Mr Speaker:
Order. I am sorry to tell the House that we have got through only five questions in nine minutes of Back-Bench time, which is very slow progress. We
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need to speed up, I am afraid, if we are to accommodate colleagues and move on to the next business in a timely fashion.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP): I thank the Minister for his hard work and effort on behalf of the fishing industry, especially in Northern Ireland, and for working with the Minister in Northern Ireland. Along with Diane Dodds, I met the Minister the day before he went to Brussels to put the case for the Northern Ireland fishing sector. The 6% increase in nephrops is most welcome, especially for the Northern Ireland fishing fleet. What plans does he have to address the growing problems associated with Irish sea cod, particularly in area VII, and the assertion of the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries that science suffers from annual TAC reductions?
Richard Benyon: I understand the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. I am pleased with where we got to on nephrops.
On the technical issue of Irish sea cod, I think that we can slightly ameliorate the impact of the cut. Working with fishermen in his constituency and the STECF, I hope that we can move the argument forward. Great work is being done by fishermen in Northern Ireland on selectivity, and I encourage that. I want to achieve the holy grail of fisheries management, which we are achieving elsewhere: catching less and landing more. We can do that.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con): My constituency and neighbouring Grimsby broadly welcome the negotiations and, in particular, the moves towards regionalisation. However, the Minister will be aware that there are concerns that the negotiations between the EU and Iceland over mackerel catches may lead to lower imports into this country, which are vital to the Grimsby-based industry. Will he give the industry in my constituency some reassurance?
Richard Benyon: I visited my hon. Friend’s region not long before Christmas and that point was made very clear to me. I recognise that we have a very valuable processing industry that we want to protect. In large part, it is dependent on fish from Iceland. If sanctions are brought in against Iceland, we want to ensure that they are proportionate. We think we can exert some influence in this area and get Iceland back to the table, so that we can start seeing proper management of a stock that swims across a vast area that is the responsibility of many countries.
Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab): On behalf of the Scottish and UK fishing industries, may I congratulate the Minister on a job well done? Will he give the House an assessment of whether Scotland’s fishermen would have benefited from having a separate delegation or whether we are better together?
Richard Benyon: My view is that Scotland’s fishermen are best represented as part of a large, 29-vote member of the European Union. That is true of a lot of other interests. I cannot do the maths off the top of my head to work out how many votes Scotland would have as an independent state, but I think that it is best served by being part of the United Kingdom in these negotiations.
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Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con): I congratulate the Minister on behalf of myself and the fishermen of Ramsgate. Will he elaborate on the impact of the settlement on the under-10 metre fleet, in particular in the channel?
Richard Benyon: We achieved an increase in the quotas for sole and plaice in my hon. Friend’s area and a roll-over of the sprat quota, which was due for a big cut. Those are all valuable fisheries for her constituents. I am gratified that fishermen in her area are part of our trial for more financial support for the under-10 metre fleet in the coming year.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP): There is much to welcome in the Minister’s statement. I commend him and the devolved Ministers for their efforts in recent weeks. I, too, want to press the Minister on the mackerel dispute, which is still at an impasse. Will he give an assurance that he will reject the Commission’s proposals for reductions in mackerel quotas next week at the EU-Norway talks, because that would simply reward Iceland and the Faroes for destructive overfishing and fail to pull them back to the negotiating table?
Richard Benyon: I am sure that the hon. Lady, like me, wants to ensure that we stay resolute in our determination to follow the science. We have a political issue to sort out with the mackerel problem and that can be done only by getting Iceland and the Faroes back round the table. I do not want the United Kingdom to fish the last mackerel out of the sea. We want to ensure that the stock remains sustainable. I feel very unhappy about the impact that this situation could be having on her constituents and on those whom I have met in Lerwick and in other places where mackerel is an important fishery. We want to ensure that Iceland and the Faroes play ball, but we cannot allow this stock to be fished unsustainably.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con): I thank my hon. Friend for all that he has tried to do for the under-10 metre fleet. Will he say more about how the “non-sector” will be affected by the settlement, in particular people fishing out of Harwich, Brightlingsea and Wivenhoe, a fleet that he knows well?
Richard Benyon: As I have said, there is good news for the under-10 metre fleet, which is particularly effective at targeting stocks such as sole and plaice. There is quite a large increase in the plaice quota and we managed to avoid a big cut in other stocks by presenting the science and working with my hon. Friend’s constituents who fish sustainably. The under-10 metre fleet can feel proud of their contribution towards the sustainability of our fishing industry and I commend those in his constituency for that.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op): The Minister has taken a sensible approach to the dispute over mackerel with Iceland and the Faroes. In the discussions that he and his colleagues have with them, will he ensure that the point is made that they will be the biggest losers if there is an unsustainable approach to mackerel fishing in the North sea? It may be attractive to Iceland to get immediate economic returns from the mackerel stock, given its current economic situation, but it would not be in that country’s interest to see the stock diminished beyond recognition.
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Richard Benyon: There is a perfectly acceptable international method for resolving these disputes, but it requires countries such as Iceland to take part in the process. We remain willing to discuss the matter with them in an open and meaningful way. The ball is in their court. In the meantime, this is a difficult time for the industry, with the threat to the viability of the pelagic fleet. I assure the hon. Gentleman that we remain absolutely committed to ensuring that bad practice is not rewarded and that we are working hard to achieve a happy solution to this problem.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con): I congratulate the Minister on securing an increase in the quotas for cod and whiting in the south-west and for plaice and sole in the channel. How quickly does he think it will be possible to roll out the catch quota scheme to further eliminate discards?
Richard Benyon: I was really pleased that fishermen in my hon. Friend’s constituency entered the scheme last year. I want many more vessels to do so, because fully documented fisheries are the only way forward, not only to have proper management of our fisheries, but to address the concerns of all our constituents—even mine inland—who are affronted by the idea of perfectly edible fish being thrown away. Through schemes such as the catch quota scheme we can give assurances to our consumers and make life better for our fishermen, who are landing more and being better rewarded for it. This is an entirely virtuous circle.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con): I, too, congratulate the Minister on his work in the negotiations before Christmas and over the past two and a half years on behalf of the under-10 metre fleet. There is concern that in future work on the reallocation of quota, the under-10s will be compromised by not having kept records. Will he confirm that he will work with the industry to address that concern?
Richard Benyon: I hope my hon. Friend would concede that I am on record as having faced criticism from some quarters for reallocating quota to the under-10 metre sector. I strongly believe that fishing opportunity is a national resource, and this rather bizarre business is about the allocation of that national resource. I firmly believe that the under-10 metre sector is important socially as well as economically, and I will continue to do what I can to make its life better.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD): I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on both what he has achieved and the manner in which he has conducted the negotiations. He mentioned the context of the common fisheries policy reform. Will he reassure the House that his counterparts in Europe will respect the fact that we are introducing marine conservation zones that extend beyond the six and 12-mile limits, to ensure that British fishermen are not constrained in areas where foreign vessels are not?
Richard Benyon:
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is really important. I am not in the business of proposing restrictions for our vessels only to see vessels
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from other countries entering the restricted areas in our waters and fishing in a way that our fishermen cannot. We must have the matter agreed at European level, and I have already had discussions with my French counterpart on it. We will have further discussions to ensure that it is completely clear at every level that we are not imposing a restriction on ourselves that will not be recognised by other countries.
George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con): I welcome the Minister’s success in getting the scientific evidence heard, particularly when it comes to haddock in the south-west. Why were the Commission’s original proposals so far wide of the mark, and why is it apparently so dysfunctional on the issue and so deaf to the evidence?
Richard Benyon: The issue of haddock in the south-west is a product of the situation that I mentioned earlier, whereby the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea simply examines one stock on its own. In most of the UK waters we have mixed fisheries, and there is a danger that we can—I have already used this expression in Committee today—make the perfect the enemy of the good. If we are tied to one species, in this case a “choke species”, it can result in more discards and worsen the sustainability of wider stocks. That was why we argued successfully for a reduction in the cut.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con): I am sure that the fishermen who fish in Sole bay will be delighted by the increase in eastern channel sole, as will those in Southwold, Orford, Sizewell and elsewhere in my constituency. Does the Minister share my concern, though, about the comments of the chief executive of the New Under Ten Fishermen’s Association that the deal was damaging, when it has actually proved a lifeline for many of our coastal fishermen?
Richard Benyon: I think the chief executive’s comments were a pity, because if he had looked closely at what we achieved he would have seen an improved prospect for the year ahead across all sectors and around all our coasts. That includes some valuable stocks that are of particular interest to his members, so I accept my hon. Friend’s point.
Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con): May I add to the chorus of congratulations from Members on both sides of the House on the Minister’s his genuine achievements? In particular, the increase in the nephrops quota will be most welcome in Fleetwood and is a real success. Now that he is back, may I ask him to keep an eye on the new wind farm applications in the Irish sea so that there might be some space left for my local fishermen to catch the new quota?
Richard Benyon: My hon. Friend may try you, Mr Speaker, but I listened to what he said. I want to ensure that we get away from the silo mentality in managing our fisheries of talking about fishermen in one forum, conservation in another and other marine activities in a third. Following the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, we are moving towards much more holistic management of our seas, which is right.
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Regulation of Bailiffs
Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)
1.54 pm
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab): I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to introduce a regulatory regime for bailiffs which would preclude the making of multiple fee charges without explanation; to introduce guidelines for dealing with potentially vulnerable debtors; and for connected purposes.
Concerns about the practices of bailiffs are not new, nor has the issue simply gone ignored. Governments have been aware of the concerns for decades. Action on the matter, however, has proved slow at best. I do not wish to make a party political issue of it, and I am aware of cross-party concerns about bailiff practices. Before I continue, I wish to thank the Coventry Evening Telegraph for the investigative work that it has undertaken into the matter. Many of my examples have been drawn from the paper’s investigation.
Those of us wanting reform of the bailiff system were given hope when, in February last year, the Government announced a consultation on bailiff reform. The consultation duly went ahead and closed in May 2012. I am aware of the disappointment felt by many in the industry regarding the scope of the consultation, but many have been optimistic that it could lead to real change. However, the report on the consultation was due to be published in October. As might be expected, every month that passes with no word from the Government diminishes hope about their commitment to the issue. I understand that the report is due to be published this month, and I very much hope that that will be the case. I therefore want the House to signal to the Ministry of Justice that we place great importance on bailiff reform.
Another reason for the lack of faith in the forthcoming report is that the Department in charge consulted 16 organisations and introduced the national standards for enforcement agents in 2002. Those standards remained unchanged for nine years and were clearly in need of updating. Many people were therefore delighted when the then Justice Minister, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), announced last January that the national standards had been updated. He said that the voluntary code had been tightened to protect people from rogue bailiffs, and stated:
“Councils and other authorities will adopt the standards”.
