Universal Credit

Debate between David Linden and Neil Gray

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray]

I have no reason to doubt what the hon. Lady says, except that the experiences of Members on the Opposition Benches are rather different. I point her and her colleagues to my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), who has been working tirelessly on this not only while he has been a Member of the House but while he was leader of Highland Council, when universal credit was first tested in Highland. He has been knocking against a brick wall trying to get the DWP to listen to the concerns that he has found in his area, and his experience is not the same as the one the hon. Lady says she has had in Redditch.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I intervene in response to the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), who said how wonderful jobcentres are and how much work they do. I do not know whether she has had the same experience as me, but in my city of Glasgow, the UK Government have closed six jobcentres, and in my area of the east end of Glasgow, they have just butchered three out of four jobcentres. How can we go and find out how things are going in jobcentres, when her Government are busy closing them?

[Neil Gray]

I absolutely concur with my hon. Friend, who has been an assiduous campaigner to protect and save the jobcentres in his constituency. Even at this late stage and after some of their doors have closed, I hope that the Government may listen and finally provide a reprieve.

It is right that we acknowledge the knock-on effect felt by landlords, whose incomes are in turn being squeezed due to tenants falling into arrears because of successive cuts to universal credit. The SNP has continually called for the roll-out of universal credit to be paused and properly fixed. That is not just about reducing the wait time by a week for those receiving universal credit, but about restoring the original principles of universal credit, which have been cut back so far to their roots that they have been battered.

The UK Government’s woeful ignorance on this is shameful. The evidence of the social destruction caused by universal credit in its current form is clear from report after report by expert charities. Such social destruction is not masked by the line, repeated ad nauseam by the Government, that universal credit is getting people into work. It is not much good for people if this is just a shift from out-of-work poverty to in-work poverty. We know there has been a rise in the rate of in-work poverty, and we also know that 67% of children—I repeat, 67% of children—currently living in poverty do so in a family where at least one person works.