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Mr. Bercow: Is my hon. Friend aware that my mother takes a keen interest in the pronouncements of the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore)? Despite the hon. Gentleman's best efforts and today's lucubrations, my mother did not vote for him at the last election and is exceedingly unlikely to do so at the next.
Mr. Willetts: Perhaps my hon. Friend's mother will have an opportunity to vote for Mr. Finkelstein. I do not know whether he will be the candidate in that constituency or elsewhere in north London.
Mr. Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar): He is standing in Harrow, West.
Mr. Willetts: He is standing there, is he?
I should like to make three points about the CSA. First, one of our frustrations when analysing the Government's social security problems is the dearth of clear figures on gainers and losers. At the heart of any serious attempt to change social security must be a gritty analysis of gainers and losers. I am afraid that virtually no Government publications on social security since they were elected have frankly and openly confronted the question of who gains and who loses. We will not be able seriously to reform child support without confronting the question of who gains and who loses. We need to know much more fully than we have been told in either the Green Paper or the White Paper who will lose and by how much.
Secondly, I want to know why we shall not have the proper proceedings on a draft Bill that so many people had hoped for. The report of the Select Committee on Social Security says:
My third point is about criminal and civil sanctions. Of course, for people who persistently and obstinately refuse to co-operate with the CSA, one ultimately needs some criminal sanctions. However, we must ask whether more could be done to collect money efficiently before we have to consider criminal sanctions. It is easy to get headlines by talking about severe criminal penalties, but it is not clear what will be gained from putting the man--it normally is a man--whose income one needs behind bars. The one thing that we can be sure of is that sewing up sacks and receiving a bit of money for it will not make a significant contribution to the maintenance of his children. Therefore, it is much better to improve civil remedies to extract money before one reaches the stage of criminal proceedings. We want to hear what more the Government will do about that.
One of the problems that the Government encountered this year with their legislation was the odd little ideas that came to them as a Bill was passing through the House, and which were added at a late stage without any clear scrutiny and without much thought in advance. The notorious IR35 is the most conspicuous example of that. We hope that there will not be an equivalent to IR35 this time round. If the Bill has a broad title and Ministers smuggle in extra provisions on Report or later, it will be a great pity if they are as ill thought out and as damaging to British business and the economy as IR35 will prove to be.
Does the Secretary of State envisage any changes to housing benefit? There have been front-page stories in the newspapers about the Government introducing bold reforms on housing benefits. At one point we were promised such reforms this autumn, but the Secretary of State has gone rather quiet on that recently. Will he assure the House that if there are no housing benefit proposals in the Bill when it first appears, there will still not be any when it concludes its passage through the House?
We have heard much about reviews of the capital rules and means-tested benefits. How are they proceeding? Can we expect provisions on changes to the capital rules? We would be interested to know whether there will be changes to sickness pay as a result of the scrutiny of statutory sickness pay. We would also like to know more about the recent announcement on community service orders. The Government sound tough and draconian, but one wonders how many people will eventually lose benefit because of their failure to comply with a community service order. The interesting and important question is: how many people does the Secretary of State expect to be penalised under that provision?
The Secretary of State for Social Security (Mr. Alistair Darling):
The debate has inevitably been wide ranging, as the Opposition have chosen, as is their right, to link trade and industry and social security in one debate. The connection is not immediately obvious, although fortuitously the two areas combine enterprise and fairness. The Opposition probably did not consider that when they grouped the two topics together.
As the House will appreciate, I want to concentrate on social security matters. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry will have taken careful note of what was said on trade and industry matters for which he has responsibility. There will be a number of Second Reading debates on trade and industry and social security legislation, so many of the issues not covered today can be dealt with in greater detail then.
The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) said that welfare reform is necessary. I am sure that we could stop there and all agree on that. However, he is right that the
problems arise when we consider the detail. We will get absolutely nowhere unless we are prepared to face up to the fact that the present welfare system is not working, is out of date and was designed for a world 50 years ago that was different from today, that it needs to be reformed, and that if we do anything to improve things, we will bump up against some hard decisions and run the risk that some group somewhere will take offence.
I knew right from the time I was appointed that whatever I did would cause some controversy. I have no doubt that the Bill containing further steps to bring the welfare system up to date will cause controversy and will face opposition from some quarters, but I will not shrink from that. The worst possible thing for any Government to do would be to run away from the challenge of bringing our welfare system up to date.
The hon. Member for Havant said that he could see no clear direction in our policy. He would say that, although it does not seem to be his principal concern. His principal concern seems to be to oppose whenever he sees a quick chance for opposition. Our philosophy is clear: we want to bring the welfare state up to date and make it fit for the next century; we want to ensure that all those who are able to work do so; and, at the same time, we want to provide security for those who cannot work.