I do not know on what basis he could make those claims, given that the standards remain voluntary.
What is most concerning, however, is that on close inspection of the updated standards, it appears that only six sentences were added to the original standards. Only one sentence was changed in the section on information and confidentiality, adding the words
“avoiding unnecessary and unhelpful use of legal and technical language”.
No changes were made under the headings “Complaints/Discipline”, “Vulnerable situations” or “Goods”. I was also shocked to discover that most of the new material had been taken almost word for word from the new Office of Fair Trading debt collection guidance.
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In updating the standards, the Ministry of Justice consulted only two organisations, compared with the original 16. Anyone looking for a meaningful change in standards for bailiffs must be extremely disappointed. Based on the Ministry’s last announcement regarding its efforts to address bailiff reform, in my eyes there is reason to be pessimistic about the Government’s forthcoming proposals. Nevertheless, I wish to take this opportunity to raise a number of recommendations that have been made, in the hope that the Ministry will take them into consideration.
The first recommendation is to eliminate the practice of making multiple fee charges for a single visit without explanation. I believe that in calling for that, I am asking for something modest. The local government ombudsman has recognised that the practice is legal and not uncommon, but she has also ruled that in many cases it is disproportionate. She has urged councils to enter into new contracts with bailiffs preventing multiple fee charging.
An example from Coventry might be helpful. Coventry council’s hired bailiffs recently sent 10 threatening letters in two days demanding that a disabled woman pay her debts in full immediately or face the loss of her possessions. That was despite her already having begun a payment plan. The bailiffs charged her five lots of £95 for a single visit to her house, which cannot be right, reasonable or fair.
There are many reports of bailiffs charging multiple fees for a single visit or bill, and the debt escalates rapidly. Such practice is too prevalent for us to continue relying on individual contracts with private bailiff firms. Let me reiterate that such cases are not unique to Coventry council and it has not behaved illegally. I hope, however, that all hon. Members will agree that such things should not be allowed to happen.
We are failing vulnerable people facing bailiff action. A cancer patient in Coventry missed just two council tax payments before receiving a court summons and a demand for the full up-front payment, together with the threat that her home possessions might be taken away. The bailiffs added another £200 costs and appear to have wrongly threatened her with prison. In that case, the bailiff firm seems to have accepted that it failed in the guideline “duty” on bailiffs to hand cases back to councils as soon as any potential for vulnerable circumstances is identified, so that councils may handle such cases more sensitively. There are many other examples from my constituency of vulnerable people trying desperately to persuade private bailiffs of their situation but simply being ignored. Such cases include a women who was suffering from severe depression and deemed at risk of suicide.
National standards for enforcement agents make it clear that bailiffs should exercise discretion when dealing with debtors who may be vulnerable. The standards state that potentially vulnerable people include those with a disability, but do not mention debtors who have mental health difficulties or who may be vulnerable by virtue of other difficulties—for example, those facing homelessness.
A bailiff might be the first person in the process to realise that a debtor is vulnerable, and we need much closer regulation of how to handle vulnerable debtors than currently exists. Private bailiff firms must be forced to inform councils of vulnerable cases. At the moment,
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administrative oversights, mistakes and unclear protocol can result in vulnerable people becoming the victims of aggressive or inept practice by bailiffs. I therefore hope to see a drastic change to the guidelines on how vulnerable people are treated in our private bailiff system, and I hope that all hon. Members will agree on the need for change.
This issue was discussed before Christmas in another place during a debate on an amendment to the Crime and Courts Bill, and I urge the Government to take on board the many sensible and important points made then, particularly regarding a full regulatory system for bailiffs. I call on the Government to consider the recommendations in the recent local government ombudsman report, “Taking possession: councils’ use of bailiffs for local debt collection”. The report covers a number of issues and provides recommendations based on the ombudsman’s considerable experience of complaints.
In conclusion, I appreciate the importance of debt collection to councils’ revenues, particularly in these times of austerity. Faced with cuts to council budgets, Coventry council has set a target under the bailiffs’ contract to reduce council tax debts from previous years by about 40%, and many other councils are in similar situations. We can therefore expect private bailiff firms to continue to be necessary to a certain extent, but we should make whatever arrangements are necessary to prevent the worst practices—whether due to incompetence or greed—such as multiple fee-charging, and protect the most vulnerable in society at an extremely distressing time. I hope that the Government will take my comments on board in the upcoming report, and that we will finally see radical change to our mediaeval bailiff system. I hope we will achieve a system that is reasonable, legal and proportionate, and I commend my Bill to the House.
That Mr Jim Cunningham, Thomas Docherty, Mr Geoffrey Robinson, Grahame M. Morris, Mr Tom Clarke, Sir Bob Russell and Mr David Winnick present the Bill.
Mr Jim Cunningham accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 25 January, and to be printed (Bill 117).
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Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans): Before I call the Secretary of State to move the Second Reading debate, I inform the House that the amendment has been selected.
2.5 pm
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The Bill, which stands in my name and that of my right hon. and hon. Friends, is about the renewal of what I believe is a principled welfare state based on affordability, integrity and fairness. For the convenience of the House, let me explain that I intend briefly to run through the features of the Bill, and I will then open up the debate to take interventions and deal with the amendment.
This Government inherited from the previous Government an unsustainable and costly system, and a welfare state that I believe delivered poor social outcomes, trapping people in dependency, as well as a poor deal for Britain’s taxpayers. My opposite number, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), needs no reminder of that as it was he who, when we arrived in government, told us that there was no money left. That was the result of a recession that was later discovered by the Office for Budget Responsibility to be deeper and sharper than anyone thought. The original estimate—
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) rose—
Mr Duncan Smith: I will give way in a moment. I am in the business of having the right hon. Gentleman justify his own position so I will be happy to give him a chance, but let me finish this point. The previous Government originally claimed that the shrinkage in the economy was 5.8%. In fact, as the OBR later pointed out, at 6.3% the shrinkage was deeper than we had ever seen before—the biggest shrinkage in the economy since world war two.
Mr Byrne: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way so early in the debate. Will he confirm to the House that on his watch the welfare bill has risen nearly £14 billion higher than anticipated?
Mr Duncan Smith:
I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman raises that point because a huge part of that is spending on pensions. He will know that we are spending more on pensions and provide a better deal for pensioners than his Government ever did. Until this Bill, the Government continued to raise welfare payments in line with inflation; this is the first time that we propose not to do so. That will take effect through the uprating order that should be laid before Parliament later this month. The Bill provides that discretionary working age benefits and tax credits will be uprated by 1% for a further two years in the tax years 2014-15 and 2015-16, if prices have risen by at least 1%. The schedule to the Bill sets out the benefit payments and tax credits
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in question, which are listed in full in the explanatory memorandum. By providing for those changes in legislation, we can provide certainty for taxpayers, the markets and claimants.
A number of exceptions to the Bill are not included, and a number of benefits remain outside the scope of the Bill. We are maintaining our commitment to the triple lock so that the basic state pension will rise by 2.5%. In April 2013, pensioners will see an increase of £2.70 on last year—far more than the derisory 75p that Labour gave them in 2000—and I stress again that we introduced the triple lock to guarantee that. Crucially, we are also protecting disabled people and carers. Benefits to cover the added costs faced by these groups will continue to be linked to price inflation.
Mr Duncan Smith: I will give way in a moment. That includes carer’s allowance, disability living allowance, and new personal independence payments, as well as premiums paid to disabled people receiving working age benefits such as the disability additions in tax credits, and the support group component of employment and support allowance.
Mr Duncan Smith: The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) was first.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab): The Secretary of State has stated that benefits have been raised in line with inflation, but he did not say that tax credits— 2,000 people who are affected by the Bill are in work and receiving benefits such as tax credits—have not been increased for the past two years. In fact, they have been frozen.
Mr Duncan Smith: It is interesting that the hon. Lady raises that point, because under the Labour Government, tax credits absolutely boomed. In 2005, there were increases of 58%. Overall, there were 340% increases in tax credits, 70% of which goes to child tax credits. The hon. Lady says that tax credits should continue to rise, but she can make that argument in due course.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab): Will the Secretary of State admit that the social security budget is going up on his watch because unemployment is rising faster than his colleague expected?
Mr Duncan Smith: Never let a good fact get in the way of a good argument. Unemployment is falling, youth unemployment is falling, more women are in work than ever on her watch, and long-term unemployment is flattening out. The reality, therefore, is that we have better employment figures—there are 1 million new private sector jobs, which outweighs the public sector jobs we have had to get rid of. The reality is that the rate of unemployment, at 7.8%, is better than the EU average and better, almost for the first time, than the United States of America.
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Mr Byrne: It is significant that the Secretary of State has just admitted for the first time that welfare spending on his watch is rising £14 billion higher than projected. Will he go a step further and confirm his understanding of the OBR figures that show that the claimant count is forecast to rise by a third of a million more than anticipated over the next few years? Will he admit that, yes or no?
Mr Duncan Smith: I should remind the right hon. Gentleman that the claimant count was forecast to rise but has fallen throughout all those forecasts. I know it is inconvenient for the Opposition, who would rather unemployment rose than fell, but unemployment is falling. Many countries in Europe would give their eye teeth for the employment figures in this country.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab): On disabled people, paragraph 24 of the Secretary of State’s impact assessment, which has just been published, states:
“Nevertheless, despite this protection…those households where someone describes themselves as disabled, (under the DDA definition) some of whom will not be eligible for a disability benefit, are more likely to be affected than those where there is not a person”
Mr Duncan Smith: There are two good reasons for that. First, families in which there is some disability are often more likely to include people who have claims on other benefits. Some of those will be affected by the change.
Derek Twigg: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Duncan Smith: No. That is exactly the reasoning behind what the impact assessment says. The second reason is that, as part of employment and support allowance, the support group is protected. However, people who are described in the terms of the Bill as qualified under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and are not in the support group will find that they will be affected by the 1% increase. Therefore, by and large, the benefits for those who are disabled and qualified as disabled, and for those in receipt either of support payments in ESA, disability living allowance or the premiums in many other benefits, are being uprated in line with inflation—[Interruption.] May I finish? The only benefit that is not being uprated in line with inflation is ESA for those not in the work-related activity group. Some of those with disability will be affected because many in their households will be on other benefits. That is the reason.
Mr Duncan Smith: I think I have dealt with that particular point and will move on—[Hon. Members: “No!”] All right, I will give way to the hon. Gentleman again.
Derek Twigg: I thank the Secretary of State for giving way, but I am not clear about what he has just said. Will he confirm his impact assessment, which states that
“despite this protection …those households where someone describes themselves as disabled, (under the DDA definition) some of whom will not be eligible for a disability benefit”—
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“are more likely to be affected than those where there is not a person who describes themselves as disabled”?
