Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alok Sharma and Liam Byrne

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

Birmingham’s food banks have had their busiest year ever—70% of their demand is due to universal credit. Can I give the Secretary of State a choice? Either pause this crazy roll-out or come to Birmingham and help us to raise the tonne and a half of food we need each month to replenish the empty food bank stock.

[Alok Sharma]

We have had this discussion in a number of questions now. Can I be absolutely clear? The right hon. Gentleman should look at the report produced by the all-party parliamentary group on hunger, which said that the reasons for food bank usage are complex and myriad, and cannot be put down to any single reason.

Disability Benefits and Social Care

Debate between Alok Sharma and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman is talking about the cuts; perhaps he will tell us how he would reform the budget. I believe that the Government’s reforms are very sensible. Will he also tell us how many Remploy factories were shut down while Labour was in power?

[Mr Byrne]

I invite the hon. Gentleman to intervene on me again when I talk about Remploy in more detail—[Interruption.] No, Remploy forms an important part of our motion, and it is right that we should have an informed debate on the matter. I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will let him have his say at that stage.

We believe that disability living allowance needs reform, and that an independent assessment is needed. We also believe, however, that the assessment should be designed first, and that the savings should be calculated afterwards. This Government have set an arbitrary, top-down financial cut, and they are now scrambling around trying to figure out what kind of assessment will deliver that cut. So little thought has gone into this that disabled people now face being tested for employment and support allowance, DLA and social care, as well as for a raft of other benefits. The testing alone will cost the taxpayer £710 million.

Surely we should be thinking harder about this. Surely we should be trying to determine what is the right assessment for DLA and ESA—which are different benefits—and asking how we can bring them together in a way that would be more convenient for disabled people and that would help them to secure the support that they need to live an independent life. Such a reform would save money. Indeed, when I was at the Treasury, my civil servants costed it and determined that it would save £350 million by 2015.

To this bleak picture we must, I am afraid, add more. Cuts to social care and to housing benefit will make the situation worse, £1 billion has now been cut from local council budgets for social care since this Government took office, and Ministers are still dragging their feet over long-term reform. Meanwhile, 1 million unpaid carers have given up work or reduced their hours, and four in 10 have fallen into debt, thanks to a system that does not work and is set to get worse.

Youth Unemployment

Debate between Alok Sharma and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 16th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the Government was wrong to cancel the Future Jobs Fund that would have created 200,000 jobs for young people; further believes that the Government’s economic policies have slowed economic growth, raised youth unemployment and created the highest graduate unemployment for over a decade; further believes that urgent action is now required to stop a generation of young people being lost to worklessness; and calls on the Government to commission an independent assessment of the Future Jobs Fund to report to Parliament before the Government’s Work Programme is implemented and to evaluate whether a guarantee and requirement of work incorporated into the Programme would bring down youth unemployment in the short and longer term and limit steep rises in welfare payments.

I am glad that we have been able to force the Government to come to the House to debate the employment figures—or, rather, the unemployment figures—published this morning, because those figures will worry families, young and old, up and down the country. The headlines from this morning’s numbers are bad enough—five quarters after the recession ended, unemployment is not going down but up; employment is not rising but falling—but the details are, I am afraid, even worse. Private sector employment is flat, while the number of public sector jobs is falling fast. It is becoming clear that the private sector is not creating jobs fast enough to absorb the redundancies that we know are coming down the line. There are now more women on the claimant count than at any time since 1996.

The consequences for young people are perhaps most serious of all. One in five of our young people is now out of work; the number of unemployed has risen again; we now confront youth unemployment of almost a million—the highest figure on record. That figure is a wake-up call to this Government to get their act together. The question we want the House to debate today is quite simply, what should the Government do next?

As if we needed it, this morning’s figures are, if anything, fresh evidence of the need for a plan B on economic growth. We have rehearsed the debate in the House plenty of times over the past year, and I do not plan to do so again this afternoon. Suffice it to say that the Government are cutting spending too far and too fast. The recession having been over for a year, we would expect to see unemployment now falling fast, and yet it is not. Longer dole queues make the deficit not easier to pay down, but harder. The result is that working families end up paying the price.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman was part of a Government who presided over a record rise in youth unemployment. As his Government’s policies clearly did not work over 13 years, should he not, instead of carping from the sidelines, get behind the policies of the coalition Government, who are offering a fresh start to young people in this country?