Benefit Cap: Review

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

As I said, the benefit cap will be reviewed at a time to be determined by the Secretary of State, but we have a range of measures designed to support people who flee abusive and violent households, as it is quite unacceptable that they should have to do this. We have provisions in housing benefit and universal credit, and I can assure the House that, where necessary, we arrange split payments for people in order for them to be able to maintain an independent life.

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, in his recent book, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, said:

“The benefit cap made little sense in a system designed to provide each family what it needed.”


Quite, so why do it? Yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Freud, told the House why. He said that George Osborne’s chief of staff had said to him:

“I knew it didn’t make much in the way of savings, but when we tested the policy, it polled off the charts.”—[Official Report, 2/11/2021; col. 1128.]


The cap has caused huge hardship and driven kids into poverty, but it was not because it was right, but because it polled off the charts, helped by rhetoric demonising the poor and those who could not work. Labour would scrap it to lift people out of poverty; will the Government now do the right thing?