Mr Duncan Smith: I have just told the hon. Gentleman that the reality is that someone in those households is more likely to be on benefits, but particularly ESA. Let me remind him and the Labour party that they introduced the changes to the work capability assessment and ESA. The Government inherited, modified and improved those measures, but they are part of the reason why that is in the impact assessment.
Derek Twigg: Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr Duncan Smith: No. I have dealt with the hon. Gentleman’s point. The truth is that the Labour party is not only against the Bill but against what the Labour Government introduced just before the last election and the work capability assessment. Labour Members have opposed £80 billion of changes and reductions in every single vote and every single motion. I have dealt with his point. They must decide what they are in favour of when it comes to reducing the deficit; otherwise, they will be a laughing stock.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con): Is not the bottom line that it is very difficult to justify 20% increases in benefits when earnings for hard-pressed families have gone up by only about 10%?
Mr Duncan Smith: It is worth pointing out to my hon. Friend that, when the Opposition originally heard about the Bill, the shadow Chancellor and my opposite number—the shadow Secretary of State—entertained the idea that what was wrong with the Bill was that it affected too many people who were in some kind of work through working tax credit. The speculation was that, somehow, they would be prepared to support, or not oppose, measures on those not receiving working tax credit. I notice that there is no mention of that position in the amendment, because they have been clobbered by their left and by the trade unions, their paymasters. Instead, there is a rag-bag amendment expressing opposition to a variety of things, which bears no relation to their previous position. There they go again, denying where they are.
The real question for the shadow Secretary of State and the shadow Chancellor, before they intervene again, is this: having opposed every single reduction to the deficit, what exactly would they do to cut it? They have not a single answer.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD): We have just heard that one justification for capping benefits at 1% is that, allegedly, benefits have risen significantly more than wages. In that case, would it not be wise for the Government to introduce a measure so that benefits do not increase by more than average wage inflation?
Mr Duncan Smith:
As I have said, the Bill is about trying to bring that fairness back into the welfare payments process. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) has said, the reality is that in the period since the recession, payments for those in work have risen by about 10% and payments for those on
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benefits have risen by about 20%. We are trying to get a fair settlement back over the next few years. Eventually, benefits will go back on to inflation.
Andrew George: We do not know—the Secretary of State is probably more clairvoyant than I am—what food price inflation will be in, for example, 2016. We are being asked to predict what the circumstances will be in the context of the rather arbitrary figure of 1%. I simply urge my right hon. Friend to keep an open mind, and to have a means by which we will uprate that is fair to both benefit recipients and those in work.
Mr Duncan Smith: I accept the point about fairness—that was my point—but the reality is that the Bill is also about getting the overall welfare bill down and in kilter. As I have said on the radio and again today, the key is that we must reduce the deficit—that is at the heart of the measure. The Liberal Democrats joined us in the coalition. I should remind the hon. Gentleman that the No. 1 priority we face is reducing the deficit that Labour left us—the biggest deficit on record of any Government since the second world war. That is the reality, but Labour Members are in denial, so I will move on.
The reality is that affordability—
Mr Duncan Smith: I will give way in a minute—I want to make progress and I have been quite reasonable in giving way.
First and foremost, under Labour public spending spiralled out of control—[Interruption.] Yes, it did. That left behind the UK’s largest ever peacetime deficit, and interest payments running at £120 million a day—[Interruption.] It is interesting that as soon as I speak about what Labour Members left behind, they go into denial. They try and shout me down because they do not like the sound of it. The reality is—
Mr Duncan Smith: I will give way in a minute. The reality is that the shadow Chancellor and the former Chief Secretary deny that they left a problem. It was a nightmare, and they should apologise and tell us what they would do to put it right.
Mr Byrne: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way again: he is being typically generous. No doubt he, like me, will have looked at the DWP benefit expenditure tables, which show that spending on out-of-work benefits between 1996-97 and 2009-10 did not rise, but fell by £7.5 billion. That is why Lord Freud said that Labour’s record in getting people back to work was “remarkable” and noted that Labour had tackled the long-term dependency on unemployment benefits that it had inherited from the Tories in 1997.
Mr Duncan Smith:
I notice that the right hon. Gentleman is very careful to avoid telling the House how much Labour spent on tax credits as well. The important point that Labour Members need to realise is that of the total bill for tax credits, 70% had no involvement with work at all. Child tax credits had no work agreement on them whatever. The reality is that Labour spent
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340% more on tax credits, 58% before the 2005 election and 29% before the last election, in the hope of buying votes to get it out of difficulty. The result was that the debt we had to pay off was costing us £30,000 every single minute. That is what we had to pay as a result of that expenditure—
Mr Byrne: Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr Duncan Smith: I am not giving way to the right hon. Gentleman again. I keep reminding him that he is the man who, when he left office, admitted that there was no more money left. He should apologise for that. Labour has opposed the £80 billion of savings that we have proposed. When he gets up again, he needs to tell the House what Labour would do to reduce the deficit and where it would find the savings. If he answers that question, I will give way to him.
Mr Byrne: My right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out far more about the difficult decisions that we would make than the Chancellor ever made. We have said that uprating of benefits should be slower; that there should be a two-year cap on contributory ESA; that there should be a reduction in disregards in tax credits; that there should be a benefit cap in different parts of the country; and that no one in this country should be allowed to live a life on welfare and languish for more than two years on JSA. The best way to bring the welfare bill down is to get people into work, not give them a failed Work programme.
Mr Duncan Smith: I remind the right hon. Gentleman again that we are getting people into work. Unemployment is lower than it was when we took office, youth unemployment is lower and we are getting more people into work. He said that he was in favour of the cap. That is very interesting, because he voted against the cap. He says that he is in favour of a number of issues, but he voted against the Welfare Reform Act 2012. He is against universal credit and the housing benefit changes. He has not agreed to any of the changes that we have made.
The overall bill for welfare rose by 60% between 1997 and 2010—
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con): Is not the philosophical underpinning of this debate our wish to create a hand-back society, not a hand-out society? Is not cutting taxes on lower earners the best way to help those on low earnings, rather than recycling their hard-earned money through the benefits system?
Mr Duncan Smith: That is exactly the point. Labour Members think that helping people is about trapping more and more people in benefits. It is interesting that under the tax credits system, nine out of 10 families with children were eligible for tax credits, in some cases those with more than £70,000 in earnings. What a ridiculous nonsense they created.
Labour’s system was riddled with fraud and error. HMRC had to write off £4 billion in fraud and error payments and will probably have to write off another £4 billion, so £8 billion has been lost. This Bill is about
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finding savings of £1.9 billion, but as a result of tax credits Labour lost probably nearly £8 billion. That is the record of the last Government. They should apologise for the mess they left us in.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP): I appreciate the Secretary of State’s generosity in giving way.
I welcome the Secretary of State’s confirmation that pensions will not be detrimentally affected by the Bill. Can he confirm that in actual cash terms there will be an increase in benefits?
Mr Duncan Smith: That is correct. That is exactly what this Bill sets out. That will also be the case this year.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): I wish to take the Secretary of State back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) about disabled people. We have now gone from the Secretary of State saying that there is a blanket protection for disabled people to him acknowledging in the impact assessment that some disabled people will be affected by these changes. Given that recognition in the impact assessment, can he tell the House how many disabled people his Department estimates will be affected by these changes?
Mr Duncan Smith: I stand by what we said originally, and I say it again: in this Bill we have protected people on disability living allowance, as well as people in the support group on ESA. All the disabled premiums in JSA and so on are also protected. I do not know where Labour Members think they are going with all these points, because the reality is that they are basically opposed to absolutely everything. They would spend more money, they would tax more and they would borrow more, and the people who would suffer would be the British people who would have to pick up the bill. That is the reality.
I was making an important point about fraud and error. In essence, more than £10 billion was lost, and we do not even know how much was overspent, because Labour would not collect the figures. Writing off those debts wastes taxpayers’ money. To put this in perspective, the Bill sets out what we are doing at the moment to raise £1.9 billion, but that money could have been raised without difficulty had Labour’s system been better and more efficient.
It is also worth pointing out that, for many of the people Labour Members talk about, universal credit will improve their income dramatically. I have some very good examples of that. Under universal credit, a typical one-earner couple who have two children and rent their home will be £61 better off—including the changes today. A one-earner family with an income of £20,000 and two children will see a net gain of at least £34 a week. That will be a big boost for them and was not taken into consideration in the IFS figures.
The reality is that there is an issue about fairness, which we touched on just now. We should bear in mind that 70% of all households will not be affected by this legislation. Many of our constituents are taxpayers picking up the bill for all these costs, including the deficit and borrowing that the last Government left us. Over the last five years, following the recession, the gap
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has grown between what people in employment have been earning and what those on welfare have been getting. Those in work have seen their incomes rise half as quickly as those on out-of-work benefits—10% compared with 20%. That is not fair to taxpayers. Returning fairness to the system is critical, and it is one area that Labour refuses to acknowledge. Under the previous Government, taxes rose, borrowing rose and the deficit rose—and they left those bills for the next generation to pay. It is our job to get that under control. These are not decisions taken lightly or easily, but we have to take them and they are in denial.
The shadow Chancellor likes to sound off from a sedentary position. He likes to give it out but does not like to take it. I remember only a few weeks ago that he went around the studios complaining that we were too mean to him. If he does not like it, then he should stop making sedentary interventions.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the Secretary of State confirm that inflation can be particularly tough on people on low incomes who face small increases? Will he reassure people in the country that the Government and the future Governor of the Bank of England will be dedicated to getting inflation down, so that the value of benefits is not eroded more?
Mr Duncan Smith: Exactly. Mortgage rates are a critical component of what a household spends each year. Under Opposition plans, if interest rates had to rise because of their messy borrowing and spending, every 1% would cost another £1,000 on a typical mortgage. What have also done as a coalition, which we should be proud of and on which our coalition partners were very keen, is raise the tax threshold. That is taking more than 2 million people out of tax—people who were paying tax under the previous Government. That is serious help and an improvement of £165 a week for the average family.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab): I want to ask the Secretary of State about the people who are moving into low-paid work. Of the increase in employment in the past year, only 20% has been for full-time work, and so 80% has been for people who are by definition in part-time, and therefore probably low-paid, work. How will they benefit when he is capping the in-work benefits increase by just 1%?
