Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

I hope the Minister will forgive me, but I was hoping to address my question to the new Secretary of State. I am interested to know what she has learned so far about the five-week wait and the damage it does. People have more debt when they come on to universal credit than they had on legacy benefits, and the advance payment is another debt that must be repaid from a meagre amount of benefit, frozen for three years. When is the Secretary of State going to look into getting rid of the five-week wait so that people get non-repayable money into their pockets more swiftly? They cannot wait for five weeks.

[Guy Opperman]

I am sure the Secretary of State looks forward to appearing before the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, of which the hon. Lady is a member, next week.

An advance is available to people in the usual way. Supported by the Treasury Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee, we have brought in the Money and Pensions Service to provide debt advice and budgeting support for claimants. There is no doubt that the extra money for Help to Claim, which is administered by trusted providers—whether that is the citizens advice bureaux or Citizens Advice Scotland—is very much helping the process.

Personal Independence Payments: Supreme Court Ruling

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

I remind the hon. Lady that the Government took this case to the Supreme Court because we wanted to get clarity on this important issue. I also remind her that, under DLA, only 6% of claimants with a mental health condition got access to the highest rate of support. Under PIP, 33% of claimants are getting that support—more than five times higher than under DLA. We are doing everything we can to support people, and we are continuing to work with stakeholders and disabled people to ensure that the process continues to improve. I am proud that this Government are spending a record amount of money on supporting the most vulnerable people in society, something that Opposition Members continue to vote against at each Budget.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

The judgment is welcome, of course, because it will provide more support to people with mental health conditions, but it does prompt a question, regardless of who brought the case, about whether the PIP and ESA assessment processes still contain significant flaws. I was under the impression that the Government were looking at the processes, potentially bringing them back in-house, and I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) that there should be more specific assessments for people with certain types of health conditions. Why are the contracts with Atos and Capita being extended for another two years when they are not meeting their targets?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. The key thing is that we will continue to engage with stakeholders and disabled people and be held to account by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, of which the hon. Lady is an active member. We will continue to make improvements, which is why increasing amounts of money are rightly being spent on vulnerable people in society. The Secretary of State is personally committed to improving the process, and we will do all that we can to do so.

Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I am sorry to hear the hon. Gentleman’s example. If I get a chance to visit his local food bank, I will certainly do so, but I have to stress that no claimant needs to wait more than five weeks to receive their first regular universal credit payment. We have listened to feedback on how we can support our claimants and made improvements, such as extending advances, removing waiting days and introducing housing benefit run-on. I will continue to work with the Trussell Trust and others to improve our system in any way we can.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

I am afraid to say to the Minister that the advance payment is missing the point. The biggest driver of people going to food banks is the five-week wait. Because of the benefit freeze, the basic amount people have to live on, particularly the very vulnerable, is not enough. We cannot then expect them to live on less by taking away their advance payment, which is a debt. There is a simple way to deal with this. Some 60% of claimants are already taking advance payment, which tells us they cannot wait. The money is already going out of the DWP’s door. Make it a grant. It should not be repayable for the most vulnerable people in society.

Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

The hon. Lady continues to object to any measures to restore fairness to the benefits system. Under the last Labour Government, we saw welfare spending increase by £84 billion and an additional tax burden of £3,000 per hard-working household. This is about fairness and supporting people, while having a good safety net for those most in need.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

9. What assessment she has made of the effect of the five-week wait to receive universal credit on claimants’ levels of debt.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Amber Rudd)]

No one has to wait five weeks for the first part of their benefit because, as the hon. Lady is aware, they can get an advance of up to 100%, and 60% of people do that. We have also introduced a two-week run-on of housing benefit, and from next year a further two-week run-on of employment and support allowance, jobseeker’s allowance and income support will be available. Those payments are in addition to each claimant’s universal credit benefit award.

[Heidi Allen]

I am afraid to say that the five-week wait issue is not going to go away until the Government recognise that it is driving some people to food banks. I was in Glasgow on Friday with the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), and we will continue on our tour of the UK, taking a camera crew with us and shining a spotlight on poverty until the Government change their mind on this. For the most vulnerable in society who have zero financial resilience, the four-week assessment period makes no sense at all—they have to wait four weeks to prove they have no money. I have suggested that there is a need to identify the most vulnerable claimants—those with no financial resilience—and hand-hold them through the system, and either make the assessment period start at minus four weeks or make those advance payments non-repayable grants, not for everyone but for the vulnerable.

[Amber Rudd]

I am always willing to look at suggestions for how to improve universal credit. The hon. Lady is well known for bringing forward a lot of suggestions for us to look at. However, we need to be careful not to create incentives that are counter to our intention to help people into work. I do believe that advances work well, and the work coaches I talk to—I also go around the country talking to people about it—do tell me that they make a significant difference.

