they lose their jobs, most people, including most people with young families, want to get back to work. Of course they do, and we must help them. What we have heard this week represents a move towards helping them even more.
There must be a fair and reasonable Budget and public expenditure round. I believe--and in the spring the electorate will endorse my belief--that we have a credible economic policy, a distinctive policy that has been successful. The Opposition do not like success, because it stops them trailing round misery and failure, as they like to do.
Mrs. Maria Fyfe (Glasgow, Maryhill):
I have been listening carefully to the contributions by Conservative Members, and much of what they have said has had no relevance whatever to social security upratings. In the few relevant comments that they have made they merely complained about the cost. We have heard the ritual expressions of sympathy with people in need, yet there is a total refusal to accept the fact that the decisions being made by the Government are throwing people who are already poor into greater poverty.
The hon. Member for Luton, South (Sir G. Bright) talked about respiratory problems. I agree that some such problems are related to transport in our cities, but the hon. Gentleman failed to mention that many children suffer respiratory problems because they live in housing that is damp and cold, and their parents do not have enough money to heat it.
The Secretary of State said that the new measures would save £6 billion. I would like to know how much of that money will be taken from the purses of single mothers--or more accurately, from the mouths of their children. There are 1.5 million lone-parent families in Great Britain, and 47 per cent. of them live on less than £100 per week, which only 4 per cent. of married couples have to do.
That statistic answers a point that has been made by several Conservative Members. Only 4 per cent. of married couples have to live on such a low income. Of course those people should be assisted, but that is no reason for failing to help the 47 per cent. of lone-parent families who live on less than £100 a week.
We know that 71 per cent. of lone mothers are dependent on benefits, and that six out of 10 children in lone-parent families are being brought up in poverty. One-parent families account for almost one quarter of all families in Scotland. The average weekly income of one-parent families is only 36 per cent.--not much more than one third--of the average income of two-parent families.
In Scotland, 75 per cent. of lone parents claim income support, and 38 per cent of children--440,000 of them--live below the poverty line. Yet the Government are now making an already bad situation worse for such families.
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Only 41 per cent. of lone mothers in Britain work, and in Scotland the figure is only 30 per cent. It has already been pointed out that in France the figure is 82 per cent., and in Sweden 70 per cent. The Secretary of State said that that was because of recent big increases in the number of lone parents in Britain, which meant that younger children were involved. However, he did not respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) when she pointed out that the figures showed that there were jobs in France for lone parents to take.
Surveys have shown that 90 per cent. of lone mothers want to work, but they need ways in which to move off benefit and into work, not punishment for being on benefit.
Lady Olga Maitland:
Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Fyfe:
No, I will not. If the hon. Lady's hon. Friends had not gone on at such great length making irrelevant speeches that had nothing to do with social security, I would have given way. But my time is limited and I intend to say what I have to say. If, and only if, I have time at the end of my speech I shall give way.
Single mothers need not punishment but help to get off benefits and into work. Yet the Government are making it harder for them to do that. For example, they have cut local authorities' budgets and made it harder for them to provide child care through voluntary schemes and other such projects with local authority and urban aid funding.
The Secretary of State said that it would be unfair to pay extra benefits to lone parents because the only extra expenses that they had were the costs of child care. That comment could come only from a comfortably-off Member of Parliament who is male and does not know much about running a household or looking after children.
I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman has any idea of what it is like to live on a low income--for example, when two or more children need shoes, but the parent has to spread her budget so thinly that she has only enough money to buy one pair of shoes at a time. Does he know what it is like to have to traipse in the wind and rain with children perhaps with a pram or pushchair to the shops with the lowest prices?
In general, Members of Parliament escape their fair share of family responsibilities. That is a bad enough state of affairs even when the family has the good income that Members of Parliament receive. But when a family consists of one parent living on an extremely low income, that parent has all the responsibility on her shoulders. Conservative Members show no sympathy for or understanding of the kind of problems that those people face.
The Secretary of State talked about the introduction of help with child care costs through family credit. However, as One Parent Families Scotland has pointed out, that help--an earnings disregard of £42 a week for single parents who work--has failed. Fewer than 2 per cent. of lone parents have taken it up to help them to return to work.
That is not because lone parents are workshy, but because of the severe limitations that affect the usefulness of the disregard. If the family is on maximum family credit the disregard does not apply, only one child counts, and it stops when the child is 11. The scheme has helped only a fraction of those whom the Government claimed that it would help.
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We are supposed to be discussing social security cuts tonight, although Conservative Members have talked about every Budget-related subject under the sun except that subject. One-parent benefit, which is worth £6.30 a week, and lone-parent premium, which is worth £5.20 a week, are to be cut.
There will also be a cut in the child allowances paid with means-tested benefits, because the increases due when children reach 11 and 16 years of age will not now be paid until the September following the child's birthday. That is another mean little cut.
We have already discussed the housing benefit cuts. In addition to all the other cuts, the Child Support Agency benefit penalty for non-co-operation has now risen to £19.16 a week. Moreover, it will last for three years and will be renewable.
Such cuts will lead to a massive reduction in the income available to spend on food for children. Earlier today the House discussed the outbreak of a strain of E. coli in Lanarkshire. Poverty is relevant to that matter, because when a family has an extremely low income any money spent on food has to be stretched thinly. It is more of a disaster if one is on a low income to be told that some of the food one has bought is unusable. Yet nothing is being done to help those people overcome that problem. A mother has told me that she lived on nothing but bread, margarine and tea for a weekend last winter to ensure that her children were adequately fed, and I can only imagine that that mother's current winter will be worse.
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