Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill
Debate between Steve Webb and Sajid Javid(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Steve Webb
It is good to hear from the true heir of Beveridge. The quotes describing the Labour party that I just read out were in party conference speeches and at a conference at the LSE—
“The party that said that idleness is an evil. The party of workers, not shirkers.”
Steve Webb
It is disgraceful, as my hon. Friend says.
The second question that has arisen is why the Bill is necessary. It has been suggested that the Bill is simply a political device, but that draws a veil over the fact that we are dealing with one of the biggest deficits in peacetime history. To listen to the Labour leadership, one would think that they took such matters seriously. The leader of the Labour party said on “The Andrew Marr Show”, in an interview, I think, with James Landale:
“So when it comes to the next Labour government, if I was saying to you, ‘I can absolutely promise to restore this cut or that cut’, you would say ‘Well, where is the money going to come for that?’...We are absolutely determined that Labour shows we would be fiscally credible in government.”
We have not heard a lot of that today. The shadow Chancellor has said:
“The public want to know that we are going to be ruthless and disciplined in how we go about public spending”.
In fact, we have heard speech after speech calling for the Bill to be scrapped but there has not been a hope of hearing where the money would come from.
The Bill and related measures save £3.6 billion. When I challenged the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), about where that money would come from, he said—I paraphrase—“We wouldn’t start from here.” I am afraid that the Opposition have to do rather better than that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Steve Webb and Sajid Javid(12 years, 6 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb)
I am pleased to confirm that we will go ahead with the introduction of auto-enrolment next year as planned, and I can confirm further that all businesses remain in scope. We have, however, decided to extend the reform’s current five-year implementation, so that small businesses will not have to start enrolling their workers until the start of the next Parliament. The revised plans will, nevertheless, still result in more than half of all workers being enrolled before the end of this Parliament. This is a positive programme, and there will be no exemptions.
Sajid Javid
This Government are doing a huge amount to help people deal with the challenges of old age. In that context, does my hon. Friend have any plans to change the rules governing short-service pension refunds?
Steve Webb
As my hon. Friend points out, certain pension schemes but not others currently allow people to take money out within the first two years, and that is an anomaly. We need to ensure that money put into pension savings stays there, and that is why short-service refunds for defined contribution schemes will not be part of the long-term landscape under automatic enrolment.