Social Security

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Greenwood]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

To put this in perspective, destitution in this context means that a person has lacked two or more of the six essentials in the last month—shelter, food, heating, lighting, clothing and basic toiletries. It is truly shocking that 1.5 million are going without basic essentials in modern Britain.

The Social Metrics Commission, whose members are drawn from the left and the right of the political spectrum, has found that 14.2 million people in the UK are in poverty, including over 4 million children. More than one in 10 of the UK population live in persistent poverty. This is a shocking indictment of a country that has the fifth biggest economy in the world.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

I want to put on the record that I have visited some of the poorest parts of the country in recent weeks with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), and I can confirm that I have seen this destitution with my own eyes. I have spoken to individuals who have literally £5 a week to live on for a variety of reasons, including their inability to access universal credit, but the overriding fact is that people can no longer afford to live on the subsistence level that universal credit and working-age benefits are set at—they cannot.

[Margaret Greenwood]

I thank the hon. Lady for making the point so powerfully.

The benefit freeze increases poverty. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the freeze is set to drive almost 500,000 more people into poverty by 2020. In 2018, a couple with children claiming universal credit were up to £500 worse off, and a lone parent with children was up to £400 worse off, due to the benefit freeze. The JRF says that the freeze is the single biggest policy driver behind rising poverty levels. Before the freeze was introduced in the Welfare Reform and Work Act, working-age benefits were capped at 1%, yet living costs are rising. In the 12 months to September last year, prices grew by 2.4%, according to the CPI inflation measure. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that between the introduction of the benefits freeze in April 2016 and November 2018, the annual cost of living for people on low incomes rose by £900.

Rising living costs and frozen social security mean that the value of benefits is increasingly inadequate to protect people from poverty. A recent report by the National Audit Office shows how the real value of the basic rate of jobseeker’s allowance and income support has fallen nearly every year since 2012-13, and it is now below its value in 2009-10. Overall, the real cut to many benefits from the four-year freeze is over 6%. According to the Resolution Foundation, child benefit is now already worth less than it was in April 1999. Beyond a family’s first child, child benefit in April 2019 will be worth 14% less than it was when it was fully introduced in April 1979. This is compounded by the Conservatives’ broken economy: low wage growth and the rise of insecure and zero-hours contracts mean that incomes are failing to meet the rising cost of living.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

Setting aside my concerns about the direction of the Conservative party, one of the motivations behind those of us determined to build a new centre ground party is the opportunity to develop policy based on evidence and to reflect on and amend our policy when that evidence changes. The motion in front of us today is one that this House debates annually. Its purpose is to increase welfare benefits in line with the economy—in other words, the consumer prices index. Those benefits include the state pension, disability living allowance, the personal independence payment, widows’ and bereavement benefits, the employment and support allowance support group premium, and the maternity allowance. However, as we have heard across the Chamber tonight, there is one glaring omission. The order excludes working-age benefits. Within this exclusion also sit standard allowances in ESA and income support, child tax credit and the child element of universal credit—in other words, benefits paid to those struggling to make ends meet but who are doing the right thing and working, as well as those too ill to work and those families with children who are also struggling to make ends meet. Our fair-minded constituents would be right to think that there must be some mistake here, but there is not. Individuals are being subjected to the final year of the four-year benefit freeze.

In the 2016 Budget, the Treasury announced the four-year year freeze with the aspiration of saving £3.5 billion by 2019-20. Everyone understood the need to reduce spending right across Government, but policy cannot be static and must be regularly reviewed, particularly when the policy so directly affects the most vulnerable people in society. Estimates recently published by the Resolution Foundation, which excels at statistical analysis in this space, indicate that the Government will have already exceeded their target by £900 million by the end of year three. Owing to inflation, the Resolution Foundation further estimates that while wages, the cost of living and pensioner incomes have risen over the period—everything has risen—these in-work benefits have seen a 6% real-terms decrease. The policy can no longer be right. The context within which the four-year benefit freeze policy was developed has changed. What kind of Government can think that it is morally acceptable to maintain this policy?

My recent visits with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) to the parts of the UK struggling most with poverty have provided me with clear quantitative evidence, too. Society is responding with compassion and the strength of human kindness. Beneath the Government’s welfare safety net, society is providing three further layers: the established and now almost “normalised” food bank network; third sector charities and faith groups who open their doors when food banks are closed; and, most movingly, individual families helping those around them. The motion before us today therefore brings into sharp focus the damaging impact of the benefit freeze on the most vulnerable in society. With the recent news that tax income in January outstripped public spending by £14.9 billion—the biggest January surplus since records began in 1993—there is simply no reason to persist with the final year of the benefit freeze. We can afford it.

Working-age benefits must be uprated in line with all benefits from April 2019. As we have heard, ending the freeze would lift 200,000 people out of poverty. It is now almost universally understood that working-age benefits are insufficient for claimants to even maintain subsistence living. Claimants at the lowest point in their lives cannot afford to live on the current welfare safety net. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions herself has spoken out about the need for the freeze to end, and I can see the discomfort among those on the Front Bench, because I know that it is not within their gift to change things, but it is not too late for the Treasury to change course and end the four-year freeze. I have also been disappointed not to hear any suggestion from Ministers that the matter will be dealt with at the spring statement on 13 March. This Government must look again at the evidence: their benefit freeze is no longer morally nor economically viable and must end in April this year.

Department for Education

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

I am pleased to be bringing this debate today, and I thank colleagues from across the House who have supported it and who are here to speak. The spending of the Department for Work and Pensions is the highest of any Department and represents almost a quarter of all Government spending. It is therefore important to scrutinise that spending, especially as the 10.7 million people who rely on our welfare state are those who usually have no other place to turn.

The welfare state in Britain was set up by the 1945 Government in order to defeat the giant of want and to create a country fit for heroes, but 70 years later, across Britain we are seeing an increase in situations that we think of as part of the bygone era of the 1930s. Even around our Parliament today, we are seeing people sleeping rough on our streets, dying in the freezing cold. Across the country, we are seeing families queueing up for food banks, and disabled people left isolated without the care that they need.

Poverty rates are rising, especially among children and people in work. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s annual analysis of poverty tells us that 14.3 million people—more than one in five of our population—now live in poverty. That includes 4.1 million children, a rise of 500,000 over the last five years. It also includes 4.6 million people living in persistent poverty—the poverty trap that lone parents especially are unable to escape. And shamefully, 1.5 million people, including 365,000 children, now live in destitution, unable to afford even the basic necessities. In the fifth richest country in the world, those bare facts should shame us all.

The Government rightly tell us—as I am sure the Minister will do today—that the Department’s spending is rising. It has risen by £31 billion, or 20%, since 2010. But alongside real wages falling for a decade, housing costs rising much faster than inflation, especially in areas of very high housing shortage, and cuts to so many of the local services that people rely on, our welfare safety net is in danger of not working. That is why I am particularly pleased that we are having this debate to look into the reasons for the seeming anomaly of rising spending and rising poverty, and so that we have the opportunity to suggest some answers for the Department to consider.

We know that £27 billion of that £31 billion increase in the Department’s spending relates to the state pension, with the triple lock and the single-tier pension delivering increased prosperity for most pensioners. That is good to see, but, as with many aspects of DWP spending, it does not tell the full story. While the state pension has increased, pensioner poverty has also increased. The rate of pensioners in poverty halved in the decade to 2013, but since then it has risen by 330,000 to 16% of pensioners. That change was partly due to reductions in pension credit, which now supports a million fewer pensioners, but also due to housing costs, which is a serious problem for the Department across the full range of benefit claimants.

The situation is worse for those who are not pensioners. The Institute for Fiscal Studies stated after the Budget that we will still see cuts of £4 billion a year to welfare spending on in-work age groups in the years to come. It is the particular and persistent focus on reducing spending that has played a major role in the increase in poverty, and destitution in particular. The emphasis on making welfare spending fairer to working people ignores the fact that the majority of claimants of state support are already in work. In the 2015 Budget the then Chancellor claimed that benefits should be frozen for four years because average wages had risen by only 11% while benefits had increased by 21% since 2008 due to high levels of inflation. The argument that real-term falls in wages should equate to even larger falls in the benefits on which so many in-work families rely fails to recognise the realities of life on low pay.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Ind)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. We have seen changes over the past few years, including increases in some pensioner benefits and in the national living wage, but the group of people who stand out more than any other are those on benefits. It is utterly unacceptable that we can even consider maintaining the benefits freeze for one final year. It has to go.

[Ruth George]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and pay tribute to her campaigning for people on benefits. I agree with the sentiment of her intervention, because over 10 million people are affected by the reality of the four-year freeze. When it was announced in 2015, inflation was just 0.4%, but it has been 2.3% and 2.6% in the past two years. Since the freeze’s introduction, the cost of living for people on low incomes has risen by £900 a year. In real terms, the income received by a single person on jobseeker’s allowance or income support of just £77 a week will fall by over £5 a week by 2020—a drop of £267 a year. When people on such benefits have less than £10 a week to spend on food, the loss of £5 makes a huge difference. Someone can just about eke out £10 a week for food, but eating for £5 a week is impossible. It is no wonder we are seeing such growth in the use of food banks.

For families, the freeze bites even harder. If it continues, low-income families are likely to lose out on an extra £210 a year due to inflation. If we see inflation rise because of disruption to trade or food tariffs or shortages, inflation for people on low incomes will be far higher. If the benefits freeze ended a year early, that would provide an essential income boost to over 10 million people struggling on low incomes and reduce poverty for 200,000 people, so I strongly urge the Government to look at doing so as soon as possible.

Of course, welfare is in the process of being reformed, especially through universal credit. I worked for USDAW—the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers—for almost two decades, so I know just how vital in-work benefits are to millions of families who struggle to get by on low pay and often low hours. I know that UC was designed to fix such problems to ensure that work always pays, and I applaud that aim, but the stark reality is that universal credit has led to a 30% increase in referrals to food banks where it has been rolled out. I see families in my surgeries facing eviction, and I give credit to the thousands of people who are organising food banks across the country to help people who cannot afford enough to eat, but that is not good enough. Food banks cannot cover the whole country—I know that from my rural area—and they should not have to, either.

I pay tribute to fellow members of the Select Committee, which has made recommendations to the Government on universal credit, and to members of the all-party parliamentary group on universal credit which, with me as chair, is producing a report on a whole range of universal credit issues—I am pleased that the Secretary of State has already committed to meeting us about it.

I thank the Government for the improvements they have already made to universal credit, and I welcome those changes, but we are still seeing problems. Some 5.1 million people in working families will see their income reduced, on average, by £2,300 a year, and 1.3 million people in out-of-work families, with even lower outcomes, will see those outcomes drop by £1,400 a year. At a time when persistent poverty and destitution are rising, the Government’s flagship policy should not be looking to take over 10% of our population even deeper into poverty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Merriman]

First, we have the two-week run-off with regard to housing benefit. We also have the system of advances. So I do not recognise those figures at all.

[Heidi Allen]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Huw Merriman]

I will not give way, because I am taking quite a lot of time. The reality is that UC is designed to mirror the world of work. In the world of work, 75% of people get paid monthly, and so the benefits system is designed to do that, because everybody on benefits is supposedly able to find work and this system mirrors the world of work. It is the right system to help people.

Another aspect of UC is universal support. It used to be the case that when someone was on benefits they were languishing on benefits, no one cared about them and they did not get the tailored support that UC gives. Now if anyone chooses to go to their jobcentre, as I do regularly, they will find a completely different approach—one where there is compassion and tailor-made support. The work coaches—[Interruption.] It is all well and good the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) chuntering from the Benches, but if she had spent time with her work coaches, seeing the passion that they have in getting their people into work, she would see that they have more effect in doing that than she has by sitting there chuntering away.

My view is that UC works, and 82% of those on UC believe it works, too. It is all well and good for MPs to knock it for political purposes, but if they wanted their constituents to be helped, they would get behind this system, rather than constantly knocking it for political ends.

--- Later in debate ---

[Frank Field]

I hope that long before the Chancellor rises at the Dispatch Box—the position that the Minister will be in when he replies to this debate—he will have made the decision that there will be no more freeze. He will say, I hope, that the freeze will be lifted, and I hope that, from this debate, we will build a movement in the country that convinces him and his Cabinet colleagues that that is the one overriding priority.

There are, however, six other cuts of which I wish to remind the House. The first of those six is the cut in council tax benefit. A total of 4.4 million families have been affected by this cut—of not paying council tax in full—with an average weekly loss of £3.

Let me turn now to sanctions, on which the Select Committee, the House and the Government quite properly indulge in debates. Three million people have been sanctioned since 2012. We know now that a person can be in work and sanctioned. I challenge the Minister to answer this when he replies to the debate: as a person can be sanctioned for not getting a higher income, even though they are in work, will he tell me how many work coaches in DWP have been sent for interviews by their colleagues because, given the amount of benefit that they draw as a result of the wages that they gain from DWP, they will now be sanctioned if they do not improve their income? Sanctions, therefore, form the second cut.

Another cut has come in the form of the lowering of the local housing allowance. Since 2013, 1.4 million of our fellow citizens have suffered an average loss of £50 a week. We are not talking about our salaries; we are talking about people who are earning very, very modest incomes from the benefits system.

On the bedroom tax, 704,000 of our constituents have suffered, on average, a weekly loss of £15 a week. A total of 197,000 households are affected by a benefit cut of between £63 and £73. Then there is the two-child limit, which affects 70,000 households, but which is likely to increase to 600,000, with an average weekly loss of £53. Any one of those cuts causes mayhem to the budgets of poorer people who have no savings—whether they are in work or not in work. I have witnessed in my constituency, as other Members have witnessed in their constituencies, an issue now not of poverty, but of people who struggle with all their might to maintain a roof over their heads.

[Heidi Allen]

I wish in a way that, at the time, I had been able to defend the courage of my good friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman). He is right that employment is up, but for the parts of the country that my right hon. Friend the Chair of Select Committee and I have seen on our tour—I hate that word because it sounds like a holiday—of food banks, what we saw were people who were utterly on the edge. With the greatest respect, universal credit is not built to deal with people who have no financial resilience at all. They are the people that we are talking about, and these cuts have absolutely cut them to the bone.

[Frank Field]

And beyond. Families know they are finished as a family if they lose their homes, so the fight is to keep the roof over their heads. They go without food; they go without heat; and they go without basic necessities. This debate is, for me, the first time that we have in this House to confront the system for those of our poorest constituents who face not just poverty, but destitution. They are the ones who have paid the most to bring down the budget deficit, and they should be first in the queue, as far as the Chancellor is concerned, to get relief when he makes that spring statement.

Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

I am happy to look at the individual case that the hon. Lady raises, but I would point out that £2.4 billion was unclaimed under the legacy benefit system, and that is changing under universal credit.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I would like to put on the record my thanks to the Secretary of State for listening and changing her approach to managed migration. I think we will see a step change in how vulnerable claimants feel about their security under universal credit. I have given her a list of other areas of UC that need improving. I urge her to look at one area that will completely revolutionise how people feel about the system—the five-week wait has got to go. If we make the advance payment the first payment rather than a loan, we will see food bank usage and the whole system transformed immeasurably.

[Amber Rudd]

I thank my hon. Friend. There are many contributions on how we can improve universal credit. Some of them carry quite a big price tag, and some have had more success with the Treasury than others. I look forward to further conversations with the Chancellor in due course.

Universal Credit

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

I will give way one final time.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I want to express the view of Government Back Benchers on the motion. We believe genuinely that the Secretary of State is listening to what needs to change with universal credit, which makes a mockery of the motion, and not a single one of us, myself included, will vote for it.

[Ms McVey]

I thank my hon. Friend for those kind words. She has fought tirelessly to make sure that universal credit is the best system possible. Like all our party’s Back Benchers, she is not scaremongering but wants to help people into work and make sure that work pays.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

We do not have very much time to speak. I am afraid the SNP Front Bencher took up a huge amount of time, so I am not going to take any more interventions from the SNP. He spoke for longer than the official Opposition.

We have reduced the effective tax rate for people on benefits from up to 90% to 63%. It was 65% to start off with and we were able to reduce that.

The second important point is that for many people on benefits who had hours caps, jobs had to be designed not around the needs of businesses or individuals, but around the needs of the benefit system. My experience when I was a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions was of meeting businesses that designed jobs around the needs of their business. However, when they took on a fantastic employee who did a great job and then wanted to increase their hours and offer that person increased opportunities to earn a living, that person had to say, “I’m terribly sorry. I can’t take that promotion or those hours because it will put at risk my benefits and I will not be able to guarantee a roof over our head for my children.” That has changed and that is a radical improvement.

[Heidi Allen]

For the record, I was one of those employers, and I got very frustrated that I could not give more hours to people working for me. On the taper rate, the situation is better than it was. Given the choice, I would restore the taper rate to 50%, where it was originally designed to be. Does my right hon. Friend agree that if we are going to have to choose wisely where to spend money, we should pump money into work allowances for those claimants most adversely affected? That is where we should focus money on in this Budget.

[Mr Harper]

I agree with my hon. Friend that if the Chancellor is able to find some money—I always think it is very good to not try to write the Chancellor’s Budget in advance—the work allowances are an area to prioritise. I know that that is what my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green thinks, too. I am sure the Chancellor will have heard the call in the letter that he wrote and in the debate today from my hon. Friend. Getting rid of the hours caps is really important. It means that jobs can be better focused on individuals and that we give people the opportunity to get into work, progress in work, and be able to earn for their families.

The final point I want to make in the one and a half minutes I have left—I will not take any more interventions, because it takes time away from other Members—is on the experience of constituents. I still get constituents writing to me about universal credit—of course I do. But in the past year, since we rolled out universal credit in my constituency, I get about half the number I once did. I now get about half the number of problems that I used to get with the legacy benefit system.

I also want to take this opportunity—I hope the Secretary of State can take this back to the Department—to say that of course when one is rolling out a benefit system to millions of people there will be errors, but the experience of my constituency staff is that when we raise those issues with the Department it looks at them properly and we get considered, detailed responses to solve them for my constituents. The members of staff in the Department are very focused on doing their best for our constituents. I certainly had the experience—I have heard the Minister of State say this as well—from when I was in the Department of frontline staff saying that the introduction of universal credit was the first time they felt they could do what they came to work at the Department for, which is to help constituents get into work, earn more money and be able to provide for their families. That is a fantastic thing and I urge the Secretary of State to continue to roll out the benefit in a careful way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gordon Henderson]

Yes, that is an important factor. I also point out that Opposition Members often quote concerns raised by citizens advice bureaux about the impact of UC on local people. Well, I visited my local citizens advice bureaux and suggested that they work closely with my office to identify people with a problem, so that they could be helped. I did the same thing with a local church group that contacted me expressing concerns about UC. In addition, I used social media to ask people to contact me if they were facing difficulties because of UC, or if they knew of somebody facing difficulties. I have had only a handful of people referred to me since we went live in January and all the problems raised were resolved quickly by my staff.

