Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Clive Efford Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford (Eltham and Chislehurst) (Lab)]

I never expected to be standing here opposing Labour Government legislation that seeks to impose changes on disability benefits that will put 150,000 people into poverty. The Government’s own poverty assessment states that the concessions mean there will be a “negligible” impact on pensioner and child poverty. I do not know when we became so matter of fact about the implications of putting people into poverty, or where that language comes from. I would expect us to be moving people in the opposite direction.

We talk about choices, and we hear a lot from the leadership about tough choices. I do not consider cutting disabled people’s benefits to be a tough choice for us politicians, but it will mean that people on the receiving end will be forced to make tough choices about the way that they make ends meet. Too often, we make choices that adversely impact those who cannot fight back. We show deference to people with wealth and power, when we know that they should be bearing a heavier amount of the burden. Those who have enormous wealth have done extremely well over the past 15 years. Average incomes for ordinary families in that time have stagnated and the standard of living has gone down. If we want to make tough choices, we should be looking there.

I wish to use my time today to highlight some of the areas where we could make a difference: reforming capital gains tax, for instance, through increasing rates and closing loopholes to raise £12 billion a year; closing the carried interest loophole to private equity bosses so that they pay their fair share to raise half a billion pounds; applying national insurance to investment income to raise up to £10.2 billion; introducing a 4% tax on share buybacks to raise between £0.1 billion and £2 billion a year; ending and redirecting fossil fuel subsidies for oil and gas companies to raise £2.2 billion a year; taxing private jets to raise an additional £1.2 billion a year; and stopping rich multinational corporations evading tax and mandating that they declare their profits wherever they operate to raise £15 billion a year.

Then we come to the performance of the Treasury. In 2023, according to the Audit Commission, the Treasury gave out £204 billion in tax relief. The Audit Commission, the Treasury Committee and the Institute for Government concluded that the Treasury is not investing enough into understanding the benefits of these tax reliefs. There are a total of 1,180 tax reliefs, 815 of which the HMRC has no idea what benefit they bring to us. That is billions of pounds a year going on tax reliefs.

Those are the choices that we are choosing not to make. Let us balance those choices against the choice that we are being asked to make today. It beggars belief that we are putting savings in the welfare budget ahead of changes to the welfare budget that might assist people into work. The amount of money that is available in the examples that I have given could easily offset what we are talking about today and allow us to implement the reforms of the welfare state. Then we could see how they benefit the people in the system and what savings can be achieved.

For all those reasons, I will be supporting the reasoned amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and voting against this Bill.