Oral Answers to Questions
Tony Lloyd Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Steve Webb
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have taken forward plans introduced by the previous Government for automatic enrolment into workplace pensions, so that as people are working for longer, they can still retire on decent pensions, through more workplace saving.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
Everybody recognises that increasing age has an impact on the funding of pension schemes, but does the Minister accept that there is a huge difference between a population such as the one that I represent, in which life expectancy is some 10 years less for males and roughly the same for women, and those populations with the highest life expectancy in the country? Simply increasing the state retirement age has an unfair impact on communities such as mine.
Steve Webb
The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and it is one that we are aware of. However, he will be encouraged to learn that in the past decade, life expectancy for both manual workers and non-manual workers, for example, has risen by two years for men. Although there are still differences, both groups are seeing improvements in life expectancy.
Housing Benefit
Tony Lloyd Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
The Secretary of State began by making great play of the fact that there had been what he described as “scaremongering”. However, many of my constituents are very scared about his Government’s proposals. If they have taken the trouble to listen to his speech today, I regret to say that he will have done nothing to allay their concerns. Of those in receipt of housing benefit in my city of Manchester—70,000-plus—10,000 will be affected by the proposals. Some will be affected significantly, as I hope to make clear in a moment. That is the reality. People are scared because they see either a significant loss of income or the reality that they will be forced to move home. That is what the proposals will do.
I am delighted that the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) is in the Chamber. He was quoted in an election leaflet for his party in my constituency recently and it seemed to run almost totally counter to his question to the Secretary of State. I will be happy to give way to him on this point, but the words that were put into his mouth in that election leaflet were that it was “Labour lies” that people would be forced to move from their homes—Labour lies told in order to win an election. A few moments ago, he asked the Secretary of State to confirm that were people forced to move, they would be in a position to stay in the same neighbourhood. He clearly accepts that people will be forced to move under these proposals, and that, of course, is not a Labour lie but something that the Government are proposing.
Simon Hughes
For the avoidance of doubt, I am very clear that if people who are in the private sector have to move they should not be forced to move away from their communities, because community cohesion is very important, and that the proposal to knock 10% off people’s benefit if they have been out of work for a year and have not been able to get a job is not something I support.
Tony Lloyd
That is very helpful, but I hope that if the hon. Gentleman speaks later he will apologise to my constituents, at least for the words that were put into his mouth in a Lib Dem election leaflet that went out during the by-election that was won very successfully by the Labour party last week in Manchester. It was quite clear that he was quoted as saying that people would not be forced to move, but it is now clear that both he and I accept that the Government’s proposals will force people to give up their homes, and that is unacceptable and atrocious.
Simon Hughes
I do not think that we can anticipate exactly what will happen, which is why speculating and making people worried is unfair. We have to go on the figures that the Government have produced in their impact assessment and I hope that the local authorities and the Government, as I have said to the Secretary of State, will agree the figures. If we get common facts, we will reduce alarm considerably.
Tony Lloyd
I think that that was nearly the apology I sought, although it was not quite the apology that my constituents were entitled to hear from the hon. Gentleman, who supports this coalition. It was not quite the apology needed by those who will lose significant sums of money and will be forced to absorb that loss by not being able to spend their money on other things.
Steve Webb
I think the hon. Gentleman’s own manifesto pledged this precise policy.
Tony Lloyd
I am talking about the Minister’s policy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) made it clear what a Labour Government would have done. That was clear also from the statements of the then Secretary of State, and it was very different from the current Government’s proposals. The proposed income loss is not something that I recognise from any Labour manifesto.
The income loss will be significant for those in one, two or three-bedroom houses. In my constituency, for example, 8,000 people face an income loss of £12 to £14 a week. That sum may be trivial to a Minister or Secretary of State, but £12 to £14 is a significant part of the disposable income of somebody on housing benefit or on benefits more generally. The House ought not to countenance taking away that amount of money. It penalises the most vulnerable people in our society to prop up the Government’s policies. That is not scaremongering; it is a disgrace. Ministers and their supporters should recognise that.
There is another aspect of the proposals that we should not countenance. The Secretary of State made a long and complicated speech, which gave no comfort whatever to those in my constituency who will lose money. It gave no comfort to those who will potentially lose their homes. It gave no comfort because the right hon. Gentleman is far more concerned with the polemic of his speech than with the reality of human beings who will lose out in respect of both housing and their finances.
