Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Brazier

Monday 18th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I give credit to Jobcentre Plus for the action that it took, which sometimes goes unnoticed, when it knew that this policy was coming in. From April 2012, it wrote to potentially affected people with advance warning. It set up a helpline on the benefit cap and an online calculator so that they could work out some of the figures themselves. It then telephoned some of the most vulnerable, and visited them as well. It set up funding for intensive employment support and worked with local authorities to support claimants in budgeting, housing and child care, and big employment events. This is one of major reasons why about 61% of those who moved into work did so after they were notified.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on this, and I assure him that in an area such as mine, which includes the ward with the highest level of child poverty in the south-east region, my constituents welcome the fact that we really are trying to encourage people who have been far too long on benefits to look for options to work. The news that he has just announced is what is needed.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The reality is that of more than 19,000 householders capped in mid-September 2013, 60% were lone parents and 78% were capped by £100 or less a week. This is a system that is returning fairness to the whole programme. The Opposition opposed the cap, and it is worth remembering that even though the trade union leaders opposed it, 80% of Unite members support our policy on welfare reform, as I discovered from a poll the other day.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Brazier

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

It was the right hon. Gentleman’s Government who left office with the lowest level of house building since the 1920s—[Interruption.] It is higher now than it was under them—nearly 1.8 million on waiting lists in England and 250,000 tenants in overcrowded accommodation. The Opposition never talk about that. Never do we hear them say they were sorry for the overcrowded mess they left behind them. Instead of little gimmicks with people from Brazil, they would be better off apologising for the mess they left us in in the first place.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I commend my right hon. Friend’s robust approach. Does he agree that it cannot be part of any responsible welfare system to support people in accommodation of a size that they do not need when so many families have no proper accommodation at all?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is also worth reminding the Opposition that they introduced a policy for social tenants in the private sector that does not allow housing benefit recipients to have spare rooms. So they are being hypocritical in saying that they are against one and in favour of the other.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Brazier

Monday 5th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The hon. Gentleman is right—those people face particular difficulties. The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), referred to those earlier. Our job is to ensure that we help all those people to overcome those difficulties. Organisations such as Work Choice and Remploy, which are helping to get people back to work, are hugely important. We are making big strides in that regard. The simple answer is that still not enough people with disabilities are back in work, although the situation is improving. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. We all want to ensure that disabled people join mainstream work and get a full life out of it.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

In welcoming my right hon. Friend's last answer, may I particularly urge him to look at organisations such as the Shaw Trust when trying to assist disabled people into work, rather than having focus desks in jobcentres?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Brazier

Monday 5th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

Interestingly, the IFS assumed that no changes to future policy would be made and did not account for fundamentals, such as behaviour change, or for education policies such as the early intervention work and some of the education reforms. The IFS did not consider several other policies—for example, the work with disadvantaged two-year-olds, the £180 million bursary fund, the early intervention grant and the fairness premium—which is fair enough, but we believe that they would affect its figures. We are desperately keen to eradicate child poverty, as we originally stated, and we stand by that. We did not enter power not to do that. The hon. Gentleman needs to acknowledge, however, that we also inherited a terrible deficit and huge debt problem. Those things tend to collide, but we are doing our level best—this is what universal credit does—to rectify the situation for the poorest in society.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that in a country where one child in five is growing up in a household without work, the best way to tackle child poverty in the long run is to break the cycle of dependency now running, in some cases, into three generations? Many of the measures he has mentioned, including work experience schemes, literacy programmes, subsidy programmes and so on, are designed to do that.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We also inherited a system with far too much in-work poverty. Our aim is to move as many people as possible through universal credit and into work, and to ensure that, through universal credit, they are better off. That is the key point. I have also made the point, however, that the idea of “poverty plus a pound”, by which we just rotate money between people to move them slightly above a particular level before they collapse back, is a mistake and led to poverty rising on the previous Government’s watch.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Julian Brazier

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The right hon. Lady will forgive me if I do not give her the absolute details. We will be publishing the details shortly—well, soon, anyway—but I can tell her now that she can expect to see a significant amount, as a proportion, for the computer change. All this is covered by the money already granted through the settlement in the spending review—more than £2 billion—which will go to protect those who would have nominally been losers and to implement all the necessary IT changes, and to cover every other detail too.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s earlier answer. In the light of several terrible cases in my constituency, does he agree that it is extraordinary that the whole system of credits was introduced at all without a proper real-time information system?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

The PAYE system is ultimately the responsibility of my colleagues at HMRC, although we will obviously require an element of that to implement the change. That change will make life considerably easier for us in delivering those benefits without the normal mistakes that are made—mistakes that have caused overpayments to people, followed by attempts to claw them back that cause hardship for many people on low incomes. I believe that in due course the change will deliver a net benefit to everybody.