Social Security Benefits: Claimant Deaths

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I shall go on to show that this has been going on for years now, and that nobody has responded. Systematic errors are coming out in repeated coroners’ reports and other reports, yet there is still no action.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I commend the determined way in which my hon. Friend has pursued this issue consistently over a long time. She has talked about the coroners getting in touch with the Department. Does she share my concern that, as was shown in the National Audit Office’s recent report, there is no systematic way at the moment of compiling what coroners say about suicides and other cases that they report to the Department on?

[Debbie Abrahams]

My right hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. There are systemic failures within the Department and they have to be addressed. This is just not good enough.

Jodey Whiting, who was from Stockton, died on 21 February 2017. She was a vulnerable woman with multiple physical and mental health illnesses, which left her housebound and requiring 23 tablets a day. That meant that she was entirely reliant on social security support. In late 2016, the DWP began to reassess Jodey’s entitlement to ESA. Jodey requested a home visit as she rarely left the house due to her health, and she had made it clear in her reply that she had

“suicidal thoughts a lot of the time and could not cope with work or looking for work”.

Despite this, the DWP decided that Jodey should attend a work capability assessment in January 2017. Unfortunately, Jodey missed that appointment and, on 6 February, the DWP decided to stop the fortnightly ESA payments that Jodey relied on. She was immensely distressed to learn that her last payment would be made on 17 February. With the help of her family, Jodey wrote to the DWP to explain the severity of her health conditions and to ask the Department to reconsider the decision to terminate her ESA, but that did not happen until after her death. She also received letters informing her that her housing benefit and council tax benefit would be stopped because they are linked to ESA. She told her mum, Joy, “Mam, I can’t walk out of the house, I can’t breathe, how am I going to work?” Jodey took her own life just three days after her last ESA payment on 21 February.

The Independent Case Examiner concluded that DWP was guilty of “multiple” and “significant” failings in handling Jodey Whiting’s case and found that the DWP failed to follow its own safeguarding rules five times in the weeks leading up to the suicide. In addition, a report by psychiatrist Dr Trevor Turner says that Jodey Whiting’s mental state was likely to have been “substantially affected” by the DWP’s decision to remove her out-of-work benefits for missing a work capability assessment that she did not know about. The case is now the subject of an appeal to the Attorney General for a new inquest, and I know from speaking to Jodey’s family today that they are desperate to know when they may hear from the Attorney General.

Then there is Stephen Smith. Last April, we learned that Stephen, the Liverpool man many people remember from the front pages of various newspapers and whose emaciated body was more reminiscent of someone from a concentration camp than 21st century Britain, had died of multiple organ failure after being found fit for work. But there are many, many more cases of DWP claimants dying, some of which I raised in last year’s Westminster Hall debate.

Jimmy Ballentine took his own life in 2018 after being found fit for work. Amy Nice also took her own life in 2018 after being found fit for work. Kevin Dooley committed suicide in 2018 after losing ESA. Brian Bailey died in July 2018, again taking his own life after being found fit for work. Elaine Morrall died in November 2017, taking her own life. Daniella Obeng died in December 2017, again taking her own life. Brian Sycamore died in September 2017, taking his own life after leaving a note blaming the DWP after failing his work capability assessment.

Mark Scholfield, who died in July 2017, was a terminal cancer patient who did not receive any UC before he died in spite of his illness. Chris Gold, who died in October 2017, was found fit for work following a stroke and was facing foreclosure when he died because he could not work. Lawrence Bond collapsed and died in the street in January 2017 after being found fit for work. Julia Kelly died in 2015, taking her own life after losing ESA for a third time. Ben McDonald took his own life in March 2015 after being found fit for work. Chris Smith, who died in 2015, had cancer and was found fit for work despite a terminal diagnosis.

David Clapson could not afford to power his fridge to store his insulin and died as a result in July 2014. Michael Connolly took his own life on his birthday in 2014 after losing his ESA. George from Chesterfield died of a heart attack in May 2014, eight months after being found fit for work despite having had three previous heart attacks. Robert Barlow died of cancer in April 2014 after losing his ESA. David Barr died in September 2014, taking his own life after losing ESA. Trevor Drakard took his own life in 2014. Shaun Pilkington—

[Debbie Abrahams]

Absolutely. I thank the hon. Gentleman.

