Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

Yes, and if the Government are to provide us with any sort of detailed, worthwhile impact assessment, they should undertake precisely that sort of calculation. They should look at what net benefit to our economy and society is made by working mothers, carers, and those whose efforts are not being calibrated by the Government, because those people will lose out as a result of the changes to tax credits.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that of the 7,700 families in my constituency who will lose £1,300 a year if the Government go ahead with this cut—three quarters of whom are working—those living in the private rented sector will find the cuts hardest to bear? The Government refuse to regulate that sector, and in my constituency people’s rent has risen by an average of 11.6% in the past year. The Government should consider further the punitive effects of this cut on those families.

[Owen Smith]

My hon. Friend is completely correct, but this cut does not affect only those who are renting and suffering from sky-high, exorbitant increases in private rent; it also affects owner-occupiers. The Government purport to speak for owner-occupiers, but those people will be proportionately harder hit by this measure than many others. Reduced eligibility for tax credits will mean that some people will receive more in housing benefit—there is an offsetting increase in housing benefit costs as a result of the decrease in eligibility for working tax credits, but owner-occupiers will not get that increase.

Earlier someone mentioned the impact of these cuts on our economy, and the self-employed will also be hard hit by these changes. Around 60% of small businesses, some 5.2 million across the country, are sole traders, and according to the Royal Society of Arts, 90% of the increase in jobs—the “jobs miracle” that the Government like to talk about—have been in self-employment in recent years.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood]

I have already been quite honest in saying that Governments face a difficult choice in this regard: do they want fewer people facing a sharper taper, or more people facing a gentler taper? There are no easy answers. I look forward to hearing the Government’s judgment when they have completed their listening and thinking. Again, the Opposition are refusing to see all three parts of the package. It is not possible to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question as simply as he would like, because working out whether people are better off or worse off, and by how much, depends on what else happens with taxation, rates of pay, inflation and all the other things that are going on.

My advice to the Government is that their strategy is absolutely right: get more from pay, more from tax cuts and then cut the benefits, because people will not need them as much. They must listen carefully to criticisms, for example if their changes are going too far and too fast, or if they catch some people we do not want to catch. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor will want to return to those points in his autumn statement and tell us his thinking. However, the direction of travel must not be simply to make big increases in benefits again; it must be to find other answers so that more people can enjoy prosperity from work, earnings and lower taxes.

[Helen Hayes]

I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman would like to comment on two issues. First, is there any legitimacy or authority in the Government’s approach to cutting tax credits, given that the Prime Minister repeatedly denied that he would do so in the run-up to the general election? Secondly, there is unequivocal evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others that the maths on the issue simply do not add up, and that asking people to work harder for less is, quite simply, an unacceptable proposition.

[John Redwood]

I agree with the hon. Lady’s latter point, because I do not want people to have to work harder for less. I have just described the world I want to live in, and how I want that world, which some of my constituents enjoy, to be available to many more. I want people to work smarter and with more skill so that they can earn more because their companies can afford to pay them more. With regard to the Prime Minister’s promise in the run-up to the general election, I heard him rule out cutting child benefit, and I understand that there are no proposals to cut child benefit.

When I was asked about welfare in the run-up to the general election, I made it clear that I wanted the total welfare bill to come down and that I expected to see welfare reform, including some reductions in welfare payments and eligibility. Personally, I do not think that I have anything to answer on that score. I was entirely honest with my electorate, and they kindly trusted me with the job again, and with a bigger majority. There are many people in this country with a grown-up view about welfare, who do not want it to penalise those who really need it but who think it is high time we reformed it so that we depend much more on work and tax reduction on lower and middle levels of pay than we have done in the past.

Therefore, I urge my right hon. Friend the Chancellor the preserve the spirit of his reforms but to look very carefully at the detail, because we do not want to see bad cases of the type that Opposition Members have been conjuring out of thin air without proper facts. Above all, we do not want to go back to Labour’s boom-and-bust economy, where generous welfare, far from creating more jobs and prosperity, helped bring the whole thing down.