Mr Duncan Smith:
I will make two points to the hon. Lady. First, the vast majority of people who take part-time work choose to take part-time work. In all the studies we have—I am happy to let her have them; they are in the public domain—only 17% or 18% say that they did not want a part-time job, and wanted a full-time job, so she should not decry those who take part-time work. My second point is that that is why we are bringing in universal credit. Universal credit is about in-work and will be a huge support to those in part-time work, starting this year. The trouble with the tax credit system, which the Opposition are defending despite the fraud, the over-payments and the massive error, is that it lodged people into little silos where they could not move up, out of those hours. If a job moved from 16 hours to 17 or 18 hours, people did not do it because they could not afford to do it. Large numbers of lone
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parents, as she knows only too well, would rotate out of that and crash back out of work, because the job moved on and they could not stay with it.
The reality is that we are reforming the welfare system to make it better and easier for people who are in part-time work to have improved incomes. That is a part of this overall welfare programme that will deliver an efficient and even-handed system. It is right that the 1% applies across the board, including the tax credit system. As I said earlier about the overall numbers of people affected, of those working households, 20% of all households are affected by the Bill. If tax credits and child benefits were excluded, as the Opposition have prescribed, we would see a requirement to find a further £1.5 billion—yet another amount of money which they cannot say how it would be found. When in denial, like those on the other side of the House, one just votes against everything. A constructive Opposition would give us a proposal on how they would save that money.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op): The Secretary of State has used the word “denial” twice. In previous Budgets and autumn statements, the Government talked about and acknowledged measured child poverty. However, in the most recent autumn statement and in the Bill, there is no mention of child poverty. Will he admit that under these plans child poverty in our country will go up and that that will come at a cost to us all?
Mr Duncan Smith: I will say two things about child poverty. First, we want to ensure that the figures published concern the years that this measure covers, and the year in which I will be introducing secondary legislation. The figures will be published next week in time for the debate—the Committee stage will be on the Floor of the House and everybody who is here today can take part.
Secondly, child poverty was calculated based on the median income line, and the previous Government lost control of it. Tax credits rocketed because they were chasing a moving line. As upper incomes rose, so did average earnings, and that is why they had to spend so much money. I remind the hon. Lady that they missed their targets in 2010 by 600,000 children in poverty. Since we have come in, the figures published this June show that child poverty fell by 300,000. I am not going to stand here today and try to claim credit for that fall. The figure fell because we saw the biggest fall in earnings for many years. Does that mean that because earnings fell child poverty has been solved? No, it does not. That is why we are consulting on a better way to measure child poverty.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green): The Secretary of State brandishes the figure of a 20% increase in benefits in the past five years. In cash terms, jobseeker’s allowance has gone up from just £59.15 in 2007 to £71 in 2012. In other words, in each of those past years JSA has gone up by just £2.50. Is it not the truth that this is a mean and miserable piece of legislation from a mean and miserable Government?
Mr Duncan Smith:
I hear the hon. Lady’s point; I have to say that I do not agree with her. Benefits have risen, but if she would like to talk to those who are in
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employment on lower incomes in her constituency she would find that many have seen absolutely no rise in their incomes at all, and some even less than that.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con): On that point, I was approached by a member of Manchester constabulary in my advice surgery recently. He said, “How can you justify putting out-of-work benefits up by 5.2% last year, when I have had a pay freeze and I risk my life every day?” Is that not the nub of the argument? People who are in work have to be treated fairly.
Mr Duncan Smith: I agree with my hon. Friend. I want to make some progress because he is absolutely right. The reality that Labour will not face up to is that the programme it has put forward is hugely costly.
I want to deal with the programme that Labour put forward in the past week, which I think is in the amendment before the House. I looked at it and it seemed very familiar. I remembered something, looking back over the past 10 years. I went back and had a look at the programme that the shadow Chancellor and his then boss, the then Labour Prime Minister the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) came up with. [Interruption.] I seem to recall that they came up with a programme called StepUp. The right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) was an adviser at the time. [Interruption.] Well, he was certainly very close to him. Is he now denying—[Interruption.] Well, there we have it finally: he no longer wants to have the former Prime Minister as his friend. More than that, from his sedentary position, he will probably deny that, late in the hour while the then Prime Minister was troubled and in difficulty, he did not come by taxi or by car to consult him and help him out. A denial of a friend is pretty cheap, and I think we will remember that.
The reality is that the StepUp programme, on which the Opposition have clearly based this new programme, was piloted in 20 areas between 2002 and 2004. It was never rolled out nationally, and I want to quote from the evaluation report. The StepUp programme was all about giving paid employment to people who had been out of work for some two years. The report stated:
“StepUp produces a very modest improvement in job entries…but this is below the level of statistical significance.”
In fact, each of those jobs would have ended up costing £10,000—a massive cost for a very small regard. When they did it—[Interruption.] Wait a minute. When they did it—[Interruption.] They do not want to hear about it. They made a bogus announcement and now they do not want to hear how useless it is. The work prospects of under-25s in the pilot got worse as a result of this programme.
Here is what happened. The Opposition were in a hurry during the Christmas recess, worried about being attacked for having no proposals, so the shadow Chancellor said, “Oh, I remember something we did under the man who used to be my friend, but is no longer my friend. I remember we had this programme.” So they decided to put that out and propose raiding pensions savings yet again to pay for a bogus programme. If anyone thinks for one moment that it would help anybody at all, let me
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tell them that it is more than a joke—it is pathetic. And it is pathetic that they have done it to try to get themselves off the hook.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con): Has my right hon. Friend pondered this question? The Government are trying to ensure that the social security net works for people who need social security. When does he think that Labour decided that they were not interested in social security, only in bribing the electorate?
Mr Duncan Smith: It is in its DNA, so I am not sure when it started, to be honest. The tax credit system was out of control, as I said earlier on, because Labour was chasing a figure it could never reach, and as a result its spending was enormous.
Mr Duncan Smith: No, I want to conclude. The right hon. Gentleman will have plenty of time to speak.
Mr Duncan Smith: Okay, I will give way in a second.
I want to remind the Opposition of what they have done. They have opposed £83 billion-worth of savings this Parliament. That is equivalent to adding another £5,000 of debt for every working family in the country. We hear much about taxing the rich, yet, in this Parliament, the richest will pay more in tax than in any single year of the previous Government—more tax on capital gains, more stamp duty—they will be less able to avoid and evade tax and they will pay more when they take out their pension policies.
We hear much about the bankers’ bonus tax, but Labour would have spent that money 10 times over. This is its great bankers’ bonus tax of £2.3 billion. Let us think about it very carefully. It would have overspent that to the sum of £25 billion—through reversing the VAT increase, more capital spending, reversing tax credit savings and reversing the child benefit savings. We are talking huge sums of money.
Mr Byrne: The Secretary of State has the temerity to criticise proposals we launched on Friday, when he is presiding over a Work programme that is literally worse than doing nothing. He stands before the House justifying the position of his Government, which is that it is possible to spend a life on welfare, but we say that is wrong. The way to bring welfare spending down is to get people into jobs, and when there are no jobs we invest in creating them.
Mr Duncan Smith: Our record on getting people into jobs is better than theirs. The difference is that Labour spent taxpayers’ money like drunks on a Friday night, with no care or concern for how effective it was. The work experience programme achieves what the future jobs fund did, but at a fraction of the cost. The Work programme is getting more people into work than the flexible new deal programme.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab) rose—
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Mr Duncan Smith: No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. I think he has a few apologies to make before I give way.
This was Labour’s legacy in government: 5 million on out-of-work benefits, one in five households with nobody working and 2 million children living in workless families—a higher proportion than in any other EU country. In opposition, they have learned nothing. Today’s amendment shows—if Members can be bothered to get to the end of it without falling asleep—that Labour would spend more, tax more and borrow more and let the next generation pick up the bill. The Bill is about picking up the pieces, sorting out the deficit and being a responsible Government.
2.44 pm
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab): I beg to move,
That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill because it fails to address the reasons why the cost of benefits is exceeding the Government’s plans; notes that the Resolution Foundation has calculated that 68 per cent of households affected by these measures are in work and that figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that all the measures announced in the Autumn Statement, including those in the Bill, will mean a single-earner family with children on average will be £534 worse off by 2015; further notes that the Bill does not include anything to remedy the deficiencies in the Government’s work programme or the slipped timetable for universal credit; believes that a comprehensive plan to reduce the benefits bill must include measures to create economic growth and help the 129,400 adults over the age of 25 out of work for 24 months or more, but that the Bill does not do so; further believes that the Bill should introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee, which would give long-term unemployed adults a job they would have to take up or lose benefits, funded by limiting tax relief on pension contributions for people earning over £150,000 to 20 per cent; and further believes that the proposals in the Bill are unfair when the additional rate of income tax is being reduced, which will result in those earning over a million pounds per year receiving an average tax cut of over £100,000 a year.
It is good to see the Secretary of State fronting the Bill today and to see the Economic Secretary to the Treasury in his place. Where, however, is the Chancellor? It is a disgrace that he is not here in person. Where is he?
Mr Duncan Smith: The Chancellor told me earlier he was in Berlin making a speech—a long-term commitment —but he will be back in plenty of time for the winding-up speeches, and he is looking forward to hearing Labour make as much of a mess of it at the end as at the beginning.
Mr Byrne: I think it is surprising that the Chancellor is talking to people in Germany, rather than to MPs in the House about the disastrous consequences of his policies.
We know that the Chancellor and the Secretary of State do not see eye to eye on much, but they are jointly and severally liable for the mess and the haemorrhaging of the welfare budget that the Bill seeks to staunch. The Chancellor’s disappearance is a hallmark of the contempt that has been shown for the House today. The impact assessment for the Bill was published at noon. It makes radically different assumptions from the policy costings set out by the Chancellor last year. And now the Government propose to ram the Bill through the House in just one day of debate. They are terrified of
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scrutiny and exposure. It is turning into a hit and run on working families, and frankly we should not stand for it.
The Chancellor should have shown up, because the Bill is about clearing up the consequences of his failure. His reputation as a maker of recessions is now pretty well established. Every time he has come to the House, he has been forced to downgrade growth yet again, and since he took office he has battered the life out of the recovery that Labour left him in 2010. He is the first Chancellor for 35 years to preside over a double-dip recession. History will not judge him well.
But the Chancellor has a partner in crime: the Secretary of State, the man who has become the Comical Ali of the Government, the only man in the DWP who thinks that everything is fine and hunky-dory—a man who would put Dr Pangloss to shame. Every time he comes to the House, he comes with words of reassurance: everything on his watch is going according to plan. He blithely assures us that the Work programme is fine. We are told that universal credit is completely and utterly on track—not a hiccup to be heard—and that the benefit cap will definitely start in May. The only problem is that he is living in a fantasy land of his own, because everything is not okay, everything is not on time and everything is certainly not on budget. We were promised a Work programme bigger than any yet known to man. So big it could be seen from space. This is a programme that is so effective it is literally worse than doing nothing. It works so well that just three out of 100 people who passed through it passed into sustained jobs. It is a disaster.
