| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Rendel: I am sorry to say that that gets us no further. I asked the hon. Gentleman in what sense reducing benefits for lone parents increases their status. He talked about all sorts of other priorities with which I may agree, or not, but they are irrelevant to the question. Does he think that that enhances the status of lone parents or not? Is he prepared to intervene again? I am happy to give way if he wants to answer.
Mr. Wills: At risk of carrying on, I said that there will be no cuts for lone parents who are in receipt of those benefits. Before the election and just last week, I met lone parents on the most rundown estate in my constituency. The message is that they want child care more than anything else, both those who want to go into work and those who merely want some break from their existing burdens. That is the truth. That is what they want and that is what we are delivering. If the hon. Gentleman--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Interventions are getting longer than speeches. The hon. Gentleman will please resume his seat.
Mr. Rendel: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is clear from that waffle that the hon. Gentleman does not have an answer to my question. It is also clear to every hon. Member that reducing benefits for lone parents will reduce their status. Perhaps 250,000 lone parents will not get the lone parent premiums next year. These will be the new claimants and their status will undoubtedly be reduced in exactly the same way as happened the previous Conservative Government. I hope that Labour will take that fact on board.
I must refer briefly to the speech made by the Secretary of State: I am sorry that the right hon. Lady is not in her place to hear my response. Her speech was an inadequate answer to the worries of Labour Members, in particular, about lone parent benefit cuts. At the heart of her speech were several illogicalities, not least her failure to answer my intervention, when I asked in what sense she felt she was targeting the most needy by reducing benefits to lone parents. She claimed that she wanted to target the most needy as well as to provide work for lone parents; she
also wants to target those who do not get work, yet she is reducing their benefits. That is illogical, as anyone can see--it does not take a great genius to see it--but it was her argument in defence of her policies.
Frankly, it was pathetic and inadequate--one of the weakest arguments I have heard from a Secretary of State in support of a policy that is admittedly pretty indefensible. I do not think that her speech will have convinced many of the Back Benchers who have shown their unhappiness with the way in which she has been pushing through the cuts.
Liberal Democrat Members welcome help for job seekers and we welcome the fact that lone parents who want work are being given help to get it. We welcome too the availability of more child care. The problems that women experience because of the lack of child care are well known. We also welcome any help that can be given to enhance the possibilities for child care, as long as it is high-quality child care that avoids the dangers of child abuse that we have seen all too often. We welcome all that.
Jacqui Smith (Redditch):
Bearing in mind the fact that the Liberal Democrats opposed the windfall levy that has raised much of the money that can now be put into welfare improvements, how can the hon. Gentleman justify demands for even more expenditure?
Mr. Rendel:
I am not justifying demands for more expenditure. The whole point is that, at present, the benefit cuts have not been made--they are in the Budget. There have been huge savings in benefit payments this year because of the unexpected fall in unemployment. The money is there if we want to spend it in that way.
The Secretary of State missed the point, as did the hon. Member for North Swindon. The point is not what will happen to the women who are able to get work thanks to the policies that the Government are trying to implement and which we welcome, but what will happen to the others. There will always be a number of lone parents who, for good reasons, do not take up work--either they do not want to because they want to look after their children, or they cannot because they do not have the relevant skills or live somewhere that makes it difficult to get work.
The Secretary of State said that she is worried that 50 per cent. of married mothers go out to work but only 25 per cent. of lone parents work. She said she wanted to raise that 25 per cent. to 50 per cent., on the assumption that lone mothers and fathers would want to work in the same proportion as married mothers. That is not necessarily the case. There is a good argument for saying that lone parents may believe that it is even more important for them to stay at home with their children since they are the lone parent and it is more important for their children to have someone at home the whole time.
Even if work is as attractive to lone parents as it is to married mothers, given the Secretary of State's figures, 50 per cent. will still choose to stay at home and look after their children and it is those lone parents who will be bitterly affected by the Government's policies if they are allowed to go ahead.
All the Secretary of State's arguments and those of the hon. Member for North Swindon about the importance of prioritising and getting people back to work miss the point
about those who do not go back. They have failed to answer that point and they will need to do so before 10 December if they are to get their Back Benchers back on board on this issue.
The Secretary of State seemed to be using the old argument that attack is the best means of defence; that the best strategy is to attack the previous Tory Government for their mistakes--which some Conservatives have been good enough to admit, to some extent at least--but in so doing, the right hon. Lady failed to answer the pertinent points that my hon. Friends and I, as well as many Labour Back Benchers, have been making about the failures of her present policies.
The motion seems to be in three parts. The first concentrates on pensions and welfare reform. We all accept that that is a long-term business--that is true of pensions by their very nature--so it is important to have consensus on how pensions reform, in particular, should be handled.
I welcome the opportunity that all hon. Members have been given to join in the review. It is much more important to get it right now than to speed it through quickly and perhaps make mistakes. I do not accept the Tory view that we should rush it through as quickly as possible. We need to find an agreement that will give stability to pensions reform.
The third part of the motion concerns disability benefits. Some worrying rumours have been circulating--even if some of them originate with Conservative Members, as was said earlier. The rumours suggest that the cuts in disability benefits may be much greater even than those for lone parents. If the Government cannot reassure us about their real plans in the debate today, which they have not so far done, I am sure that many people with disabilities will remain worried.
In the Government's amendment, the only mention of people with disabilities is a passing reference to trying to help them get back into work. I would welcome any such help, but if that is all the Government intend to talk about it seems that they are not prepared to give the reassurances for people with disabilities that are being sought.
It is ironic that the hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) and his hon. Friends should express a new-found compassion for the disabled. It struck me as being like cannibals suddenly deciding that they are in favour of vegetarianism. The Conservative motion uses the word "inconceivable". It seems pretty inconceivable that the Tories have had a Damascene conversion to caring for the needs of the disabled, which certainly did not concern them when they were in power. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to reassure people that disability benefits are safe in Labour hands.
The second part of the Conservative motion concerns lone-parent benefits. It is odd that the Conservatives do not congratulate the Government on their U-turn, which picks up the very policies that the previous Government wanted to implement. The shadow Secretary of State has told us with commendable honesty that he would have implemented those policies had his party remained in power. The Labour Government are implementing Tory policies.
The sad fact about the Tory attack is that they forced the Government to defend the U-turn rather than the policy itself. The excuse offered by the Secretary of State and others for the U-turn is that they are providing help to get lone parents back into work, but Government figures show that in practice they do not expect any more lone parents to be back in work next year than this year. Presumably, then, they are not expecting their policies to be all that successful.
Lone parents are being sacrificed to save Labour's reputation for keeping its promises; but the Government will not even succeed in that, because, to keep the promise that they will stick rigidly to Tory spending plans, they have had to break the promise that they would revoke the benefit cuts. Lone parents are being sacrificed for nothing.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |