Universal Credit Work Allowance

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I am extremely grateful, Mr Speaker.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Owen Smith]

No.

Disabled workers will lose £2,000 a year, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) reminded the House, the worst affected group will be single mothers. A single mother working full time on the new, shiny national living wage will be £3,000 worse off. How have the Government justified that? They have made a series of attempts to defend it. The first was to refer to their manifesto and say, “We said we were going to deliver £12 billion of cuts from welfare, and here we go.” What they did not say at the election, as I recall, was that they would be stripping the money from working families. I do not recall them talking about nursery nurses, security guards or shop workers on the minimum wage as the sort of wage scroungers they now seek to vilify, yet those are the very people who will be scragged by the change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson]

I will now try to make some progress so that I can set that out.

The old approach of taking money from people’s wages and recycling it back to them in handouts was not transforming lives, it was trapping them. Why? It did not provide the right incentives or support for people to get on and realise their ambitions. Our central approach is therefore about ensuring people are better off in work and better off working more.

[Simon Hoare]

The Minister is being a little too charitable to the Opposition. I might be being a bit cynical, but did not their policy seek to create a hinterland constituency of people wedded to welfare and therefore reliant on the Labour party? The voters saw through that in May and they are not going back to that again.

[Justin Tomlinson]

There is no need for my hon. Friend to feel that he is being cynical, as the statistics make that very clear.

Through universal credit people can support their families and have the dignity and independence that comes with having a job. We have already made huge progress through our reforms. Employment is at a record high, up by more than 2 million since 2010. Unemployment is down by more than 750,000 since 2010. The claimant count rate is at its lowest level since 1975. The number of people claiming the main out-of-work benefits has fallen by 1 million since 2010. Wages are rising—for 13 months consecutively—higher than inflation. I know that the shadow Secretary of State started talking about the 1920s—an easy mistake to make, perhaps, forgetting about inflation. That is why living standards are up. Business confidence is underpinning all this progress, which the Opposition are—