| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Duncan Smith: It is no good the hon. Gentleman shouting--getting on with it is the simple process of
discovering from the Secretary of State exactly what her plans are. Not surprisingly, we will now move on to disabilities.
Mr. David Rendel (Newbury): I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way before leaving the subject. Is the problem not merely the number of people the Government have to find to take on child care, but the serious nature of the business of child care, which is not a matter for any frivolity? Carers must be of high quality and properly trained, and that will take a long time.
Mr. Duncan Smith: I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Interestingly, we will have people trained for child care through the welfare-to-work programme who might have to be compelled into that process, but they might be looking after the children of those whom the right hon. Lady refuses to compel to go into work. That is a dichotomy: on the one hand, we will have people not compelled to take up jobs and, on the other hand, people being compelled to train to look after the first group's children. Child care is a serious subject and the Government are treating it with a great deal of frivolity.
I have some serious questions to ask the right hon. Lady about disability benefits; I want to give her the opportunity to clarify one or two problems.
First, there are some people with disabilities who have been awarded disability living allowance for life. Will the Secretary of State guarantee that life means life, and that she intends no change?
Secondly, we hear that the Government are considering taxing disability living allowance. The Labour manifesto stated that there would be no new taxes; given the raid on pensions, who would now believe that? Where do these pledges leave people on disability living allowance? Do the Government plan to single them out, or does the right hon. Lady deny that such a proposal exists?
On 17 November, the right hon. Lady answered a question at the Dispatch Box, saying that she and her colleagues had spoken to more than 40 organisations representing people with disabilities; yet on the "Link" programme on ITV yesterday, disability groups were adamant that they had not been approached, and they accused the Secretary of State of misleading the House of Commons. The programme had contacted 28 leading organisations, including the Royal National Institute for the Blind, all of which said that they had not been consulted or approached by the Secretary of State or the Department. Will the right hon. Lady take this chance to clear that up? Did she intentionally or otherwise mislead us during oral answers to questions or does she stand by her claim that she contacted these organisations?
Benefits Agency staff have been making home visits to 150,000 people who receive disability living allowance at the higher rate in both care and mobility components. What training have those people had? These are all serious questions to which we demand serious answers, either from the right hon. Lady or at the end of the debate.
Mr. Duncan Smith:
I am concluding.
The debate would not have been necessary if the right hon. Lady and her team had set about their brief in line with what the Prime Minister has said. In a rhetorical flourish, he told them to think the unthinkable; they would change welfare and engage in sweeping pension reform. The right hon. Lady and her team have not done that. They promised before the election not to cut lone parent benefit and the supplement on income support, yet they are doing just that.
In everything that is going on we perceive delay, vacillation and policy U-turns. The cross-briefings and disputes between the people running the Department do not bode well for the biggest Department in government or for the Secretary of State's stewardship of it. Labour party members charged around when they were in opposition--many of them still think they are in opposition--promising Back Benchers and pressure groups to deliver on their most favoured programmes; a nod here and a wink there. It was not so much a case of a wet Wednesday in Dudley as of a United Kingdom programme of empty promises seven days a week.
The Treasury seems determined to make spending cuts, while departmental Ministers are more worried about their jobs than anything else. They are so busy trying to extricate the knives from each other's backs that they have no time to think about where the next cut will fall.
No wonder Labour Back Benchers have smelt a rat. Someone needs to take control of the Department before it descends into chaos. I urge the right hon. Lady to get a grip and to get these reviews moving, as she promised to do. She must also explain why she has reneged on her promise before the election not to cut benefits. She must get the Department focused.
The Secretary of State for Social Security and Minister for Women (Ms Harriet Harman):
I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
Reforming the welfare state to tackle poverty and welfare dependency is a priority of the Government. We are delivering on that commitment. There is a new deal for the young and long-term unemployed, and the biggest employment programme for 40 years. A new deal for lone parents is already up and running and transforming the lives of lone parents and their children. There is the first national child care strategy for Britain, with the biggest ever investment in out-of-school child care. There is a new programme to give extra help and opportunities to people who were written off by the previous Government as long-term sick and disabled. We are getting help to all Britain's pensioners, with extra help to the poorest. That is what we said before the election that we would do, and that is what we are doing, now that we are in government.
Before I continue, I want to place the debate in context. The social security system that we inherited failed to tackle poverty. It trapped people on benefit and did nothing to help them into work. Under the previous Government, spending on social security rose to £100 billion a year--£25 billion more than the total amount of income tax collected in any one year.
Despite that huge growth in welfare spending, during 18 years of Tory rule, more and more people were excluded from the main stream of society. The system was not working because it had failed to respond to social and economic change. The Tories got it wrong. Growing social exclusion--for the benefit of the hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), who does not seem to know what it means--means adults deprived of work, children deprived of a decent education, whole communities cut off from their more prosperous neighbours, and a growing gap between rich and poor.
Mr. Simon Burns (West Chelmsford):
The Secretary of State said that the Tories got it wrong. If that is correct, why has she now decided to implement one of the policies which, according to her, the Tories got wrong--the cuts in lone-parent benefit, which the right hon. Lady constantly condemned at the time and said that she would not implement? Will she once and for all tell the House what has gone through her mind to make her change her policy, announced last winter, that she would not implement those cuts?
Ms Harman:
The Tories got it wrong on lone mothers, because their proposals left 1 million lone mothers bringing up 2 million children on income support, and offered no help or opportunities for them to work, despite a growing economy.
"congratulates the Government for the progress that has already been made on reforming the welfare state to tackle social exclusion and welfare dependency; backs the Government's strategy of offering hope, opportunity and a better standard of living for people through its welfare to work programmes for lone parents, disabled people and those with long-standing illness, young unemployed people and the long-term unemployed, and the National Childcare Strategy, in contrast to the previous Government's approach of writing millions of people off to a life dependent on benefit; welcomes the Government's determination to ensure security in retirement for today's and tomorrow's pensioners through the pensions review and the action the Government has already taken to get help to Britain's pensioners, particularly the poorest pensioners, by cutting VAT on fuel and through the £20 winter fuel payment to pensioner households and the £50 winter fuel payment to pensioner households on Income Support; and congratulates the Government for keeping its promises and delivering its manifesto commitments to the British people.".
This debate has shown that the Tory Opposition have nothing to say about welfare reform, nothing to say about tackling worklessness and poverty, and nothing to say
about social exclusion or the problems of pensioners. However, the debate does allow Labour Members the opportunity to expose the full extent of theprevious Government's legacy of failure, to set out the Government's approach to tackling that failure and to talk about the progress that we have already made.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |