Jobs and Social Security

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Byrne]

In a moment.

The Government spent something like £63 million closing down the flexible new deal—a programme that was actually getting more people into sustainable jobs than the Work programme and was costing only something like 9.5% more per job outcome. The Government have, in effect, shut down a system that was working, spent an awful long time getting something back up and then overseen a programme that has dramatically failed to hit the target set for it in the first years. It is a catalogue of failure.

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[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Glasgow city council has lessons to teach all of us about what it takes to get young people back into work. Despite all the difficult decisions that the council has had to take, it has made it a priority to get young people back into work. The way in which it has built on the future jobs fund is a real lesson for everybody.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about the Labour Government’s record of getting people into work. Can he explain why the number of households in which no one had ever worked doubled to 350,000 during the 13 years of his Government?

[Mr Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman should check his facts. The number of people on out-of-work benefits came down by 1 million under Labour, and the out-of-work benefit bill came down by £7.5 billion. That is in sharp contrast to this Government, who have put up welfare spending by £20 billion more than they projected. To pay down that bill, they are now having to cut tax credits from constituents such as those of the hon. Gentleman.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The right hon. Gentleman did not answer the question. I asked why the number of households in which no one had ever worked doubled to 350,000 under the last Labour Government.

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[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: there is a bleak future for many young people in his constituency, where the Work programme has delivered something like 1.3% of people into sustainable jobs, so it is one of the worst figures in the country. When young people in my hon. Friend’s constituency face tuition fees that have trebled, the cancellation of EMA and the shutdown of the future jobs programme, he is right to call in this place for a very different course of action.

Even more worrying for the future, the signs are that when universal credit is introduced, it will not get better for Britain’s strivers and battlers; it will actually get worse. We know that new rules for universal credit will mean taking in-work benefits away from anyone who has managed to squirrel away £16,000, and we know that it locks in cuts to tax credits. Now, in this morning’s Sun, we read that a couple working full time—over a million of them will be in the system—will lose something like £1,200 a year. That is, of course, if it ever happens.

[Andrew Bridgen]

rose—

[Mr Byrne]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will tell us what he thinks of that.

[Andrew Bridgen]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I would like to tackle him on the last Government’s record on what he claims was getting people into work. If that were the case, will he explain why the working age welfare budget increased by 40% in real terms during the 13 years of the last Labour Government?

[Mr Byrne]

Let me give the hon. Gentleman some statistics. If he looked at the amount spent on benefits in 1996-97, he would find that it came to about £51 billion, excluding pensions. By the time we reach 2009-10, that had fallen to £44 billion, so I am afraid that no matter how he looks at it, the truth is that the amount spent on out-of-work benefits over the course of Labour’s period in office fell by £7.5 billion. The hon. Gentleman is a member of a party that has presided over an increase in the projected welfare spend by £20 billion, and there are something like 8,000 families in his constituency that are now seeing their tax credits either frozen or cut to pay for that cost of failure. I wonder how he is going to explain that to his constituents as we get closer to the next election.

It is not simply people in work who are paying the bill. We now know that about 6 million families are working, yet are still in poverty. There is another group of our constituents that we must worry about, too—those constituents who are disabled yet are set to lose something like £6.7 billion of help over the course of this Parliament to help pay for the failure to get Britain back to work. These benefits are being taken away, without any cumulative assessment of their combined impact, and these cuts total more than the Government are taking away from banks. That, I am afraid, is a sorry indictment of this Government’s values.

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[Geraint Davies]

We are seeing the perverse irony that the welfare bill is going up and up, with more people going into dependency, because the environment for job creation is not there. Meanwhile, the Government’s one-string solution is simply to give people less and less, when the focus should be on how to create new jobs, so that we can help people to get and sustain a job.

Another example—other than the targeting of under-25s who tend to have children and the escalation of child poverty into intergenerational poverty—is the empty bedroom tax. This is another horrendous idea whereby poor people—they are poor by definition as they are on housing benefit—who have an empty bedroom will lose about £7.50 a week, or £15 if they have two empty bedrooms. For example, a couple with two children, one of whom wants to go to university or get a job, will clearly have an incentive to say, “Don’t go to university,” or “Don’t leave home to get a job”—“Don’t ‘get on your bike’”, as Lord Tebbit would have it—“because, if you do, we shall end up being taxed £7.50 a week.”

A man who came to my surgery a couple of weeks ago told me that he was receiving disability living allowance, that he had a second bedroom—he used it for painting, as it happens—and that he did not have a job. Indeed, he was not a person who could have got a job. After he had paid his utility bills and all the rest, his disposable income was £20 a week. He will now lose £7.50 as a result of the bedroom tax, and next April the Government will cut the council tax rebate by 20%, which amounts to about £5 a week. His disposable income will then be down to £8 a week, which will have to cover his food, clothing and leisure.

This despicable and, in my view, socially criminal activity generates very little money from those who can least afford it, and one of the by-products will be mass homelessness. I have been a leader of a local authority, and I know that local authorities usually build family-size housing. Someone living in a two-bedroom flat or a three-bedroom house that ceases to be full when the children leave home will lose housing benefit and will then be evicted if he or she goes into arrears. Where do such people go when a local authority has not built enough one-bedroom accommodation because it is supposed to cater for families?

What if a child wants to come back from university, or to visit the family? What if there is a split in the family and the child needs to move from one place to another? The bedroom tax will cause massive disruption to communities in areas like mine throughout the country and disfigure the opportunities for us to create new jobs and get back on a sound track towards economic recovery.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will the hon. Gentleman not concede that better utilisation of the social housing stock and an increase in its capacity will give us an opportunity to reduce homelessness?

[Geraint Davies]

I have been the housing chair for London and for Croydon. I know that it is possible to devise strategies involving incentives to encourage people to move to smaller homes—and, of course, as people die over time, housing is recycled in any case—but the suggestion that a group of people in social housing should be evicted once their children have grown up and that, because suitable housing does not exist in their own communities, they should be moved around is not only despicable but completely counter-productive. It is economically insane as well as socially immoral.

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[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

I share the Secretary of State’s incredulity that the Opposition would choose to debate these issues on an Opposition day, since they have no credibility at all. They snipe from the political sidelines despite the fact that the Government have created more than 1 million private sector jobs in just three years—twice as many as the previous Labour Government produced in 13 years.

The Opposition seem also to have forgotten the terrible legacy that they left, and they should once again be reminded of a few of the facts. For instance, in their 13 years in government in arguably favourable economic conditions—the boom before the inevitable bust—the number of households in which no one has ever been in work doubled to 350,000. That legacy will take many years to rectify, as children in those households will have no working role model and will probably come to believe that not working is the norm and that it is normal to subsist on benefits. As a Member of Parliament, there is nothing more depressing than visiting a school and asking a young child what they want to do when they finish school, only to be told, “I’m going to sit at home and watch television with my dad.” I never want to hear that again; it makes me want to weep.

Almost 2 million children are growing up in homes where nobody works. The UK has one of the highest proportions of workless households in Europe, and as I have pointed out, the working age welfare budget increased by a shocking 40% in real terms in 13 years of Labour government. That is another area where the Opposition failed to fix the roof while the sun was shining. However, we now have a Government who are determined to tackle the welfare dependency that developed under the previous Government and oversee the creation of sustainable, private sector jobs as we work to rebalance our economy. The Opposition do not want to hear the good news about employment statistics, but despite their sniping, real progress has been made. Some 1.2 million jobs have been created; employment is up by a net 750,000; and there are more people in work than ever, including more women employed than at any time in our country’s history.

One statistic that the Government should be particularly proud of is the fact that more than half a million people started an apprenticeship in the past year. In my constituency of North West Leicestershire, there were 420 apprentice starts in 2009-10, but 940 in 2010-11—a growth rate of 124%. I would like to mention the excellent work undertaken by community groups and charities to boost apprentice numbers. In my constituency, Whitwick Community Enterprises has undertaken sterling work, reaching out to young people who are not even classified as not in employment, education or training—they have slipped under the radar altogether—giving them life skills in preparation for their return to full employment. I am delighted that that group has successfully applied for Government grants, which means that even more people in my constituency will be given the opportunity to learn skills for life. It should be extremely proud of that.

Opposition spokespeople have discussed the Work programme, and what they perceive as a lack of success. According to the Employment Related Services Association, the industry has helped 207,831 people back into work since the Work programme was introduced, and 29 in every 100 people who have gone on the programme since June 2011 have been supported into a job. Indeed, every month, more than 20,000 people are finding jobs through the Work programme, and the figures improve month on month, as many of my colleagues have said.

Many people would suggest that the Work programme is the biggest and most ambitious scheme of its type in the world. It is, and we should be positive about it. According to the Employment Related Services Association, the official statistics released by the Government yesterday represent a limited snapshot of performance in the early months of the programme, bearing in mind that it has been running for only a year. For someone to qualify as undertaking fixed employment they have to be on the programme for six months and employed for six months. Very few people fit those criteria, but I am assured by the providers that there is more good news in the pipeline.

The Work programme has helped 64,601 people into work. Over that period, unemployment fell by 49,000, so it is difficult to argue that it has not had an impact in reducing unemployment. I would have liked more time, but it was Labour that proposed the jobs tax—the increase in national insurance—which we reversed. It was under Labour that youth unemployment increased by 40%, and half a million people were left on benefit facing marginal tax rates of over 80% if they found work. The Opposition are as credible on welfare reform as they are on the economy: no apologies, no new ideas, and still nothing to say.