Then, of course, we have universal credit—a policy that is now proceeding so smoothly that, it is fair to say, it has earned widespread support and praise from right the way across Government. Members of the Cabinet—perhaps even those sharing a building with the Economic Secretary—are now so impressed that they are telling anyone who will listen at the Daily Mail and elsewhere that it is a “disaster waiting to happen” and that the IT is “nowhere near ready.” The Secretary of State has so much grip on this project that the Prime Minister himself invited him to pack his bags and clear on out of the Department—a vote of confidence that I know rang around Caxton house, because senior officials are now leaving the Department as fast as they can.
Now, of course, we have the news that the benefit cap—which Lord Freud told the other place would absolutely, definitely, without question be introduced nationwide in April—will be introduced in just four London boroughs. This is a record of chaos, delay and impending disaster, and today the Government are inviting millions of working families in this country to pay to clean it up.
Jake Berry: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I am sorry to drag him back to the Bill, but what would he say to the police officer in my constituency—the right hon. Gentleman heard my earlier intervention—who said, “Is it fair that people out of work have seen their benefits go up by 5.2% when my salary’s been frozen and I risk my life every day to keep people safe in this country?”? That is what this Bill is about; will the right hon. Gentleman please answer that question?
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Mr Byrne: I want incomes to rise faster than benefits. That is why I think it was wrong that the hon. Gentleman voted for a three-year freeze in tax credits, which has hit 7,700 of his constituents. He must answer to them after today’s debate. Why is he supporting a huge tax cut for millionaires when 7,500 people in his constituency are seeing a freeze on their tax credits and a squeeze on them in the years to come?
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab): To respond to the issues raised by Government Members, I point out that a lady on £72 a week in jobseeker’s allowance came to my surgery on Friday. She is being expected to pay £9.60 because of a loss of housing benefit because of the imposition of the bedroom tax. What do Government Members have to say to her?
Mr Byrne: Once upon a time—back in 2004 and 2005—when the Secretary of State was making speeches about poverty, he said that the way to judge the Conservative party was on how its policies worked for the poorest communities in the country. What many people will be asking after today’s debate is: what happened to that man?
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con): The right hon. Gentleman is perhaps not willing to address the issues put to him by Government Members, but I wonder whether he will address the question raised by a former Cabinet colleague of his, Jacqui Smith, who said earlier this week that Labour canvassers
“who’ve knocked on doors recently”
“been told the problem for Labour is…they think we caused the deficit and they’re not…convinced we know how we’ll solve it.”
Mr Byrne: I spoke to the former right honourable Member for Redditch yesterday and I set out—[Interruption.] Absolutely. I set out the substance of today’s debate and said that we have a choice between the Tory way and the Labour way to bring down welfare spending. The Tory way is to hit working families; the Labour way is to help people work.
Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op): I share the concern about the Bill’s impact on public service workers. Has my right hon. Friend seen—I am sure he has—the research published over the weekend by the Children’s Society? It shows that 40,000 soldiers will see their household incomes cut if the Bill goes through, along with 300,000 nurses, 150,000 primary school teachers and 9,300 of my constituents, which is why I will be voting against it today.
Mr Byrne: My hon. Friend is already speaking very eloquently in the House. Some 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will be hit by this Bill. I suggest to the House that they are making a much bigger contribution to the health and well-being of this country than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is accusing them of being the people whose blinds are closed in the morning.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab):
We have seen the failure of the Work programme. In my constituency, unemployment is now 10% higher than a year ago. One
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person in the area telephoned BBC Tees this morning and said that he had £130 a week for himself, his wife and three children. He cannot get a job and all he has to look forward to is an increase of £1.30—enough to buy a loaf of bread. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need to show compassion to such families, rather than giving millionaire earners a tax break of £2,000 a week?
Mr Byrne: What we need from this Government is the right combination of compassion and competence, and right now we see neither.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab): We were told that this Bill was about fairness. How can it be a fair when a young mother in my constituency on jobseeker’s allowance is expected to live on £56.24 a week? She will lose £12 a week through the empty room tax and £9 a week in council tax. That leaves her with £35 a week to pay for heating, water and food. How is she going to survive? How can that be fair?
Mr Byrne: My hon. Friend is exactly right. What her constituents need is a job, but what they are not getting from the failed Work programme is any prospect at all of work.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab): On inflation uprating, which is at the heart of this Bill, there is a widespread belief that housing benefit for private rented accommodation will rise in April by CPI. The Department has done little to dispel that understanding, but in Rotherham, as my right hon. Friend might be aware, the rate for a three-bedroom home is set to be cut by 3% in cash terms. Is not this, like the Bill, another harsh, half-hidden cut to the help that those in work and those out of work need to meet the cost of household bills?
Mr Byrne: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is also right that the Department’s incompetence in proceeding with some of these reforms means that many of the changes risk costing more than they save. That is why Ministers have been forced to delay implementation of the benefit cap, about which they made such a fuss last year. Now we see that it will be implemented in just four London boroughs, because the Government do not know how it will work in practice.
Charlie Elphicke: Does the right hon. Gentleman think it right and fair that benefits should have gone up by 20% at the same time that average earnings have gone up just by 10%?
Mr Byrne: I repeat: there are 6,800 people in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency on tax credits—we have rehearsed these figures before, because he is an assiduous attender of social security debates. I want incomes to go up faster than benefits. That is why it is so important that tax credits are protected. He has to accept that he has voted for a freeze in tax credits for the 6,800 of his constituents who enjoy them. Today he is proposing to vote for a further squeeze, at a time when millionaires are being given a tax cut. I just do not understand how he will justify that to the good residents of Dover.
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Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con): The right hon. Gentleman refers to 6,700 people in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). While he is bandying statistics around, he might be interested to know that there are 38,000 people in work who have benefited from the increase in the tax threshold. The way to raise incomes is not to have inflation of state support but to get people back into work where they can keep more of their own income.
Mr Byrne: The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do—he is a numerate man and he understands the figures involved in this debate—that the personal allowance does not compensate for the whack that has been delivered to most working families in this country. The House of Commons Library says they will be £280 a year poorer by next year and the Institute for Fiscal Studies says they will be £534 poorer by 2015-16. He has to get real about the impact of his Government’s policies, because they are hurting 7,000 of his constituents.
Nick de Bois: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. However difficult these decisions are, if we look more closely at the numbers, we see that he is not highlighting the fact that people earning £50,000 or £60,000—which most people would consider a good income—are included in his figures for tax credits. That is disingenuous and merely a reflection of the trap and the legacy of the shadow Chancellor’s former friend, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown).
Mr Byrne: That is complete nonsense. This Government are taking £14 billion out of tax credits and the Bill proposes to take another £4 billion. That will hurt 7,000 of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents, at a time when millionaires are being given a tax cut. I simply do not understand how he can justify that, either in this House or on the streets of Enfield.
Mr Byrne: I am going to make a tiny bit of progress once I have given way to my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas).
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. What Government Members do not seem to understand is that the whole rationale for this Bill is the need to address their failure to deliver on the economic promises they made when they first came into government. The Bill is necessary only because the Government have failed economically.
Mr Byrne: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. When the Chancellor came to the House back in December, he was forced to admit that somehow, for some reason, growth had eluded him once again—it had got away. He brought forward a package of measures that was so focused on generating jobs that the Office for Budget Responsibility looked at it and revised the claimant count for the forecast period, not down but up by 300,000. The OBR also spelled out how much this was going to cost us: it is an eye-watering figure. The heroic efforts of the Chancellor and the Secretary of State to get the claimant count down over the next few years is costing us £6 billion in higher welfare bills, and today’s Bill shows us exactly who is going to pick up the tab.
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Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con) rose—
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con) rose—
Mr Byrne: I shall give way to people who were here at the start of the debate, rather than to those who have wandered in late. This is an important debate. The point that I want to make, before I give way to the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), is that we are learning today who is being asked to pick up the bill for this catastrophic economic failure. It is not Britain’s richest citizens, who are now so hard pressed and under the cosh that they are being given a tax cut. From next year, millionaires will have £107,000 more to help them to heat their swimming pools. It is not Britain’s millionaires who are picking up the tab; it is Britain’s working families. The measures in the Bill are a strivers’ tax, pure and simple.
Margot James: Is the right hon. Gentleman going to acknowledge the 1 million extra jobs that have been created since 2010? Will he also acknowledge that the number of people claiming tax credits escalated to an unsustainable level under his Government? The country cannot afford to have 50% of the population either claiming tax credits or in receipt of benefits. That is unsustainable.
Mr Byrne: I look forward to coming to Stourbridge and helping to explain to the 6,500 people there who are on tax credits that their Member of Parliament thinks that the money they are getting is unsustainable. I happen to think that those 6,500 people, whom the hon. Lady has just dismissed, need every pound of the tax credits that Labour delivered when we were in office.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb): I should like to bring the right hon. Gentleman back to the Bill, and to tell him that when he votes against it tonight, £1.9 billion a year will go missing. Will he compare that £1.9 billion a year with the £3 billion a week that Labour was borrowing during its last year in office?
Mr Byrne: I would contrast that money with the £3 billion a year that the Chancellor is giving away to Britain’s richest citizens, in a tax cut that will kick in next year, at a time when the Government are cutting tax credits and when Britain’s working families are under pressure. How can the hon. Gentleman possibly justify that, either here or to his constituents?
Mr Duncan Smith: I would be grateful if the right hon. Gentleman will now acknowledge that all the OBR’s latest figures show that, under this Government, the wealthiest are paying more in tax than in any single year under his Government.
Mr Byrne: Like me, the Secretary of State will no doubt have seen table 2.1 of the Budget, published in March 2012, which clearly shows that in 2014-15, the cost of the tax giveaway will be £3.4 billion. How can he possibly justify that at a time when he is hitting Britain’s working families? Will he justify it now?
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Mr Duncan Smith: I asked the right hon. Gentleman a simple question—[Interruption.] Actually, the shadow Chancellor should leave the right hon. Gentleman alone for a second; I think he has a brain in his head. Don’t listen to him; his advice to the last Prime Minister was hopeless. I want to ask the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) a simple question. Here are the figures: the wealthiest in Britain are paying more in tax under this Government than in any single year under the last Government. Does he agree with that?
Mr Byrne: We put the top rate of tax up. It is this Government who are cutting it, at a cost of £3.4 billion a year. How can the Secretary of State possibly justify the choices made by his right hon. Friend the Chancellor, a man who has supported him hilt and sword? How can the Secretary of State justify giving away £3.4 billion to Britain’s richest citizens in a tax giveaway when he is hurting Britain’s working families? Justify it now!
Mr Duncan Smith: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree or disagree that the OBR figures show that, under this Government, we are raising more in tax from wealthy people than in any single year under the last Government? Will he now admit that?