The Opposition have also made much of the use of food banks, and I want to touch on that issue. My first experience of food banks in my constituency was when our local steelworks closed down and some workers were left without any money to buy food for their families. There was a long delay in getting those people the financial help that they needed and to which they were entitled. That delay did not arise under UC, but under the legacy benefit system. We hear repeated claims from Opposition Members that the transition to UC has forced more people to use food banks, so to check their claims, I went to visit a food bank in my constituency last week to find out for myself. [Interruption.] The volunteers who run that food bank are wonderful people for whom I have the utmost respect, as are the volunteers in the other food banks in my constituency.

[Heidi Allen]

I hope that my friends in the Opposition will forgive me for saying this, but everybody in the Chamber genuinely wants to get UC right, and I would rather that Opposition Members did not belittle my hon. Friend, who is genuinely trying to do his best to find out what is happening in his constituency.

[Gordon Henderson]

As my hon. Friend will understand, the claim is being made that some people who use those food banks were forced to do so because of the difficulties faced when claiming UC. When I pressed them about those difficulties, they said that one was the requirement for claims to be made online, which was also raised by the shadow Secretary of State. Some people claimed that they either were not computer literate or did not have access to a computer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

She was not told about the availability of an advance payment. They are now being better publicised than when she made her claim, but the problem with advance payments is that people are being plunged into debt right at the start of their claim. For many, it is impossible to get out of debt once the system has forced them on to that slope. The result is that they have to go to food banks. We know that food bank demand rockets when universal credit comes in, because people get behind with their rent and other debts mount. I say to Conservative Members—many of them are fully aware of this—that this is not the way to treat our fellow citizens. Universal credit must be changed to stop this happening.

[Heidi Allen]

I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman giving way, not least because I might run out of time and not be able to say all that I want to say in my speech, including suggesting that it might be a wiser idea to make the advance payment into a first payment. It could be a bit like when people who do not pay their last month’s rent do not get their deposit back. We would look to take something back if anything was due, right at the end of the claim. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we should turn the advance payment on its head so that it is no longer a loan that we need to take back?

[Stephen Timms]

The hon. Lady makes an interesting suggestion, and I hope that her Front-Bench colleagues will listen to it. We certainly need urgent change on this point.

Ministers have, perhaps understandably, developed a tin ear to the voices that they should have been listening to over the past eight years, as the warnings about what they were getting into were being sounded. They have not been listening to those warnings, but I hope that they are at least listening to the Residential Landlords Association. They might have heard Paul Cunningham, the chair of Great Yarmouth Landlords Association, on the radio last week, as I did. He said that the majority of landlords in Great Yarmouth were now unwilling to let property to universal credit claimants because they inevitably got into arrears with their rent. He said:

“It is a social experiment that’s gone wrong”.

Of the Department for Work and Pensions, he said:

“They remain in denial about the system”.

His concluding point was that

“it doesn’t make business sense to let a property to a tenant who has no idea of when their claim is going to be processed or how much money they are going to get, and who will invariably end up in arrears”.

That is the reality of the experience of private landlords, let alone the organisations representing claimants that have been making submissions to the Government.

Among the many representations that the Government have received about managed migration, they will have seen the report prepared by the Resolution Foundation, and I hope that they have looked at it carefully. A lot of the submissions expressed deep foreboding about where we are heading with the managed migration programme. The Resolution Foundation made the following recommendation, which I commend to Ministers:

“The managed migration should only begin when the DWP has shown service levels meet a standard agreed with external experts including SSAC”—

the Social Security Advisory Committee—

“and the Work and Pensions Committee. We suggest this should be that 90 per cent of new claims are paid in full and on time”.

The recommendation—an excellent one—is that managed migration should not commence until that level of service can be achieved, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that when he winds up. I commend that idea to him.

It is clear that we are heading into very difficult territory if this goes ahead on the current basis, as is still likely. The Conservative party has been warned about what happens to parties when they go ahead with such projects, given the prospects for universal credit. There is now, however, a chance—there is a moment here—for Ministers to fix these problems. They could take the necessary action; the Chancellor could do so in the Budget on Monday week. I urge them to stop the roll-out until these problems are fixed and not to press ahead in the way that is being proposed. Universal credit was a perfectly sensible idea. Unfortunately, its implementation has been very badly handled. The problems went right back to the start, when the July 2010 Green Paper stated:

“The IT changes that would be necessary to deliver”—

universal credit—

“would not constitute a major IT project.”

How wrong that was, sadly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I am pleased to speak in this vital debate, not only because when universal credit is rolled out it will affect millions of lives, but because two significant parliamentary events are coming soon: the Budget and the regulations on managed migration.

I have been a member of the Work and Pensions Committee since 2015 and I have seen the Government do the right thing time and again. We halted the planned cuts to tax credits in 2015, we reduced the taper rate from 65% to 63% in 2016, and last year we invested a further £1.5 billion to reduce the six-week waiting period to five weeks and provide two weeks of extra housing benefit run-on for people who move on to UC. We know that when presented with facts, the Government will act, so that is what I shall do today.

