1. What recent discussions he has had with (a) Cabinet colleagues and (b) the Welsh Government on the effect of the planned removal of the £20 universal credit uplift on low-income families.
The House will be aware that today is the 10th anniversary of the mining disaster in Gleision, in which Charles Breslin, David Powell, Philip Hill and Garry Jenkins lost their lives. I know that colleagues across the Chamber will join me in paying appropriate respect at this time, and of course in sending condolences to their families We have always been clear that the universal credit uplift was temporary to help people through the economic shock of the pandemic. We are committed to supporting families most in need and planning a long-term route out of poverty by helping people find work.
I echo the words of condolence from the Secretary of State More than a third of all those who receive universal credit are in work and will now have to pay an extra £100 a year in national insurance contributions while also suffering a cut of £1,040 per year, and UK inflation has risen to 3.2%—its highest increase since 1997. Will the Secretary of State use his influence to push for the publication of any impact assessment or analysis of the consequence of this cruel cut to universal credit, which research suggests will mean that one in eight people will struggle to afford food?
I know that colleagues across the House have received representations from constituents, charities and other bodies on this subject, so it is one we take extremely seriously, and rightly so. Of course, one of the things the Government are absolutely committed to is to rebalance the economy, both local and national. We have, of course, the plan for jobs, the levelling-up fund, the shared prosperity fund and the community renewal fund. There is a number of ways in which we are attempting to do that, which will of course help those who are not in work, but also those people on in-work benefits. We are very conscious of the hon. Lady’s observations and, as I say, absolutely committed to making sure that every family, not just those out of work, are helped as best we possibly can.
A quarter of a million Welsh families now face the grim prospect of losing over £1,000 a year because of this Government’s shameful decision to slash universal credit. We know that the Secretary of State’s colleague, the Work and Pensions Secretary, seems to think that people just need to work harder, but I would remind him that nearly 40% of Welsh people who receive this payment are in fact in work, many of them key workers. What does the Secretary of State have to say to those families and their children who are struggling to make ends meet now and will be so much worse off as a result of this cut?
I touched on this obviously in the answer to the initial question, especially the temporary nature of the increase and of course the many plans and projects we have that are going to enhance and improve the economy in Wales, which will have a positive effect on the very families the hon. Lady talks about. I think it is just worth pointing out as well that it is this Government who increased the personal threshold on NICs—that was of considerable value to families across the land—and there have been other improvements, such as the increase in the national living wage. I think those things need to be taken into account as well, and I am sure the hon. Lady will do that.
I am not sure that is going to be much comfort to those families who are going to be losing £80 a month. This is not just a blow to Welsh families, but a real hit to Welsh shops and businesses, because we all know that families on low income have to spend their money locally on the very basics of life. This will suck £286 million per year out of the Welsh economy. The Conservative party constantly talks up the sums paid to get this country out of the pandemic, but is not the reality that the Tories are taking money away from Welsh businesses just at the time that so many of them need it most?
I do fundamentally reject that accusation. Having visited numerous companies, large and small, across Wales throughout the pandemic, the message I have had back is one of relief that the UK Government Treasury has been able to step in and offer the levels of help that it has. Particularly in relation to the hon. Lady’s comment about universal credit, what she is suggesting is that none of the remedial measures we have introduced will work. That is clearly not the case, so the families that she and other colleagues quite rightly raise as being concerned about what the future holds should, I hope, be reassured by the fact that the Government continue to be committed not only to companies, but to individual families themselves.
The north Welsh coast, when one goes from Wylfa to Trawsfynydd to Capenhurst, is intimately connected with the north-west of England through Capenhurst, Warrington and all the way up to Sellafield and Moorside. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that those economies work well together to solve problems in the nuclear industry, and that the North West Nuclear Arc is something we should be very proud of?
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, particularly because I have been on the receiving end of such compelling arguments from organisations, such as the Mersey Dee Alliance, that recognise the economic region and the economic drivers and recognise that administrative boundaries can sometimes be an impediment to investment. I absolutely share her enthusiasm and her confidence about what may be available in the future.
I remind Members that supplementary questions must be in line with the original question.