We inherited a social security system that, despite all their rhetoric, cost the Conservatives some £40 billion more after 18 years in government than it did when they took over the system. Despite that increased expenditure, one in three children were living in poverty--three times the number in 1979--one in five households of working age had nobody in work and one in five pensioners had to rely on income support. I take those three statistics in isolation, but anyone looking at the system can see that it resulted in many people being written off, especially children. We know that children who are born in poverty are likely to be held back, possibly for the rest of their lives, and chances are that households with no one in work represent the second or third generation of people in those circumstances. When so many pensioners rely on income support because they have had no chance of saving during their lives, anyone would say that reform was necessary.
Our first objective was to help people to help themselves by ensuring that all those who can work do so. The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) took up a theme that was first raised by one of his hon. Friends. However, given that we have halved long-term unemployment, that youth unemployment is down by two thirds, that there are now 700,000 more people in work than there were at the time of the general election, that some 200,000 vacancies are being notified to jobcentres every month and that there are 1 million vacancies in the economy, any reasonable person would conclude that the Government's efforts through the new deal, the reduced starting rate of tax and the benefit changes that have been made have been effective and people who hitherto have been written off--often along with their families--are now in work. There is a clear sense of direction and a clear distinction between us and the Conservatives, who have opposed every single measure that we have taken to get people into work.
The second strand of our approach was to provide more help for those in need. I make no bones about it. The
state's primary obligation must be to help those most in need. That is why the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act 1999 does more to help the severely disabled, who, until we made those changes, were living on so little benefit that they were dependent on income support for their entire lives. We have increased child benefit and done more to help poorer pensioners.
The third strand is to provide for the future. I shall return to pensions later in my speech. We are the first Government ever to have pledged to end child poverty within a generation. We do not believe that any society can function economically or morally if so many children can be written off without being given any help or opportunity.
We want to provide a welfare system, backed up by policies across Government Departments and elsewhere, to help those who can work to do so and to make sure that those who cannot work--either because of disability or because they have reached the end of their working lives--have a decent income. At the same time, we are bringing the social security system--the actual means of delivery--up to date. It is common ground that for years the Department of Social Security and its agencies have relied on IT equipment that is long past its sell-by date and is in desperate need of renewal.
I now turn to the first point that the hon. Member for Havant raised, as I have no doubt he will return to it. He referred to the contributory system. He spoke about confusion, but the Tories in power doubled the amount of means-testing in the social security system. They are now against it and tell us that it is a terrible thing. They are also committed to slashing social security expenditure, to which I shall turn shortly. However, if they want to get rid of means-tested benefit and have more contributory benefits, they must realise that a cost is involved. It is important to ensure that the state concentrates help where it is most needed. Crucially, the social security system is judged on outcome--on what it does. That concerns people rather more than how the benefits came to be delivered.
We have strengthened the contributory system in many respects. We have extended contributory benefits to men and enabled low earners and carers to qualify for the second state pension. We have extended maternity allowance to women earning £30 a week and incapacity benefit to disabled people in childhood. We do not have a dogmatic preference for one means of benefit or another. We have increased universal child benefit, and we have increased fivefold the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. We have extended the non-contributory disability living allowance and, for those on income-related benefits, we have made increases--the working families tax credit, the national minimum wage and so on.
I do not have a dogmatic preference. The benefits system in this country has, since its inception, been a mix of contributory benefits, means-tested benefits and payments based on extra costs--DLA, for example. Successive Governments have followed that pattern. Of course, they have made changes from time to time, but it is the outcome that bothers people.
Curiously--for perhaps the first time in a social security debate--the hon. Member for Havant did not mention social security spending. I wonder why he did not mention it. I always like to see what he has to say. At the Conservative party conference, he was condemning our alleged failure to control social security spending, which he called a
Social security spending grew by 90 per cent. in the Tories' 18 years in power. At the same time, poverty grew and the gap between rich and poor grew because the Tories were paying more and more for economic failure. I suspect that the hon. Member for Havant did not mention that, because he is now aware that, in this Parliament under Labour, social security spending--including the working families tax credit and the record increases in child benefit--will grow by only 1 per cent., compared with 4 per cent. in the last Parliament. He will not mention that because he knows that he was skating on thin ice when he spoke at the Tory party conference.
"We are disappointed that it has not proved possible for the Government to fulfil its earlier intention of publishing its Child Support proposals in the form of a draft Bill."
It adds that
"we recommend that the legislation on child support should be committed to a Special Standing Committee in order to enable its Members to take evidence directly on the details of the legislation, which they will then proceed to debate and (if they wish) to amend."
Although the Select Committee carried out a full investigation of the subject, it did not think that its work was a substitute for such pre-legislative scrutiny. Does the Secretary of State accept that proposal, which was made by Labour Members and others on the Select Committee?
"catastrophic failure of financial control".
He went on to say:
"The first Conservative pledge I give this conference is that we will cut social security spending as a proportion of our national income. We did it before and we can do it again".
I found that quite curious. In the Tories' 18 years of power, social security spending as a proportion of national income rose by a third. He said that they would cut it as they did before, but they increased it. It strains credulity for him to say that the Conservatives would cut spending on the basis that they did it before, when they manifestly did not.
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