I wish to talk about how we can improve universal credit. Let me start with the existing system. The awarding of a national contract to Citizens Advice will transform the experience of claimants struggling to get on to the system for the first time, but it still will not fix the risk of debt faced by those who cannot wait five weeks for their first payment and who subsequently struggle on reduced payments when they are paying back their advance loan. If press rumours that the pay-back rate will be reduced from 40% to 30% are true, that is welcome, but for me that does not go far enough. Does the fact that we are paying advances to 60% of claimants not tell us that people cannot wait for five weeks, so the system design is flawed? As we are paying out taxpayers’ money at the start, let us give them better value for money by making that first payment the actual payment itself, not an advance loan. If our estimation was wrong, we can readjust slightly at the end of the month and claw back any slight overpayment at the end, when the claimant’s life is more settled and their debts are under control. I believe that that would tackle the majority of debt and food bank-related cases that we hear about. Let’s just do it.

As we have heard today multiple times, we need to make sure that universal credit can handle occasions when there are two pay cheques in a long month and ensure that that does not disproportionally affect the following month’s benefit. We should support the Scottish Government trial to see whether split payments give greater support to sufferers of domestic violence, and we need to look again at how universal credit works for self-employed people.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

Totnes has a vibrant arts sector. My hon. Friend will know that many self-employed artists take longer to establish themselves as a business, and there may be great variation, month to month, in what they are paid. In the light of her detailed work, does my hon. Friend have any suggestions about how we can improve the situation for self-employed artists?

[Heidi Allen]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is a fact that universal credit was not built for self-employed people, and it shows. The monthly assessments do not work and the minimum income floor needs to be looked at again because it typically takes more than a year for people’s businesses to settle down.

To make the existing system really fly, I suspect that we need a boost to IT and admin man and womanpower behind the scenes, because let us make no mistake: universal credit is not yet fully automated. Claiming for childcare costs is a prime example of the manual work that is still being done. That brings me on to how we move legacy claimants across and the regulations that we have still to vote for—in November, I suspect. I am pleased that migration will start a lot later than originally planned, but I and many others still have concerns about the regulations. As a Government, we are choosing, for all the right reasons, to move people—that is people—across to a new system. I fail to see why that should be the complete and utter responsibility of those claimants. I have led on IT transformation projects in business and it would be unheard of for there not to be some kind of automated population of data from the old system to the new. We need to look really seriously into doing that, because it would save us hardship in the long run. Let us not forget that a third of migrated claimants are on ESA—the most vulnerable in society who have some kind of illness or disability—and we should look after them and not let them drop off the system. The population of data should be automatic and there should be no break in those people’s payments at all.

Finally, when people arrive safe and sound on universal credit, the work allowances need to be what they should have been prior to 2015. How in this fair Great Britain that we call home can we have two families in identical circumstances living next to each other, but one has been protected across through migration and their next-door neighbours are £2,500 worse off a year? That is not Great Britain.

Oral Answers to Questions

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 15th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

The right hon. Gentleman knows that my door is always open to him. I did receive a letter on Friday, but really we need to work with those ladies and see what help we can give them—from work coaches right the way through to various charities and organisations. In the meantime, perhaps he and the work coaches could tell these ladies that there are currently a record 830,000 job vacancies, and that perhaps there are other jobs on offer.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Just to draw on a point that we have already heard in the Chamber this afternoon, is the Secretary of State aware how much support she has on the Conservative Benches for our desire to see extra funding in the Budget to restore the work allowances to where they should be?

[Ms McVey]

I thank my hon. Friend. I know that all Members of the House want to ensure that universal credit works for all claimants. It is helping people into work and is built on sound principles, unlike the legacy system, which trapped people and locked them into unemployment. Now we are helping people into work, but we have to listen, learn and adjust where we can, as we have done in the past, with a £1.5 billion package this year. We are still adjusting, learning and helping the most vulnerable.

The Secretary of State’s Handling of Universal Credit

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I suspect that everybody in the House became an MP because they wanted to make a difference—I most certainly did, and I know the Secretary of State did too—so I find the motion to be nothing other than an unacceptable personal attack on her. Perhaps President Trump’s visit to the UK this week can serve as a reminder: they go low and we go high.

I have yet to talk to any organisation with deep knowledge of our benefits system past and present that does not agree that universal credit is a vast improvement on legacy systems. Everyone who cares about alleviating poverty and improving the life chances of the vulnerable wants universal credit to succeed. I could look back and say I wish we had had more ministerial stability at the Department, that the roll-out in the last 12 months could have been slower or that the £1.5 billion in the Budget last year could have come a bit sooner, but since she has taken the reins at the DWP the Secretary of State has listened, just as her predecessor did. Deciding not to pursue the court challenges over PIP, and the severe disability payments, which we have heard about today, were both the right things to do. I am confident that when those of us who have constructively assessed the system tell her what more we can do, she will listen.