This is unforgivable. These are people’s family members and we are failing them. We must not let this continue.

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend will probably have seen, as I did, the comment in the recent National Audit Office report on suicides that internal process reviews, which are perhaps not carried out as frequently as they should be, are often carried out when a claimant takes their own life, but the Department does not know whether the lessons from those reviews are implemented. Does that not point to another dramatic change that is required here?

[Debbie Abrahams]

My right hon. Friend is spot on. There are so many learning points that we should have already picked up on, and I will go through them in a minute.

I will finish the list if I can. Shaun Pilkington died in January 2014, and Terry McGarvey died in February 2014. This is not an exhaustive list, but it shames us all. This inaction shames the Government. I have raised this so many times over the past five years, and there has been no change whatsoever.

For years now, there have been warnings that the Department’s safeguarding policies are not working. In 2014-15, as a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, I asked for an inquiry on sanctions policy. From this inquiry, the Committee recommended:

“DWP should seek to establish a body modelled on the Independent Police Complaints Commission, to conduct reviews, at the request of relatives, or automatically where no living relative remains, in all instances where an individual on an out-of-work working-age benefit dies whilst in receipt of that benefit. Such a model, operated within the purview of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, should ensure that the role of all publicly-funded agencies involved in the provision of services or benefits to the individual is scrutinised, so that a learning document can be produced setting out how policy, and the service delivery pathway, can be improved at every stage.”

In their formal response—[Interruption.] Would the Minister like to intervene? I believe there is something he finds amusing about this.

Social Security

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I welcome the fact that, for the first time for many years, benefits are being uprated in line with inflation. It is a welcome change and one that is long overdue. But I think we do need to look a little bit at the history of what has happened since 2010, as the shadow Minister has done in part.

In the 2012 autumn statement the then Chancellor, George Osborne, limited increases in most working-age benefits—including those for people in work—to 1% for three years from 2013-14. That was due to end in 2015-16. But then, as we have been reminded, we had the benefits freeze, which froze most working-age benefits at cash levels for a further four years. Thank goodness that freeze is ending, but we have now had seven years without inflation uprating, and the inflation uprating that we are getting through this order is at the lower CPI rate, rather than at the RPI rate that was always used prior to 2010.

The Government have chosen to cut the incomes of those who are assessed as being the poorest, and we all know the consequences. We have been reminded of some of them already in this debate: enormous numbers resorting to food banks; people sleeping rough in Westminster tube station; and child poverty going through the roof.

Social security spending on working-age adults and children amounted to 5.7% of GDP in 2010. It is now down to 4.3%. A single adult’s jobseeker’s allowance will be £74.35 a week from April under this order. It would have been £86.72—one sixth more than it is actually going to be—if RPI uprating had been in place since 2010. Child benefit for the first or oldest child is going to be £21.05 a week after the modest increase that the shadow Minister drew attention to in his speech. If it had been uprated by RPI since 2010, it would have been £26.90 a week—over 25% more than it is actually going to be because, of course, child benefit was frozen in cash terms from 2010, not just from 2015.

This morning Citizens Advice published research entitled “The impact of the benefits freeze on people in debt”, which states:

“Since the benefits freeze began, we’ve seen an increase in the proportion of people we help with debt who have no money left at the end of the month once they’ve covered their living costs. In 2016/17, 32% of all people we helped with debt had no money left after covering their costs, but by 2019/20 this had risen to 38%.”

It argues that the Government should adopt the recommendation of the Work and Pensions Committee to which my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) has already drawn attention. I think the Committee first made this proposal last July under the chairmanship of Frank Field, to whom I pay tribute and who will be greatly missed in the House. The recommendation was:

“From 2020/21, the Government should increase the rates of frozen benefits by CPI plus 2%. That would mean that benefit rates would, after four years, reach the level at which they would have been set if they had not been frozen.”

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates a minimum income standard for a minimum acceptable standard of living for different household types. In 2009, the benefits system provided 70% of that standard for a lone parent with two young children. By last year, that was down to 58%. In 2009, the system provided a childless working-age couple with 42% of the standard. Hon. Members might think that that is low enough, but last year it was down to 30%. The household benefit cap is not being uprated at all, when it certainly should be, and there is no change at all to the harshness of the two-child limit.

