Tax Credits

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

When tax credits were first brought in, people were often overpaid. They would then receive a demand for an end-of-year repayment. I fought many of those cases, but Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would engineer the perfect excuse. Deep in its standard letter demanding repayments was this astonishing sentence:

“Even though we told you that your assessment was correct, it was not reasonable for you to believe it.”

That is how I view the Chancellor’s proposals—even though he tells me that there will not be any problems, it is not reasonable for me to believe him.

I have no problem in principle with removing low wage subsidies so long as we ensure a decent living wage; family support to make up for the variation in income when people have families of different sizes; proper affordable childcare provision available universally, particularly in deprived and rural areas, which are currently very poorly served; and support for small businesses to enable them to earn and to pay a living wage.

When tax credits were introduced, I asked the then Labour Treasury Minister what pilots had been carried out. Essentially, she said that none had been carried out. I fear that we are in that same position with these proposals. We know what happened then: chaos, over- payments, underpayments, misery to families and the damage to the Government’s reputation. The impact of these changes has not been thoroughly assessed, and I fear that we will all regret that at our leisure.