Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Grant Excerpts
Monday 8th March 2021

(3 years ago)

Commons Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Marion Fellows Portrait Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw) (SNP)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

What assessment she has made of the implications for her Department’s policies of Budget 2021.

Peter Grant Portrait Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
- Hansard - -

What assessment she has made of the implications for her Department’s policies of Budget 2021.

Thérèse Coffey Portrait The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

Since the start of the pandemic, our priority as a Government has been to protect lives and people’s livelihoods. That is why we are continuing to give our support, extending the temporary £20 a week increase in universal credit for a further six months, taking it well beyond the end of this national lockdown. I should point out to the House that total welfare spending in Great Britain for 2020-21 now stands at an estimated £238 billion, 11.4% of GDP. Alongside that, the Budget confirmed the ongoing measures that we will be taking as part of our plan for jobs, including the expected starting of the restart programme, particularly focused on long-term unemployed, before the summer recess.

Thérèse Coffey Portrait Dr Coffey
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

Discussions between Ministers are normally confidential, but the answer is no, the reason being that we have a process that was put in place as a temporary measure relating to covid. The rationale for that was set out last year. I encourage the hon. Lady to genuinely consider encouraging people who are still on legacy benefits to go to independent benefits calculators to see whether they would automatically be better off under universal credit. Universal credit has been a huge success during the last 12 months—if not the years before that, but it has particularly shown its worth—and I genuinely encourage people to really consider whether they would be financially better off moving benefits now rather than waiting, potentially, to be managed-migrated in the next few years.

Peter Grant Portrait Peter Grant [V]
- Hansard - -

I think the Minister has possibly given the game away there by linking an explanation of her refusal to ask for an uplift to legacy benefits to an attempt to pressurise my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) into pushing her constituents to move from a useless system of legacy benefits to an equally useless system of universal credit.

Does the Secretary of State not accept that the fact that universal credit had to be increased by £20 a week as soon as lockdown was imposed is a clear indication that the underlying rate of payment of universal credit is not adequate for people to live on? I defy anyone on the Conservative Benches to live on universal credit for more than a few weeks, never mind two to three years. Will the Secretary of State now accept that the underlying rate of universal credit is utterly inadequate and that the £20 uplift, as a minimum, should be made permanent with immediate effect?

Thérèse Coffey Portrait Dr Coffey
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

No, I do not accept that, and I want to be clear. It has been explained to the House in multiple ways over the past year why that decision, which the Chancellor announced last year, was taken at the time. Let us be straight about this: universal credit is working and will continue to work. It worries me how many Members of Parliament criticise universal credit when it is clearly working. It has done what it was designed to do. For those people who have had their hours reduced, universal credit has kicked in and the payments have gone up. Frankly, unlike in the last recession, in 2008, when the Labour party did nothing to help with some of the financial instability that people were going through, I am very proud of what we have undertaken by investing over £7 billion extra in the welfare system in this last year.