[Debbie Abrahams]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend—the new Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee—for giving way. Many of us are concerned that the Government’s proposed increase is not at all going to rectify the dreadful social security situation that exists at the moment. Is he as concerned as I am about this?

[Stephen Timms]

I am very concerned. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think that the Government are making sure that the situation is not going to get worse, or at least not much worse, but they are certainly in no way putting right the damage that has been done over the last few years—indeed, over the past 10 years.

[Kate Green]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a cruel lack of logic in the household benefit cap because it is a blunt instrument that takes no account of different family structures and different forms of need in different households?

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is quite right. We were given a rationale when the cap was introduced—it was an extremely blunt one, but it was a rationale—but the benefit was reduced arbitrarily after that.

I have several questions for the Minister. Does he recognise that the freeze has made life much harder for those who depend on benefits, and that they are due a better offer than simply maintaining the current diminished level of income in line with inflation in the years ahead? Does he recognise the force of the case made by the Select Committee under its previous Chair and by Citizens Advice, which is of course drawing in part on its observations from the work it does for the Department, running the help to claim service for universal credit? Does he recognise that benefits need to catch up on ground lost over the past 10 years?

I have one specific technical question. The definition of RPI is to be revised. The Treasury is going to consult on the future definition, which will replace the current definition in a few years’ time. Is it the Government’s intention to make the new RPI the default uprating amount for each year, rather than the CPI figure that is being used this year? I would be grateful if the Minister said a little about the Government’s intentions in that regard.

As has been mentioned already in this debate, there is one part of the system where inflation uprating makes no sense at all, and that is local housing allowance—determining how much housing support claimants in the private rented sector in each locality can receive. Local housing allowance was introduced in 2008 to limit the amount of housing benefit that could be paid. It was set initially at the 50th percentile of rents in a locality, so the effect was to cap housing support at the median rent locally. In 2011, it was then reduced to the 30th percentile, so housing support would cover only the cheapest 30% of accommodation in the area. Since 2016, local housing allowance has been frozen completely in cash terms, while rents have increase by leaps and bounds. That is why, as the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) and others have pointed out, Shelter and others have drawn attention to the fact that there is now hardly anywhere in the country where people can rent accommodation for the amount set by the local housing allowance. The shortfall therefore has to be made up from people’s other income, and if that is benefit income that has been has been frozen since 2015-16, so people have to pay their increasing rent by somehow reducing what they spend on everything else.

What does that mean in practice? Well, it is a very big part of the reason why so many people are sleeping rough in London this winter. I can remember—I imagine that many of us can—when nobody slept in Westminster tube station overnight. We have all seen the large numbers who seem at times to be camping out there at the moment. That is the consequence, to quite a large extent, of the extraordinary unwillingness to allow the local housing allowance to reflect what is actually going on in housing costs in London.

Last summer, I hosted a visit to my constituency by members of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Housing. We called on one of my constituents who lived with his wife and child in a single small, squalid room above a shop on East Ham High Street. Both those parents work in the NHS part-time, but this room was all they could afford. Their four-year-old son was running around when we visited—a very lively youngster. His mother had given birth to a younger sister, but she had died. It was clear that the housing conditions in that room had contributed in no small part to her death.

That is the impact of the grinding down of housing support since 2010. Surely we can do better than that. In its report last July, the Select Committee recommended

“that the Department unfreeze Local Housing Allowance as planned in 2020/21, and restore rates to at least the 30th percentile of local market rates. Thereafter, the Department should commit to uprating Local Housing Allowance in line with rental prices.”

I want to urge that view from the all-party Select Committee on the Minister this evening.

Universal Credit: Delayed Roll-Out

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his kind words. The answer is a categorical yes: his constituents will be better off. Under our forecasting, around 900,000 people will now be eligible for transitional protection, and as a result they will be better off.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) on securing this urgent question. Claimants are extremely reluctant to be moved on to universal credit. It has a dreadful reputation, largely because for the first five weeks that they are on it the only help they can get is a loan. Claimants on universal credit are two and a half times more likely to need a food bank than those on the previous benefits. Will Ministers look urgently at drastically cutting that five-week delay?

[Will Quince]

First, I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his election as Chairman of the Work and Pensions Committee. I take all issues around policy in my Department, in the areas in which I have control, very seriously and I am happy to work with him. Are there improvements that we can make to universal credit? Yes, of course there are, and I look forward to working with him find some of those solutions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that important point. We already publicise pension credit as much as we can, but we are working hard to get material into jobcentres and local authority premises to ensure that take-up is as high as possible.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

T2. Benefit claimants are two and a half times more likely to need a food bank if they are on universal credit than if they are on one of the predecessor benefits, and the main reason is the five-week delay after applying for universal credit compared with seven working days in the past. Will the Minister look at significantly shortening that delay, which is doing such harm?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)]

As I said earlier, no one has to wait five weeks for their first payment. People are able to get their initial payment on day one, repayable over 12 months—16 months as of next year. We have the two-week roll-on of housing benefit and a further two-week roll-on of additional benefits starting next year. I am considering other measures we might take, all of which will require Treasury approval, but I am happy to meet the right hon. Gentleman to discuss any ideas he has.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

This is probably a question for the Department for Education, but we are supporting more than 1 million children with free school meals, investing up to £26 million in school breakfast clubs and providing approximately 2.3 million four to six-year-olds with a portion of fresh fruit or vegetables each day at school. Through the Healthy Start programme, hundreds of thousands of low-income families benefit from vouchers that can be redeemed against fruit, vegetables, milk and infant formula.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Child poverty is being driven up by the five-week delay during which people have to wait before they receive universal credit. Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that what Ministers refer to as an advance is in fact a loan that has to be repaid by claimants, and will he commit to scrapping the five-week delay?

Child Maintenance Service: Payment Recovery from Absent Parents

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. Those of us who are old enough to remember it would do well to recall that the original version of the Child Support Agency was set up not to help the children, but as a way of getting somebody else to pay the children’s maintenance costs to save the DWP or its predecessor a wee bit of money. That legacy can be seen sometimes in the fact that the CMS, through the DWP, is simply not as enthusiastic about pursuing money that is owed to other people as it would be if it were pursuing money owed to itself.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

I think I can give way once more, and then I will have to move on.

[Stephen Timms]

I was looking through my records this afternoon, and I saw that I wrote to the Child Support Agency on behalf of one of my constituents on 30 September 1999. She finally received a first, partial payment on 1 August 2018. It took 19 years. Is the hon. Gentleman as unsurprised as I am that people, as he says, just give up?

[Peter Grant]

I just wish that I could wait 19 years before paying the bills that come into my constituency office with more regularity. I would love to think that the example the right hon. Gentleman raises was unique, but I do not think it is. What is the point of a child maintenance system that does not pay anything to the child until they are 18 or 19 and have left school, and possibly left home and gone to university? The children need the money when they are two, three and four years old, not when they are in their 20s. In a case I mentioned earlier, the children were literally grown up and had left home. Some were married, some were at university. As a point of principle, the parent was determined to carry on fighting, but he knows perfectly well that the money will not make any difference to his children. They have had the experience of being brought up when money was desperately tight.

A completely incomprehensible aspect to the write-off scheme is that the process the Child Maintenance Service has to go through before it can write off historical arrears depends, reasonably enough, on the level and value of the arrears, but that, by its own admission,

“significant policy, operational and IT issues beset the 1993 and 2003 schemes which contributed to the build-up of considerable arrears of unpaid maintenance”.

In another document, it admitted that it cannot always be sure how much the arrears are. How can it be fair for the CMS to say that it can write off an amount of arrears because it is small enough within the scheme that it does not need the receiving parent’s permission, and at the same time to say, “We don’t really know how much the arrears are, because our record-keeping system was so appalling in the past”?

A great deal more could be said, but I know that colleagues want to speak as well, so I will bring my comments to a close. First, however, I want to add something that was not in my original speech. I decided to do that when I realised that, while we are having this debate, our colleagues in the main Chamber will, hopefully, be agreeing to the Second Reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill.