Mr Byrne: I am saying that we should be raising more from Britain’s richest citizens, not giving them a £3.4 billion tax cut to heat their swimming pools while Britain’s working families are being punished. Let us be clear about the effects of the Bill.
Mr Byrne: I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, even though he could not be bothered to get here for the beginning of the debate, but let me first ask him how he can justify giving away £3.4 billion to Britain’s richest citizens while taking money away from Britain’s working families. Justify that now!
Nadhim Zahawi: My question to the right hon. Gentleman is about the honesty with which he delivered his message in 2010, in which he told us that there was no money left and wished us good luck. Will he show the same honesty now and acknowledge that we are taking more from the wealthiest in this country in every year of this Parliament than was taken in the 13 years of the Labour Government? That is the honesty we require from him. Yes or no, please?
Mr Byrne: I think that, at a time like this, those with the broadest shoulders should be carrying the biggest load. I also thought that, once upon a time, the Conservatives agreed with that principle. I seem to remember hearing that once in a debate.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con) rose—
Mr Byrne: I will give way to the hon. Lady, who I believe made an important intervention yesterday about the tone of this debate and about how we should not reduce it to a basic division between Britain’s shirkers and strivers. I hope that she will say more about that today.
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Dr Wollaston: I certainly feel that the tone of this debate is important, and that we should not be talking about shirkers. I do not believe that people on welfare benefits are shirkers. Having made that clear statement, I would like to ask the right hon. Gentleman this question: for how many days did the Labour Government apply the top rate of tax when they were in office?
Mr Byrne: I know that the hon. Lady is new to the House—[Interruption.] I will seek to answer her question as soon as those on her own Front Bench calm down a little. I think that she would acknowledge that the economics and the politics of this Parliament are very different from those in the last three Parliaments. There was an important principle at the heart of the debate—namely, that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the biggest load. That is why, when Labour was in power, we put up the top rate of tax. We knew that, as part of the plan to bring the deficit down, those with the broadest shoulders should bear the biggest load. That is why we put up the top rate of tax, and that is why we object to the Chancellor of the Exchequer cutting it and giving £3.4 billion to Britain’s richest citizens when he is taking money from Britain’s working families.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD): The hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) was right yesterday, and she is right today. This debate should not polarise people in work against people who are out of work. However, the right hon. Gentleman must realise that those of us who lived through the last Labour Government saw the rich doing better, the bonuses getting higher, the bankers exploiting people more and the pensioners not getting the link with earnings that Labour promised but never delivered. This is a difficult decision, but the Government have got the balance right in these difficult times. I hope that, by the end of this Parliament, they will be vindicated through many more people being in work and many fewer being on benefits.
Mr Byrne: I respect the passion with which the right hon. Gentleman made that intervention, but would he mind intervening once again and telling me whether he thinks a top-rate tax cut is the right priority for Britain’s hard-pressed working families?
Simon Hughes: No, I do not think that it is the right priority, but it was part of a package deal that will leave the richest paying more than they did under Labour, that will bring the top rate down to 45% when it was only 40% in 12.5 years of the Labour Government, and that will bring in a rise in the tax threshold to £9,440 for ordinary people in my constituency and the right hon. Gentleman’s this year. In this place, we make balanced choices. This is a reasonable balanced choice to get the economy out of the mess that he and his colleagues have clearly admitted they left us in.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo): Order. Interventions, even when invited, need to be relatively brief.
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Mr Byrne: At least the right hon. Gentleman is honest, unlike that lot on the Conservative Benches. We will leave it to the voters of Bermondsey to decide whether the package that he secured, which punishes so many hard-working families in his constituency, was or was not a good one.
Mr Byrne: I shall give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), but then I will make some progress.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab): The argument coming from the Government Benches is wholly founded on misinformation, particularly in respect of the claim that the Government have created 1 million jobs in the private sector. Is my right hon. Friend aware that, according to the Office for National Statistics, 196,000 of those jobs are due solely to the reclassification of sixth-form colleges and further education colleges?
Mr Byrne: My hon. Friend is right: sometimes things are not all that they seem to be.
Mr Byrne: I will give way later, but I want to move the debate on a little. It is time that we debated who is going to be hurt by the Bill. Yesterday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies did us a great favour in setting out for the first time that a total of 7 million working families will be hit by the Bill—half the working families in Britain. As we heard from the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois), some on the Treasury Bench like to cry, “Don’t worry, don’t panic; working people are going to be compensated by the rises in the personal allowance.” That is simply not true. The IFS is very clear about that: the real income of a one-earner working family is going to be £534 a year less by 2015-16.
The Children’s Society, as one of my hon. Friends mentioned earlier, has spelt out clearly what this means for many of Britain’s working families. A second lieutenant will lose £552 a year, and there are 40,000 soldiers in the same position; and a lone parent nurse will lose £424 a year, as will a primary school teacher. These are not people who have their blinds closed in the morning, yet these are the people who will be hurt by the Bill.
I know the Chancellor thought he was being clever. I know that he was, as the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) said, playing the politics of the playground and looking for a dividing line. We are right to ask what that means for the average Conservative constituency. It means that an average of 6,000 families in Tory-held constituencies will be worse off—a number that I noticed was bigger than the Tory majority in 107 seats. I just mention that in passing. Why should a second lieutenant, a nurse or a primary school teacher, or 6,000 residents of an average Tory constituency, be asked to pay for this Government’s failure to get people back to work? This is a strivers’ tax pure and simple: it does nothing to create new jobs or remedy the deficiencies of the Work programme; it does nothing to sort out the chaos in universal credit; it does nothing but punish working families that are now losing £9 billion of support under this Government.
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Chris Bryant: Is there not another real problem? In many constituencies where there is profound deprivation and low-income families have even less money coming in to spend every week, we will see further depression in the local economy, more shops closed and fewer people in jobs, so that we will never be able to refloat the economy. Is not the greatest scandal of all the fact that working people in our constituencies—people in jobs—are using food banks to feed their children?
Mr Byrne: My hon. Friend speaks eloquently, and his remarks cut to the quick of the values now on show in this Government. Once upon a time—the Secretary of State will well remember this—he said:
“Conservative policies have to work for Britain’s poorest communities and every policy must be measured by that standard.”
That is what the right hon. Gentleman said on 28 June 2004, so let us weigh up the impact of this Bill on Britain’s communities. It will mean child benefit rising by 20p a week, maternity allowance by £1.37 and jobseeker’s allowance by 72p, while the income of a millionaire will go up as a result of the tax cut by £2,058 a week. How can he possibly justify that? He cannot. He knows that the Chancellor was in search of a dividing line on welfare and that he has obliged the Secretary of State to kiss goodbye to 10 years of campaigning to turn the Tory party into one that gave a monkey’s about poverty.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab): Does my right hon. Friend agree that child poverty in London remains stubbornly high, and that this Bill will make matters worse? My constituency has the highest level of child poverty, and this Bill will lead to more poverty across cities such as London and around the country.
Mr Byrne: Many unemployed people in my hon. Friend’s constituency are young people. These are the people who need a jobs guarantee backed by a tax on bankers’ bonuses.
Andrew George: Of course we welcome the Labour party’s last-minute pre-election conversion to increasing tax for wealthy people. The right hon. Gentleman will have heard in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State my sincere misgivings and my wish to encourage him to review this rather arbitrary 1% cap and perhaps to find ways of relating it to average wages. Bearing in mind that the welfare budget is—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo): Order. It was only a few moments ago, I remind the hon. Gentleman, when I said interventions on a speech needed to be brief and should not become a speech in their own right.
Mr Byrne:
I am grateful for the intervention because I think the hon. Gentleman, like us, is concerned that in our country today a food bank is opening every three days, and that 5 million people may resort to payday loans this year in order to balance the books for the end of the month. The Sun on Sunday this weekend, in an article carried next to the one by the Secretary of State, said that a quarter of mums are now turning off heating so that they have enough money to feed the kids. Is that the kind of country that we are becoming, because the
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Saint of Easterhouse has now become the punch bag of the Treasury? Once he talked about broken Britain; now he is presiding over breadline Britain because he keeps losing his battles with the Treasury.
Andrew George: In view of that and given that the welfare budget is £220 billion, does the right hon. Gentleman believe that it is something that needs a long hard look at? Particularly in a time of austerity, where does he believe the savings can be made within that budget?
Mr Byrne: I have been very clear about where I think the savings can be made. I just think it is wrong that we are giving £3 billion in a tax giveaway to Britain’s richest citizens.
Mr Byrne: Let me deal first with the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. I think it is wrong that millionaires will get an extra £2,058 a week next year, in 2013-14, when child benefit is going up by 20p a week. I simply cannot see how that can be justified and I do not think that tax cut should go through.
Mr Byrne: I shall give way a couple more times, but then I want to conclude.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con): The right hon. Gentleman is right to say that the public do not want false distinctions between strivers and shirkers and he is equally right, I think, to believe that people will see through those who pretend to care when they do not have the money to show that they care. In his more lucid moment, he explained that the Government had no more money left, so would he accept that one answer might be to push forward with ideas such as the living wage, and will he advise us, on the basis of his own research on a living wage, what impact it would have on the long-term benefits needs in the country?
Mr Byrne: I suspect the hon. Gentleman feels that very keenly, as 7,500 people in his constituency are on tax credits. I think that the best way to bring the welfare bill down is by getting people into work. The tragedy with the Bill is that it fails the Ronseal test set out by the Prime Minister yesterday. It does not do what it says on the tin. We are told that this Bill is all about reducing welfare spending. Actually, if we put tax credits to one side, the welfare bill for the period covered by this Bill will not rise by 1%; it is going to go up by 4%. It will go up by £8 billion because the Secretary of State is doing so little to get people back to work.
The reality of the debate is that there is a Labour way to bring down welfare spending and there is a Tory way. The Tory way, aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats, is to attack tax credits. The Labour way is to bring down welfare spending by getting people into jobs—jobs in which they will pay tax rather than sitting on the dole taking benefits. That is why we tabled our amendment. We think that it is right to introduce a bank bonus tax to get 100,000 young people back to work, and to
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reform pension tax relief to create a two-year limit on jobseeker’s allowance. We think that it is right to send the clear signal that anyone who can work must not, and will not, be allowed to languish or to live a life on welfare. That is the kind of tough-minded but fair policy that we now need.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab): We have heard many interventions from Government Members about the unsustainability of tax credits and top-up benefits for working families. According to the Government’s own impact assessment,
“households towards the bottom of the income distribution are more likely to be affected and have a slightly higher average change because they are more likely to receive the affected benefits.”
What does my right hon. Friend think is the reason for that statement?
