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Mr. Letwin: In the course of his speech, has my hon. Friend noticed that the Minister of State--until leaving the Chamber--was saying "Hear, hear" from a sedentary position and appearing to agree whole-heartedly with my hon. Friend's views?
Mr. Gibb: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention. It is true that there are members of the Government who would like to see a fundamental review of the tax and benefits system and radical reforms emanating from the Government, but the fact is that the Government are beginning to recognise that they will not get any radical reforms through the House because of Labour Back Benchers.
The report that came out with the green Budget last week, "The Modernisation of Britain's Tax and Benefit System", contained 44 pages of nothing new. All the report does is repeat the usual mantras of stability, flexible labour markets, education and welfare to work--all of which are important points, but we have heard them before. Only on page 43 of the report are Taylor and his review even mentioned. It is all hype and no reality. Even last Tuesday, the Chancellor was still hyping the report, saying:
"We have concluded that, to help people move from benefits to wages, nothing less than a comprehensive tax and benefit reform and the modernisation of the welfare state are now required."--[Official Report, 25 November 1997; Vol. 301, c. 776.]
1 Dec 1997 : Column 64
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That is not what Chris Kelly thinks; nor is it the impression given by the documents.
If the Government cave in on the lone parent premium, or if they delay its abolition by a few months, it will be clear to the House and to the country that the Government are incapable of tackling the problems that they say they are intent on tackling, simply because their Back Benchers will not let them. They will be a lame duck Government in respect of welfare reform and the Secretary of State will be a lame duck Minister. They will trumpet and hype success, but the reality will be failure and inaction--failure in their new deal for lone parents.
Mr. Letwin:
Would my hon. Friend care to join me in a speculative inquiry into whether being a lame duck is better or worse than being a drowning duck?
Mr. Gibb:
I shall leave hon. Members to draw their own conclusions on that question.
Jacqui Smith (Redditch):
I shall be brief, so that other hon. Members can contribute to the debate.
When I saw that the Opposition had decided on a debate on welfare reform, pensions and disability, I asked myself what possible reason there might be for the Conservative party doing that. I thought that it might be so that Conservative Members could come to the House and apologise for the mess in which they left the country. Perhaps they wanted to apologise for the doubling of the number of those on means-tested benefits from one in 12 to one in six. Perhaps they wanted to apologise for the fact that now one in five households are workless. Perhaps they wanted to apologise for the fact that inequality has increased faster in this country than in any other major industrialised country. Perhaps they wanted to apologise for their failure to reform a complicated and slow system of benefits that encourages dependency, not work, and that traps people--
Miss Julie Kirkbride (Bromsgrove):
Will the hon. Lady give way?
Jacqui Smith:
No, I will not take an intervention from the hon. Lady, because she has only just turned up and I am short of time.
I thought that perhaps Conservative Members wanted to apologise for their fundamental failure to get to grips with the pension system that they implemented during
their 18 years in government, but that left current and future pensioners insecure. Perhaps they intended to come and apologise for imposing value added tax on fuel and thereby making many pensioners fear that they could not afford to pay their bills.
Perhaps they intended to apologise for having significantly failed to introduce comprehensive disability rights legislation and for having assumed consistently throughout their period in government that those with disabilities could not and did not want to work. Perhaps they intended to apologise for the fact that there are now 1 million lone parents supporting 2 million children on income support; and for the fact that the Conservative Government stigmatised those lone parents and stranded them on benefits that can never be the long-term alternative to the higher incomes that those lone parents want. However, as we have discovered today, the Opposition do not intend to apologise for any of the mess in which they left the country.
When thinking about the problems to be debated, I went back to my casework and looked at the examples that have come up in my constituency over the past seven months. I was looking for some idea of the problems that people face and the solutions that the Government can implement. The first point I recognised was that no problem is solely about benefits--we cannot think of anybody as being simply a benefits claimant. All the difficulties faced by those on benefits stem from a variety of causes and it is crucial that the Government adopt a multi-departmental approach to tackling those difficulties.
That is why I welcome the introduction of the social exclusion unit and the way in which it will work through several Departments to solve problems.
One such problem relates to young unemployed people in my constituency. There is the young unemployed man who cannot get a job because he lacks the reading and writing skills necessary for a job. He is also trapped in inadequate housing on housing benefit. I appreciate what the Government have already done in terms of the new deal, which has been enthusiastically received by the Employment Service in Worcestershire, which in turn is grateful for the opportunity to put people back to work instead of having to act as benefits police--as the service did under the former Government.
I also welcome the education White Paper, because it will tackle educational under-achievement. Welcome, too, is the release of capital receipts which will begin to solve the difficulties with housing encountered by so many people.
One unemployed man who came to see me said that he could not afford to take a job for £3 an hour because he would lose too much benefit to make that worth doing. The only way to solve that is to get rid of the benefit and tax traps by introducing a minimum wage and--dare I suggest it?--by looking to introduce a 10p starting rate of tax, so as to get away from the punitive marginal rates of tax that such people face.
Jacqui Smith:
No, I am short of time.
Then there is the lone parent who wants to work but who cannot because the CSA has unsuccessfully chased up the absent parent for support. This lone parent cannot receive the child care that she needs or get the training
that she wants. But the Government have clearly shown their commitment to helping such lone parents, through their review of the Child Support Agency and through the extra money that they have put into child care and training.
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset):
The essence of this debate can be rapidly summed up. There are many Conservatives who welcomed the radicalism with which we believed the Government were entering on these matters, and who whole-heartedly accepted the good intent behind much that the Government are trying to do. Probably all of us welcome the idea of people moving back into work--of people moving off welfare--and the idea of finding suitable long-term pension arrangements. These are all common aims in our parties.
The question we are debating today, however, is whether the programme that the Government have so far brought before the public shows the least sign of achieving any of these admirable aims; or whether, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) suggested, it is all a mess and a muddle.
We have heard much from Labour today about the problems that they attribute to the previous Government, but little in defence of the progress that they ought to believe has so far been made by this Government. There are essentially two strands in the present Government's efforts: one relates to non-contributory and income-related benefits, the other to pensions.
In relation to the first class, there has been a devastatingly accurate critique of the Government's efforts to move lone parents back into work--efforts on which the whole of the rest of their arguments depend. That critique was not made by an opportunistic Conservative Member; it was not made with any political intent. It was made out of deep conviction and real knowledge by the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) on the basis of her real understanding of the problems that her constituents face in moving back to work.
It is no answer to the hon. Lady's critique to talk about out-of-school child care, because, as she pointed out devastatingly enough, it is often the period outside school terms that causes the problem. It is no answer to talk about the amount of child care on offer because, as she pointed out devastatingly enough, in many of our inner cities the costs of child care far exceed the money on offer. It is no surprise to Conservative Members to find that the evidence so far available to the British public about how well the lone parent welfare-to-work system is working shows that it is not working. Ninety-five per cent. of those to whom letters were written have not found a job, and there is not a shred of evidence that the 5 per cent. who have would not have found one in any case.
I should like to turn briefly to pensions, where a great opportunity has surely been sadly missed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) introduced, shortly before the election, proposals that would have led to the long-term funding of the basic state pension.
In place of that, after several months of this Government, we have so far had a set of 65 questions about a so-called stakeholder pension, none of whose details have been developed. Nor is there the least sign of how those stakeholder pensions will be developed in a way that exceeds the expectations that people legitimately hold of the private sector pension schemes which already provide people in Britain with £750 billion-worth of private pensions.
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