I cannot go into much detail about some of the cases I have had, because people are still under threat from ex-partners, but I hope the Minister can explain how someone whose partner has been convicted repeatedly of assault can hide their income from the Child Maintenance Service for more than three years after the CMS has been alerted to where the money was, where it was going and how it was being hidden. It was hidden in such a way that, if I had the same authorisation to visit premises and to make inquiries as the CMS and HMRC, I could have found it, as any of us could, within 20 minutes. It was not an elaborate offshore scheme; it was a very simple accounting practice that HMRC and the Child Maintenance Service know about.

How can it be that someone who has been and still is a victim of coercive financial control is told that it is entirely up to her to find evidence that her ex-partner is committing fraud against her and probably against HMRC as well? How can that be acceptable? Why is the Child Maintenance Service not working more closely with HMRC, so that when they get information that points clearly to a large-scale criminal evasion of tax by somebody whose address and place of work is a matter of public record, they can take action? How can it take three years for them even to begin an investigation? When the Minister sums up, I hope he can answer that question, as well as responding to the other comments I have made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing the debate. I would like to say a little more about the case I referred to in an earlier intervention.

By the time of the letter I wrote on behalf of my constituent, Mrs A, on 30 September 1999, the father, Mr A, had been assessed as being due to pay just over £100 per week towards child maintenance. He never paid. He claimed to be on a very low income. He claimed that he had absurdly high housing costs. At one stage, confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he was working, he claimed to be doing so free of charge. He is actually a prosperous and busy builder, who owns his own large home.

I was more or less continuously in touch with the Child Support Agency, its successors and Ministers for 19 years on my constituent’s behalf. There was a short period when she was distracted because of the ill health and later the death of her mother. However, she showed extraordinary ingenuity and determination in compiling evidence of Mr A’s true circumstances. Without that evidence, I do not think that he would ever have been forced to pay at all. He was absolutely determined not to pay. He spent a fortune in legal costs. If only that money had gone to his child, things would have been very different. He made three small contributions in 2003, amounting to just over £1,000, and that was after he had lost three tribunals in succession and appealed against the decision each time. But other than those three small payments, he refused to pay any money.

By December 2013 it had been established that Mr A owed £54,000: £15,000 was due to Mrs A; and £39,000 was due to the Government, to reimburse benefits that should not have been paid. It then took another five years for that demand to be enforced. My constituent finally received the £15,000 on 1 August 2018, 19 years after she had first approached me. The system completely failed to deliver the support that she and her son were entitled to throughout his entire childhood. As a result, he grew up in much more straitened circumstances than he should have.

The point that I put to the Minister is that surely the Government must act to ensure that an absent parent can no longer use legal chicanery to avoid their responsibilities for 20 years.

Universal Credit: Managed Migration

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Lady asks a lot of detailed questions, and I will do my best to answer them, but if I have not done so, I hope she will write to me so that I can complete my response. A discretionary hardship fund will be in place for the individuals who are being managed-migrated from legacy benefits to universal credit in Harrogate, which will be the equivalent of the legacy benefits being paid in addition that were going to be received next year, in June 2020, for people who are being moved from one benefit to the other. So the answer to her question is yes, but the type of payment will be under the umbrella of a discretionary hardship payment instead. She asked about the support that the jobcentre will get. We are working with it, and a dedicated team is working closely with my Department to ensure that there is true learning from the experience of moving people in this way. She asked specifically about Harrogate and why we are doing this there. The answer is that it already has a relatively high level of people on universal credit, but a significant number will still need to be transferred. I did say in my statement that it might not be the only location, and we are taking permission to do up to 10,000, so it may mean that, to complete that learning process, we do it elsewhere as well. We are keeping an open mind on that, because it is essential that this really covers the serious matters of getting it right, some of which have been raised in the House today.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State use this pilot to review thoroughly the impact of the catastrophic five-week delay policy in universal credit? It is forcing people to use food banks, as the Trussell Trust reports; forcing people into debt to her Department, because they have to take out what she calls an advance but is, in fact, a loan; and, as we have discovered over the past two or three weeks, opening up a bonanza for crooks and fraudsters who dupe people into taking out unwanted advances and claiming universal credit. Will she do a thorough assessment of the impact of the five-week delay as part of the pilot’s evaluation?

[Amber Rudd]

The right hon. Gentleman is no doubt aware that, in addition to the advances, the housing benefit run-on and the legacy benefits run-on will come in next year, and they are effectively part of the transitional arrangements being offered to the pool of people who are having their migration managed. He has raised this matter before. I have bent over backwards to ensure that we get funds to people as soon as possible, and former Secretaries of State have done the same, but I know that some people still have concerns about what more we can do to ensure that people on the lowest incomes are supported at the moment of difficulty when they move from one benefit to another. I will always take an open mind to looking what we can learn from that going forward.

Universal Credit Fraud

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

On the specifics of the meetings, I will have to write to provide a full answer. However, we are seeing that the cases that are being reported are clustered around particular areas, so there is a real focus in those areas on raising awareness and on targeting often very sophisticated criminal activity. As we bring forward prosecutions, we are finding that that is making a significant difference as a proactive deterrent, and rightly so.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Ministers have made one monumental misjudgment after another with universal credit. The five-week delay is forcing people into debt and dependency on food banks, and now we learn that it has opened up a bonanza for crooks and fraudsters. Will the Minister now urgently review the catastrophic five-week delay policy?

[Justin Tomlinson]

As is very clear, any claimant can access financial support from day one where it is needed. We will continue to do all that we can to ensure that everybody benefits from the personal, tailored approach that universal credit offers, which is an integral part of how we are helping to deliver record employment across all regions of this country.

Inequality and Social Mobility

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

If Members will forgive me, I shall make some progress, and then I will take some more interventions.

Let me talk for a moment about the Government’s record. The hon. Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) went on at some length about that, so let me make some points to her in reply. I will begin with our record on employment. We have helped more than 3.6 million people to enter work; we have reduced unemployment to its lowest level since the 1970s; we have supported nearly 1 million more disabled people into work, and women’s employment is now at record levels.

Those jobs are not just in London or the south-east; more than 60% of the employment growth since 2010 has taken place in other parts of the UK. Nor—I can already hear the suggestions coming at me from the Opposition Front Bench—are they just part-time and temporary jobs. The jobs that make up this increase are overwhelmingly full-time, permanent roles, giving people the dignity and security of a regular pay packet. Behind every employment statistic is a person or family whose mental health, wellbeing and life chances are improved by participation in the workforce. This increased employment means that 660,000 fewer children are growing up in workless households, which makes them less likely to grow up in poverty.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State will know that the number of food parcels distributed by Trussell Trust food banks increased by 19% last year. Does she recognise the close link between the growth of that problem and the roll-out, with its current flaws, of universal credit?

[Amber Rudd]

I know that the right hon. Gentleman has been very engaged in this subject. He will be aware that there are many reasons why people turn to food banks. There were some issues with the early roll-out of universal credit in terms of the timeliness of the payment. That has been corrected, and between 85% and 87% of recipients are now paid on time, which compares favourably with the previous legacy system.

Let me now talk for a few minutes about income inequality. Since coming to office, we have lifted 400,000 people out of absolute poverty. Another key fact that I can give in response to the Opposition motion is that household income inequality is lower now than it was in 2010. However, that is not enough for us; we need to build and do better.

Our safety net is one of the strongest in the world. We deliver the fourth most generous level of welfare support in the OECD. In this financial year, total welfare spending will be more than £220 billion[Official Report, 15 July 2019, Vol. 663, c. 5MC.]. As has been acknowledged by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, thanks to the benefits system, overall income inequality has remained stable, even as earnings have increased for the most well paid. That is because we have what the IFS has described as a highly redistributive tax and welfare system. We have deliberately taken action, through the tax system, to ensure that income inequality is reduced.

Supporting Disabled People to Work

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

The disability employment gap fell steadily in the years up to 2010. It has since got stuck at a level just above 30%. David Cameron, in the 2015 election campaign, promised to halve it by 2020, a pledge that was quickly abandoned after the 2015 election. What does the Minister now believe will happen to the disability employment gap over the next five years?

[Justin Tomlinson]

The right hon. Gentleman is one of the most constructive and proactive Members of the Opposition pushing on this very important area. When we came to office, disability employment stood at 44.1%. It has now gone to 51.5%. That is up 7.4%, with the gap closing by 3.6%. I expect that trend to continue over the next five years.