The Government’s attack on struggling families this autumn will make more than four in 10 families with children over £1,000 worse off. It is no surprise that the Secretary of State is content with plunging thousands of people into poverty, but these families spend their money in high street shops and local businesses. Government policy will be directly responsible for taking £286 million out of the Welsh economy. This is not levelling up; it is hammering down. What assessment has he made of the effect of the £20 cut in universal credit on the Welsh economy?
The right hon. Lady clearly did not listen to my answers to the first and second questions on this very subject, and her statement—rather than question—was predicated on the basis that absolutely none of the Government’s other economic interventions, such as the plan for jobs, the levelling-up fund and the other encouraging initiatives we have been talking about, will have any positive effect at all. That is clearly incorrect and is clearly not supported by businesses across Wales, which leads me to the conclusion that she is determined to talk down the economic prospects of the country she wants to represent.
It is clear that the Government are content that Wales loses almost £300 million. The pattern is clear from the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020, trade agreements, the control of state aid and now plans to cut the number of Welsh MPs from 40 to 32: the right hon. Gentleman’s Government are taking from Wales and giving to Westminster. Anyone can see that levelling up will only happen when we have a strong Parliament in Wales empowered to do the job and directly answerable to the people of Wales. We all know there is a reshuffle going on; is now the time to reshuffle the Wales Office out of existence?
The right hon. Lady will not be surprised to learn that I am not going to rise to the last of the baits she dangles in front of me, but she needs to make her mind up about whether she wants Westminster representation or not: she complains on the one hand that the numbers might be reduced, whereas in fact they are being equalised to be fairer, and on the other that we should not be here at all.
2. What plans the Government have to provide funding for rail infrastructure in Wales.
7. What plans the Government have to provide funding for rail infrastructure in Wales.
13. What plans the Government have to provide funding for rail infrastructure in Wales.
The Government have and are funding a number of rail improvements in Wales, including upgrading Cardiff Central station and the Cambrian line and upgrades that are in the pipeline to key lines in north, south-east and south-west Wales. I also recently had the opportunity to visit Pencoed to hear the case for an upgrade to the Pencoed level crossing.
Wales accounts for 11% of the rail network but receives only 2% of rail enhancement funding from this Government. Will the UK Government commit to addressing this underinvestment, and make a start in Newport East by finally allowing the Welsh Government to run more cross-border services under the Wales and Borders franchise and by supporting the new stations fund bid for a walkway station for Magor?
This oft-cited figure comes from a Wales Government report which looks purely at renewals between 2011 and 2015. The very same report on page 20 draws attention to the figure that would apply if one looked at maintenance operations and restoration as well, in which case the correct figure would be 4.37%, not 1%.
I was glad to hear the Minister mention, in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), Pencoed in my Ogmore constituency. He will know that the debate about closing the level crossing has been going on since the early ’90s, and I know he is personally supportive and has been to Pencoed to look at the site. However, Bridgend County Borough Council has now put forward cabinet reports to say that the scheme will cost almost £20 million. Department for Transport Ministers cannot keep announcing additional services on the mainline without tackling the safety issues around the Pencoed level crossing. So may I press the Minister to ensure that DfT Ministers back up their announcements with much-needed funding to deal with the problems in my constituency?
I would certainly encourage all partners and stakeholders in this, including DfT Ministers—and also those in the Welsh Government, who are responsible for the highways of course—to engage with the rail network enhancement pipeline in the usual way or consider future rounds of the levelling-up fund. I say, too, that the hon. Gentleman has made a powerful case for that level crossing and the wider strategic benefits that will flow if this problem is sorted out.
I know the Minister shares my disappointment and that of my constituents in Gower at the lack of electrification to Swansea, but is he aware that we have great issues with the Hitachi carriages and fleet? They are costing a lot of money and cracks have been caused because of their becoming hybrid. Can he confirm that he is aware of this problem, and can he say what conversations he is having with his colleagues in the Department for Transport and what it is costing?