Let us start with the current system. We need to upgrade universal support to Martini status. Given that just 54% of claimants can enrol for universal credit without assistance, we need to ensure that universal support is available anywhere, everywhere and at any time. This means a full service specification with quality standards that can be monitored. It needs to provide more than was originally envisaged, including debt advice, which should be available through a trusted provider and to every claimant who needs it. I would suggest contracting it out to Citizens Advice, housing associations or some other such organisation.

The universal credit system as a whole needs quality indicators. What does good look like? What payment timeliness are we aiming for? What about accessibility, advanced payments and debt monitoring? Let us think of claimants as valuable clients, as citizens and taxpayers who deserve excellence in their interactions with the DWP. I want us to focus on the most vulnerable claimants—those at risk of ending up in our surgeries and food banks—such as victims of domestic abuse and modern slavery, those with mental health issues and the disabled.

Let us treat them as a special set of customers—platinum customers—and make it our mission to ensure they do not fall through the net. Let us think about fast-tracking them through the system and treating advanced payments as first payments, not loans to be collected back in. Since we pay universal credit in arrears, that advanced payment should be collected right at the end, when, all being well, the customer, with all the positive support of universal credit and the skills and passion of their work coach, has moved into good sustainable employment.

[Paul Masterton]

My hon. Friend mentions work coaches. I was disappointed that the Opposition spokesperson expressed no gratitude to the incredible men and women all over the country working on the frontline of our jobcentres with some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Does she agree that they deserve our support?

[Heidi Allen]

Absolutely, and they care deeply. I have spent time with work coaches all over the country in different jobcentres. They are proud of what they do and deserve our support. Working with them, we need to identify every crack in the system and ensure that our most precious customers—our platinum customers—do not slip through them. In that regard, I am pleased that the Chancellor has agreed to keep an eye on the taper rate.

None of my asks so far would incur big financial costs, but there is one we should ask the Chancellor for: we have to release working-age claimants from the benefits freeze. Universal credit can be the most positive and efficient system in the world, but if people cannot afford to live on it, it will not matter a jot. Furthermore, all this has to be sorted out before we push the button for managed migration. This is important, because when we do that, about two thirds of the claimants who will move across will be ESA claimants. They are our platinum customers and everything has to be perfect for them before we move them across. I will need to be reassured of that before I can vote for that legislation.

Conservative Members want universal credit to work. It is brilliant that we will be working with Citizens Advice, the Trussell Trust, Save the Children and others as they are desperate to engage positively and collaboratively. Getting universal credit right and, in doing so, helping millions of people in this country—that is a motion worth supporting.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

This is a petty and mean motion. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is doing a first-class job, and I have only the utmost respect for her and for what she is doing. There is no more passionate an advocate for the principle of work and the eradication of poverty than my right hon. Friend. Her team are attentive, listening and committed to the task, which is to ensure that people are always better off in work than on benefits.

We have had full service universal credit in Stirling for over a year, and I would like to share some observations and suggestions based on our experience. First, is there a way—I think there might have been a suggestion earlier that there is—in which the DWP could extend the concept of trusted partner status to organisations such as Citizens Advice? That would allow Citizens Advice volunteer advisers to have access to named DWP contacts in order to support the resolution of client queries, which would go a long way to making things simpler and resolving things quickly. The second point is on the need to secure mental health training for DWP staff dealing with the migration of legacy benefits. The legacy benefits issue has been well documented, and with more vulnerable clients coming into the system, we need to ensure that DWP staff are well supported when supporting their clients.

Thirdly, there needs to be increased decision-making discretion at local level on reassessment, and particularly on mandatory reconsideration. When clients are well known to the DWP, it is my view that the mandatory reconsideration process is redundant. More than 90% of medical assessment decisions are upheld at that stage, but three quarters are then overturned on appeal. Giving more discretion to local staff on this matter would make the system more efficient and make better use of the working knowledge that staff have of their face-to-face clients.

My fourth point relates to an anomaly in universal credit deductions. When the DWP makes a deduction from a payment, that might not be the only deduction that is coming off that payment. There might also be court deductions or deductions from the local authority. This can often take claimants below the minimum payment level and leave them without anything to live on. That is a real-life experience.

My final point relates to women’s refuges. When a woman goes into a refuge, only one benefit should stop, and the woman should continue to receive payments. In the experience of our local women’s refuge in Stirling, both payments have stopped, and that is unacceptable. That situation needs clarity.

[Heidi Allen]

Does my hon. Friend agree that those sorts of women are the platinum customers that I am talking about? They are the ones who need to be fast-tracked through the system and to have a bespoke work coach with them.

[Stephen Kerr]

Absolutely. The test of this system is how we take care of the most vulnerable people that are touched by it. That point is well accepted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and her team.

Those are the five points that I wanted to make, and I would like to see some movement on them, to help to continue to roll out a fair and improved system that meets the promise of encouraging work and also protects the most vulnerable in society. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.