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and others on the Government Benches will think again, particularly about some of the most difficult aspects of their proposals. There are parts of them which, with proper care and attention, we could all begin to agree with. The problem, at least in part, is the ridiculous speed of their implementation and the lack of acceptance of the impact that they will have. Were the Secretary of State to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that the Government are prepared to look again at the speed of their implementation, we might have a basis for real debate.
The worry among my constituents is that the proposals are driven, first, by concerns of budgetary restraint—the battle that the Secretary of State fought with the Chancellor and lost—and secondly, although this is a claim that I do not make against the Secretary of State, by the apparent desire among some of his Back Benchers to penalise the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. That rhetoric has come through in some of the debate.
Tony Lloyd
The hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I have a limited amount of time and will lose some if I give way.
The speed of the changes raises real issues. Even if I believed that rents would adjust as the Secretary of State believes, they would not do so at the lightning speed required by his policies. People will not suddenly find their landlords voluntarily reducing their rents by £12, £13 or £14 a week. That will not happen for a number of reasons.
Tony Lloyd
No, I am sorry.
The first of those reasons is that there is no evidence that rents adjust at that speed. The second and more important reason is that in a city such as Manchester—a complicated city which is quite different from the London housing market, with different types of housing tenure and different types of housing cheek by jowl—the housing benefit system is not the primary driver of rental levels. Those are driven by other factors. If that thesis is right, the Secretary of State’s proposals are doomed not to succeed. If they do not succeed, rent levels will not adjust downwards and people will inevitably lose money. Even if rent levels were to adjust, they would not do that overnight. That is why, partly as a plea and partly as a demand on behalf of my constituents, I hope that the Secretary of State will think again about the speed with which the changes are implemented.
The Secretary of State’s argument about jobseeker’s allowance was rather confusing. He seemed to imply that no one would really lose 10% of JSA because nobody would find themselves in that position. Even in the relatively high employment times under the Labour Government, my constituency still had serious pockets of unemployment because it is one of those constituencies that are the repository of the longer-term unemployed. In those circumstances, it is fanciful to suggest that no one on JSA will be unemployed for more than 12 months and fanciful to say that nobody will be hit by that 10% penalty.
Ten per cent. of JSA is a huge amount of money for somebody in that situation to lose. I hope that the Secretary of State will look again at this issue, because, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State has said on many occasions, those whom we regard as blameless—those who have conformed to everything that the Government and society have asked of them, sought work and gone out of their way to upskill and everything else—simply should not be penalised in the way that the Government propose. I hope that the Secretary of State, almost mirroring what he said—if he believes it—will say that if all the other changes that he proposes to benefits are to be effective, he will withdraw the 10% cut. To follow his direction of travel, it is an unnecessary 10% cut, and it simply should not exist.
People in my constituency who are in work, looking for work or disabled are going to lose out under the proposals. When Manchester city council considered the measures, it discovered that the people most likely to be hurt were single parents and those seeking work. They are simply not the people whom we should penalise. If Government Members’ ambition is to penalise, they should support their Government and these proposals. If their real intention is to reform the system, they should say to their Secretary of State, “Please think again.”
Welfare Reform
Tony Lloyd Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Duncan Smith
I made the point that we also have to balance taxpayers’ requirements alongside those of people on benefit. By the way, when seen in the context of the total number of people on benefits at the moment, the numbers that we are dealing with are much smaller than people make out.
Most of all, I should say that we will not be doing this for people on disability living allowance. Those in receipt of working tax credit, for example—those in work—will also not be caught. We are simply looking to those families who have become static and immobile. There is a disincentive against their going to work; the amount of money that they receive is such that they could never get it if they went to work. Therefore their incentive to work is non-existent. That is the benefits system that we inherited; that is the benefits system that we will change.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
If the Secretary of State recognises that this period of uncertainty is very stressful for people on incapacity benefit, does he also recognise that drip-feeding information through the media is not the right way of giving people any confidence that the system is fair? In particular, I understand that 40% of people who were originally refused incapacity benefit had that overturned on appeal. What does he intend to do about that, because it is frankly unacceptable?
Mr Duncan Smith
If the hon. Gentleman is worried about the drip, drip, drip on the 20th of this month, I should tell him that there will not be a drip at all; we will get it out all in one go, so he should steady himself for that. None the less, the issue generally will be resolved, and I promise him that if there are any direct questions, I will answer them. He should remember that the figure that he refers to is 40% of all those who appealed. In total, 5% of those who have migrated have had their appeals upheld.