Mr Byrne: I note that the impact assessment is based on assumptions very different from those that formed the basis of the Treasury costings in December last year. However, the Government cannot change the simple truth: this is a strivers’ tax pure and simple, and it will hit people on tax credits.
We oppose this strivers’ tax. We believe that welfare to work will not work without jobs, and the Bill does not create a single job. It creates a heck of a mess, and asks Britain’s working families to clear it up. I urge the House to oppose the Bill’s Second Reading, to strike a blow for Britain’s strivers, to send the Government back to the drawing board, and to demand from them a proper plan to get our country back to work.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo): Order. I remind all Members that there is a five-minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches.
3.21 pm
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con): Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the debate, Madam Deputy Speaker.
If they read Hansard tomorrow, many of my constituents will be under the misapprehension that the last Labour Government were a great welfare-reforming Government, but one of the points that many others will make to me is that that left the legacy of welfare dependency that has corroded so much of our society. The simple reality is that the last Labour Government should have dealt with the issue of welfare reform when they had the opportunity to do so, between 1997 and 2010.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab): Research carried out recently by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that no such culture of worklessness existed, and that in fact there was a strong commitment to work among people throughout the country, including the 3,500 unemployed people in my constituency.
Gavin Williamson: Where we have a culture in which it sometimes does not pay to take a job or to work more hours, we capture people in a culture of dependency.
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How do we measure success? Is it about spending more and more money? Is it about spending money on welfare, constantly and consistently, or is it about results? I think that we on this side of the House believe that it is about results. In 1997, the number of households in which no one had ever worked was 184,000. That number was far too high. Given all the billions of pounds that were spent, we would expect it to have fallen considerably: perhaps by 10,000, perhaps by 50,000, perhaps by 100,000. So what happened? Did it increase or did it fall? It increased, and not by 10,000—
Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab) rose—
Gavin Williamson: Does the hon. Gentleman think that the number increased, or does he think that it fell? Perhaps he will tell the House.
Chris Williamson: If the hon. Gentleman is concerned about an increase in long-term unemployment, why will he not go through the Lobby with the Opposition in support of our amendment, which will guarantee jobs to people who are out of work for more than 24 months?
Gavin Williamson: The hon. Gentleman is living in cloud cuckoo land. He will not answer the question that I asked. How many more families are there in which no one has ever worked? In fact, the number increased from 184,000 to 352,000 under the last Labour Government. Is that a legacy to be proud of? I think that Members on this side of the House would say that it is not.
Margot James: My hon. Friend is making an excellent point about the legacy of the last Government. Perhaps he agrees with the economics editor of The Sunday Times, who wrote last week:
“It is hard to think of a period more conducive to control of welfare spending than the Blair years, 1997-2007.”
Gavin Williamson: That too was an excellent point. What we have seen is total fiscal irresponsibility. The whole idea of the Labour party’s proposals is to trap more people in welfare, not to take them out of welfare.
Nadhim Zahawi: My hon. Friend has made a very good point about Labour’s past record of fiscal irresponsibility, but what about its current record? Labour Members will vote for millionaires to receive child benefit.
Gavin Williamson: I am afraid that the Labour party’s proposals on so many matters are completely inconsistent. The greatest shame is that there are no ideas coming from Labour Members. They have no ideas about how to deal with the legacy that they left, in relation to welfare reform or in relation to the many billions of pounds of debts with which they have saddled the country.
Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab) rose—
Gavin Williamson:
I will happily give way to the hon. Lady if she explains to the House what she will cut. I assume that she will be voting for the amendment. Will she shut schools in her constituency? Will she close
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hospitals? Will she sack teachers? Will she get rid of nurses? I want to hear what the hon. Lady is going to do.
Fiona O’Donnell: What I want to do is return the hon. Gentleman to the subject of the Bill. Does he agree with Disability Rights UK, which has said that 1 million disabled people will be affected by the 1% uprating, and that more disabled people will be living in poverty? Is he proud of that?
Gavin Williamson: I am taking a lead from the Labour Front Benchers and touching on some of the reasons why we are in this position, and having to make highly difficult decisions. We are not scared to take difficult decisions, but perhaps if the Labour party had made some of the tough choices that we have made—if it had reformed welfare earlier, and had not trapped so many people in welfare dependency—the decisions that the present Government are having to make would be far, far easier.
I am afraid that the hon. Lady is not facing up to the reality, and nor is her party doing so. This Government are committed to giving a hand up, not a handout. What we want to see is people getting into work. What we want to see is people doing well, and not constantly depending on the state.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op) rose—
Gavin Williamson: I will make some more progress.
That is what we are hoping to do. That is what we are doing for our welfare reform, and that is what we are doing here today. We recognise that we cannot spend money that we do not have. It is a simple fact and we hope that eventually the Opposition will adopt such fiscal responsibility. We hope that during the afternoon they will suggest what they would cut if they vote in favour of their amendment.
No one wants to see a restriction on benefit increases, but we all have to face the reality of the country’s position. The coalition is dealing with that reality and with the mess that the Opposition left us. That is what we are getting on with and what we will deliver for this country.
3.29 pm
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab): Over the past hour and a half, the parties on the Government Benches have thrown various lines of argument into the mix, but possibly the most absurd is that the whole agenda and the Bill are about deficit reduction. That argument is already in tatters. We have seen the economic recovery deferred and a double-dip recession possibly turning into a triple-dip recession. The rate of reduction of unemployment has been so slow since 2010 that it will not return to pre-recession levels until 2019, and we have seen a systematic and structural increase in under-employment. It is no wonder that total expenditure on welfare, despite the protestations, has been going up.
Let us take one example about which there has been a great deal of sound and fury over recent years—the housing benefit bill. Over this comprehensive spending review period, this Government will spend £12 billion more on subsidising private tenants than was spent by
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the Labour Government during the previous CSR period, so let us not hear anything from the Government about their successes on welfare reform and reduction and our failure.
For the first time in decades we see more working than workless people in poverty—now a record 6.1 million. It is no wonder that the new head of the Secretary of State’s favourite think-tank, the Commission for Social Justice, told an interviewer:
“I would say we have missed in-work poverty”.
Yes, the commission did, and yes, the Government did, but rather than the Government facing the evidence, we have been subjected to a barrage of rhetoric about the people behind the closed curtains and the shirkers rather than the strivers.
Meg Munn: Does my hon. Friend recognise that in half the workless households the adults are under 25, which is a reflection of the growth in unemployment among that age group?
Ms Buck: That is correct; I recognise that figure. We have seen from the Bill and the debate behind it a political debate and a set of wheezes that the Government think will pay off for them. The problem with wheezes is that they tend to fracture when they come into contact with reality. The Government cannot make serious money out of an assault on out-of-work benefits, whatever the Conservatives like to say. Just 3% of all welfare spending goes on jobseeker’s allowance. Indeed, all out-of-work benefits account for only 3% of GDP between them. The House of Commons Library advises me that if only out-of-work benefits were subject to the 1% cap, but in-work benefits were uprated as normal, 80% of the proposed savings would disappear. If one factors in the changes to the personal tax allowance, one finds that working people, as the Resolution Foundation demonstrated to us, take 60% of the hit.
If the Bill is passed, 2.5 million workless households will lose out by about £215 a year by 2016, and of the 14.1 million working-age households with someone in work, 7 million will be hit: 30% of all households will take a hit on their income because of this Government’s obsession with the tiny minority of long-term or multigenerational workless.
The distinction between those in and out of work is far less rigid than the Government would have us believe. That is an extraordinary piece of rhetoric, given that the universal credit, the centrepiece of the Government’s welfare agenda, is designed to blur the distinction still further, and it has that one significant advantage of seeking to do that. Millions of our constituents, in Conservative and Liberal Democrat constituencies as well as in Labour ones, churn between those states of being in and out of work. Last year there were between 244,000 and 357,000 new claims every month for jobseeker’s allowance, while between 242,000 and 370,000 left benefit every month.
It is a myth that the welfare reform agenda put forward by the Government is about tackling worklessness. It is an assault on low-income working families far more than on working households. It is an assault on both, and on very low-income families, but it is real and not mythical families who will be hurt as a consequence.
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It is real children who are at increasing risk of going to school hungry, as teachers unions are already reporting, and it is real children who will return to homes that cannot be heated by parents who cannot manage to balance all the bills.
We live in a country that apparently can afford tax cuts for millionaires but requires low-income, working families to go to food banks and pay their mortgages with payday loans. Every day in London 100 homes bust the £1 million value level, yet 70,000 children were homeless this Christmas. Today we should not be reducing the capacity of 9.5 million families and households across the country to pay their bills.
What the crash and its aftermath demonstrated beyond doubt was that the future cannot be like the past. We want everyone who can work to do so, we want that work to be secure and fairly paid and for the costs that consume an unsustainable element of people’s incomes to be reduced.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab): Did my hon. Friend notice that the Secretary of State accused Labour of having a new idea with our job guarantee? In fact, the pamphlet produced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) on a job guarantee is dated January 2012. We have been discussing these ideas for more than a year.
Ms Buck: We have indeed been discussing these ideas. The future jobs fund demonstrated value for money in getting people back into work, but the Conservative party, which claims to like evidence, trashed it in favour of the Work programme, which, as we know, has been less effective than doing absolutely nothing would have been.
Without jobs, deficit reduction is doomed, however much the Government cheese-pare away at the income of the poorest. While housing and child care costs consume an ever-larger portion of the incomes of poorer families, work cannot pay and families cannot thrive. It is jobs, fair pay, affordable homes and good affordable child care that will get us out of the trap we are in, whether it is the trap we want to spring to get people into work or the trap of deficit reduction. The trap that the Government are setting today will catch 30% of households in a worsening squeeze on their incomes at the very worst time for them to be facing it.
3.36 pm
Sarah Teather (Brent Central) (LD): People who come to my constituency office these days for help with some kind of error in their benefits often spend the first few minutes trying to justify their worth. They usually begin by trying to explain their history of working and that they have paid tax. They are desperate to get over the point that they are not like other benefit claimants—they are not a scrounger. It is perhaps a feature of the way in which the term “scroungers” has become so pervasive in social consciousness that even those on benefits do not attempt to debunk the entire category, only to excuse themselves from the label.
Language matters. Politicians in this place know that, because all of us spend a good deal of time worrying about how everything we say will be reported by the media, just as journalists pore over every fact, comma
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and noun we give to look for power shifts and personal divisions. Any modern political party devotes considerable money and effort to testing messages with focus groups to see how they would influence voting patters. However, I am afraid we often spend less time considering how our language actually affects people’s lives, choices, values and sense of worth, how they rub up against their neighbours and how society itself functions.
