Welfare Spending

Debate between Helen Whately and Harriett Baldwin

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I do not agree with the hon. Member. I am going to talk about poverty in a moment, so if he will just hold on, he will hear my view on that point.

This is a ticking time bomb. If we do not solve this problem, our economy will collapse, yet opposite me sit members of this Labour Government who have just shown us, with the welfare chaos over the past couple of weeks, that they will not, and indeed cannot, fix this. In fact, they are just making it worse.

If hon. Members cast their minds back to early 2020, they will remember that Labour was in the midst of a leadership election. The now Prime Minister made a clear and unequivocal commitment to

“scrap…punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.”

Then, once he had secured the leadership of the Labour party and the election neared, he changed that tune. He said Labour was not going to abolish the two-child limit. He acknowledged the need to take tough decisions and not to make unfunded spending promises, and on this we can agree. But saying that he would take tough decisions is not the same as actually taking them.

Take for example the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, now just called the Universal Credit Bill, which Labour voted through last week. It was meant to save £5 billion. The first U-turn brought that down to £2 billion, and the next U-turn then brought it down to—well, the Minister on the Front Bench at the time could not tell us, but the consensus is that it will now cost the taxpayer around £100 million.

[Dame Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that, as a result of that Bill, one of the things that is most shocking is that in due course it will actually pay someone more to be on welfare than to work full time on the minimum wage?

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the problem of a welfare trap, where people would better be better off on benefits than working full time on the minimum wage.

Winter Fuel Payment

Debate between Helen Whately and Harriett Baldwin

Wednesday 19th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

Let me make a little progress and then I will be delighted to take more interventions from colleagues.

The Chancellor has previously argued that winter fuel payments should be means-tested and cut for the richest pensioners, but who here thinks that someone on an income of £11,500 is rich? Age UK estimated that over 80% of pensioners living below or only just above the poverty line would lose their winter fuel payment.

The issue is not just that low-income vulnerable pensioners miss out on help with their heating because they are just above the pension credit threshold—the problem is worse than that. Last summer, the Government knew that over 800,000 people may be eligible for pension credit but did not claim it, meaning that they, too, would miss out on the winter fuel payment. The Pensions Minister at the time, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Emma Reynolds), assured us that the Government would get on top of that. In fact, she told us that her target was to have 100% of those eligible for pension credit claiming it. But here we are many months later, and still around three quarters of a million eligible pensioners are not on pension credit. That is another promise easily made but easily broken. There has been a woeful failure by the Government to close properly that gap, despite all the coverage the winter fuel payment received.

Of course, we knew that this would be hard. We, too, had pension credit uptake campaigns in Government. More people signed up, but still many did not. I expect the Government knew that they would fail, too. Their officials would have told them, but it was easier for them to assure the press, the charities and their Back Benchers, “Don’t worry,” just as we have heard their Ministers do about the welfare reforms in the last 24 hours. For them, it was easier to wait for the spring to come and hope that everyone would simply forget. Well I say to them, “We won’t let you forget.” Nor will millions of pensioners and their families: 10 million pensioners are missing out on help with their heating, among them around 1 million of the most vulnerable people in our country, quite literally left in the cold by this Labour Government. That will not be forgotten in a hurry.

[Dame Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. It is absolutely right that we ask the questions we are asking today. The statistic that has shocked me most in this debate is that of the millions of pensioners who lost their winter fuel payment, 44,000 are estimated to have been terminally ill. Is she as shocked as I am by that statistic?