In an atmosphere of uncertainty and limited resources and where every family in this country is struggling, there is a natural tendency to try to find someone to blame for our woes. A fissure already exists between the working and non-working poor. Hammering on that fault line with the language of “shirkers” and “strivers” will have long-term impacts on public attitudes, on attitudes to one neighbour against another. It will make society less generous, less sympathetic, less able to co-operate. The marginalisation of the undeserving poor will place one group outwith society entirely over time and leave them less able to make choices about their lives and to participate. That fragmentation of society, for me, is the spectre of broken Britain, and it is one that we hasten at our peril.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con): Does the hon. Lady not recognise that the nub of the whole argument is that if we allow benefits to be increased by more than salaries, that will increase the number of people on benefits who are trapped in poverty and unable to afford to go to work?
Sarah Teather: I will return to that point in a moment, because I want to make another point about public attitudes first.
For those of us in this place who care about social justice, long-term changes in public attitudes to poverty should give us other causes of concern, because they will make it more difficult for any politicians who come after us to argue for any option for the poor, because public opinion will simply not support it. The irony, of course, is that, as many have said, many of those affected by the Bill are actually in work; many are the same group who have already had a negligible pay rise and are already bumping along at the bottom of the poverty threshold. For me, that is the first of a number of disingenuous comparisons used to argue for the fairness of the Bill. The first is that those affected are out of work, when many more are in fact in work but on low pay. As the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) mentioned a moment ago, many of those are part of the group of people who cycle in and out of work all the time; I see that in my constituency.
The second disingenuous point is about percentages themselves, which fail to take into account the cuts to housing benefit that families in my constituency will be experiencing in the next six months or so as the changes filter through. There are also the changes in April to council tax benefit; they will affect the same families affected by the uprating provisions in the Bill.
The third point is whether percentages mean anything at all. Whatever goal posts are used to measure the percentage change in benefit across time, it is clear that the monetary value of rising average wages is significantly more than that of benefits. Percentages do not buy milk, bread or school uniforms—pounds and pennies buy those things, and it is in pounds and pennies that people will experience a cut.
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Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab): I thank the hon. Lady very much for giving way. I have sat for three or four minutes listening to her and I have never in my life agreed with her more. She is right about the language of the debate and about the percentages—it is monetary value that is important.
Can the hon. Lady explain to me in any way how the removal of the best part of £6 billion from the economy in the next two to three years will stimulate the economy? How many jobs will it create, if any at all?
Sarah Teather: The fourth disingenuous point is probably that cutting the incomes of those at the bottom of the income threshold will help boost the economy. All the evidence says that money put into the pockets of those at the bottom of the income spectrum is most likely to be spent. That is precisely why my party argued so hard during negotiations to ensure that we raised the threshold of tax on the lowest paid.
I do not enjoy voting against my own party, and I cannot vote for the Labour amendment, but with a very heavy heart I shall be voting against the Second Reading of the Bill. I hope that I, and any others who choose that course of action, will give the Government some cause for thought and reflection.
3.42 pm
David Miliband (South Shields) (Lab): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather).
The truth is that all western economies need to refashion their social contract to cope with demographic and economic change—expanding child care versus higher child benefit; housing benefit versus house building; and long-term care versus reliefs and benefits for old age. In each case, we need to choose.
The Bill asks us to make three judgments: about fairness, affordability and politics. The Chancellor claimed in his autumn statement that the Bill was about distinguishing working people from those
“asleep, living a life on benefits.”—[Official Report, 5 December 2012; Vol. 554, c. 877.]
That has been blown out of the water by the facts that have come out since; the facts unearthed by my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State today are damning.
What of the 3,120 people in South Shields on income support or the 4,200 on jobseeker’s allowance alleged to be choosing a life of Riley? I have three points. Two years ago, the Prime Minister said that he had ended the option of a life on benefits through the so-called Welfare Reform Act 2010. Secondly, the Government’s own figures about the level of fraud show it to be 0.7%—by the way, it is lower among immigrants to this country. Thirdly, the DWP’s own figures, published by the Secretary of State, show that more than 10 jobseekers in South Shields are seeking every job. In all the talk of fairness, that is what is unfair.
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): Will the right hon. Gentleman elaborate on the statistic he gave? Do immigrants not have a lower level of benefit fraud because fewer of them are entitled to the full range of benefits?
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David Miliband: I do not want to give the hon. Gentleman a maths lesson—I did not get good marks in maths—but percentages are percentages; that is the whole point. If we change the denominator it plays through in the percentage that comes later. I do not want to get too diverted by that, but I thank him for the extra 50 seconds.
Let me get on to the question of affordability, which is central to the Government’s case. The Government claim that the alternative to this Bill is higher borrowing or higher taxation, but I want to show why that is not true. The Government themselves have projected the total cost of all benefits, all tax credits and all tax relief for the next few years, and I am happy to debate priorities within that envelope. I will take the envelope that they have set, but let us have a proper debate about choices, not the total sum—a priorities debate, not an affordability debate.
David Miliband: Just a minute.
The measures before us raise £3.7 billion from poor and lower-middle-income people in 2015-16. The Chancellor cut tax relief for pension contributions by wealthier people, but by how much? It was by £200 million in 2013-14 and £600 million in 2015-16. The cumulative saving from the richest between now and 2015-16 is £1.1 billion; the cumulative saving from those on lower-middle incomes on benefits and tax credits is £5.6 billion. Taking five times as much from poor and middle-income Britain as from the richest in Britain—
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con) rose—
David Miliband: I will come to the hon. Gentleman in a minute.
Taking five times as much from lower and middle-income Britain as from the richest in Britain is not equality of sacrifice. The Chancellor reminds me of the man at the top of a ladder in a 1929 election poster. The man at the bottom of the ladder has got water up to his neck, and the man at the top shouts, “Equality of sacrifice—let’s all go down one rung!” It is not equality of sacrifice when you are up to your neck in water.
David Miliband: I will come to the hon. Gentleman in a moment.
The Government have made a great deal of the point that no one should receive more on benefits than the average wage of £26,000 a year, but they offer tax relief of £40,000 for those with £40,000 spare. Just to be clear, that tax relief costs £33 billion a year, while we are talking about a total bill of £42 billion for out-of-work benefits. If tax relief on pension contributions were limited to £26,000 a year, we would not need this Bill. That is the point about priorities and choices that need to be made.
Kwasi Kwarteng:
The right hon. Gentleman gives a very powerful speech in which he mentions lots of facts and statistics, but there is a very fundamental question that he has not answered. Is it right that people on
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out-of-work benefits should be receiving faster and greater increases in their income than people on very low wages? Is that fair?
David Miliband: Forty thousand soldiers are not on out-of-work benefits but they are being hit by this Bill. Eighty per cent. of the savings—
Kwasi Kwarteng: Answer the question.
David Miliband: I will address it directly; I am very happy to do so. If a couple on £5,500 a year or someone on £3,700 a year gets a 1% increase, that is different from someone who is on £15,000, £20,000, £25,000, £30,000 or £35,000 getting the same increase, because although the people on £15,000, £25,000 or £30,000 are making tough choices, those on £5,000 or £3,700 are making a choice between feeding their kids and heating their home.
David Miliband: Let me make some progress and I will come to the hon. Gentleman if I have time.
The truth is that this rancid Bill is not about affordability; it reeks of the politics of dividing lines that the current Government spent so much time denouncing when they were in opposition in the dog days of the Brown Administration. It says a lot that within two years they have had to resort to that dividing-line politics. We know the style: you invent your own enemy, you spin your campaign to a friendly newspaper editor, you “frame” the debate. But the enemy within in is not the unemployed; the enemy within is unemployment.
I do not want to live in a society where we pretend that we can enjoy the good life while our neighbours lose their life chances. It is bad enough to have no economic growth, or 420,000 young people out of work for more than six months, or rising levels of child poverty, or declining levels of social mobility, but it is hard to stomach a Government who take absolutely no responsibility for their mistakes. It is intolerable—[Interruption.] Government Members are laughing, but I am ready to say what we did wrong; I have not heard them say a word about what they are doing wrong. It is intolerable to blame the unemployed for their poverty and our deficit. That is why I will vote for the amendment and against this rotten Bill.
3.50 pm
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con): It is never a pleasure to support any Bill that will leave some people worse off, but Members of both Government parties do so out of a heavy sense of duty and responsibility, both to those who pay taxes and to those who receive them. It is unfortunate, to an extent, that this debate has been framed, perhaps not in this House today, but in some quarters of the press, as a kind of battle between workers and shirkers or, even more regrettably, between immigrants who have come to this country and are sponging off the state and those British nationals who have been here all their lives and paid taxes.
It is true that some people have come to this country and have received too generous an amount in benefits. It is equally true that a lot of eastern Europeans—I know that both points are true from the experience of
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my own extended family, who are eastern Europeans—have come to this country, sometimes speaking very little English and sometimes with qualifications that are not recognised here, and have managed to find work very quickly, have used that work to get better jobs, and have ended up contributing a great deal to our society. It is true that some British people have not wanted to take on the jobs that have been snapped up by eastern Europeans.
I would have no hesitation in saying to somebody who is fairly young and in their 20s that they should be willing to accept any job going, no matter how demeaning it may appear. I have worked in nightclubs and done other low-paid work in my life. I would have more of a problem, however, with saying to people I know who spent 20 or 25 years working for Tata—British Steel as was—who lost their job through no fault of their own and who may be a father of three or four, “You have to go to work in Starbucks on the minimum wage.” It is a shame that we find it hard in our benefit system to distinguish between different types of people, but that is the way it is.
We are not here to talk about penalising people; we are here because we have a simple problem, which was put eloquently by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) when he said that we do not have any money.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab): If the hon. Gentleman is saying that that is the problem, why is he supporting a Government who are only too happy to give a tax cut of £2,000 a week to everybody earning more than £1 million a year? How does that add up? How is that fair?
David T. C. Davies: Put simply, the total amount of tax that we are taking from the rich has increased, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, and that has not been denied by any Opposition Member. The total amount of money that we are taking from the rich has increased, which means that the total amount that we have to take from those who are not so rich has gone down somewhat. That is how I would justify it.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): It might be worth reminding Opposition Members about the 10p tax fiasco that they imposed on some of the poorest members of my community. They have not been forgiven for it.
David T. C. Davies: I should also like Opposition Members to recognise the economic truism of the Laffer curve, which has proved that the more we try to tax the rich, the less we get off them. That is why so many people are queuing up to come over here from France at the moment, and good luck to them. We will have their money and spend it on less well-off people here.
I have listened carefully today to Opposition Members and I have not heard any of them explain how they would manage to maintain benefits at their current level or fund the increases that they want to impose. What would they cut in order to fill that gap? What extra taxes would they impose on people? Would they simply continue to do what Labour Governments have done since the time of Attlee, which is just to borrow the money they need in order to pay for projects that they cannot afford?