I believe that that problem was quite well publicised, so I think we are all aware of it. The rolling stock is being examined. There is no issue around safety. I do not know what the costs are. I understand the hon. Lady’s disappointment about electrification, but she will know, through her sterling work on the Welsh Affairs Committee, that there would have been enormous costs to electrification between Cardiff and Swansea and no benefits for any passengers in terms of decreased time. This Government want to spend that money where it will have the most impact and benefit for rail passengers.
The community in St Athan in my constituency was naturally disappointed, and even angry, that the Welsh Government did not include a new station for St Athan in their application to the Department for Transport’s new stations fund. Can my hon. Friend reassure me that he will listen to the views of Members of Parliament as well as the Welsh Government when considering applications for new stations?
I can absolutely reassure my right hon. Friend on that point. I commend him for the work that he has done in improving rail infrastructure in his constituency. I enjoyed visiting Barry station with him to see the disability access improvements that had taken place sometime last year.
When the Minister listed all the projects that the Government are undertaking, he did not mention the marvellous work being done by Network Rail on the only wooden bridge in the country being used for rail services, between Morfa Mawddach and Barmouth. Will he make a point, together with the Secretary of State, of visiting the bridge and walking across it when it is finally completed and all the wooden piles have been installed? Of course, it is a walkway as well as a railway.
I would be delighted to take my hon. Friend up on what I think is an invitation to visit. I believe that he may even be able to supply a cup of tea somewhere in the vicinity. He is right that I did not mention that particular project. There are so many projects I could mention that Network Rail is responsible for in Wales as a result of UK Government funding. I did not mention, either, the south Wales relief line, the north Wales coast line, the improvements that will hopefully come about to the Wrexham to Bidston line, or a whole host of other projects that are being funded by this UK Government.
One key way we are supporting rail infrastructure across the country is through HS2. Does the Minister agree that HS2 will have a truly nationwide benefit in places such as Port Talbot and Teesside if we use UK steel in its construction?
Of course, many companies in Wales will be tendering for work on the HS2 project, so there will be huge benefits to Wales, huge benefits for the railway industry, and of course huge benefits for the whole United Kingdom. HS2 is also about getting people off the roads and on to the railways, which is something that anyone who supports getting Britain to net zero by 2050 should be in support of.
3. What steps the Government are taking to support the manufacturing industry in Wales.
I assure the hon. Lady that the UK Government are completely committed to manufacturing in Wales, which is why we have put £3.4 billion into manufacturing and enabled companies to take advantage of the many schemes that were brought forward during the covid crisis.
I thank the Minister for that response. Will he join me in welcoming the Welsh Labour Government’s £20 million commitment to the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Broughton, in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), which will attract business and boost skills across the north Wales region?
That, I believe, would be a promising scheme that could perhaps be looked at in conjunction with the growth deals. As the hon. Lady will be aware, £790 million has been put forward for growth deals across Wales, and that is exactly the sort of scheme that is being considered as part of that. May I say how strongly I welcome the hon. Lady’s support for the aviation sector, which I hope will be shared by all her colleagues?
4. What steps the Government are taking to help Wales achieve the net zero emissions target.
10. What steps the Government are taking to help Wales achieve the net zero emissions target.
Wales’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by close to 31% since 1990. To bring them down to zero, we will be scaling up low-carbon power generation, kickstarting the hydrogen economy and transitioning to zero emission vehicles.
I am grateful for that response. Many parts of Wales are rural like my own constituency in the Scottish borders. These rural areas need a plentiful supply of electric car charging points to encourage people to make the switch to electric cars. How are the UK Government supporting the switch across the four nations of the United Kingdom?
I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s question, because it illustrates a situation very similar to his in Wales. I hope he is as pleased as we are with the £275 million commitment to the electric vehicle homecharge scheme, the workplace charging scheme, the on-street residential chargepoint scheme and a number of other measures, all of which, of course, are UK-wide initiatives.
The drive to net zero presents huge challenges to industry all across south Wales, especially for us in Pembrokeshire where the oil and gas plants support thousands of high quality jobs. What further steps can the UK Government take to help the energy sector to adapt, taking advantage of new opportunities in hydrogen but also plans for floating offshore wind? The truth is that we are going to need significant extra help in Pembrokeshire if we are going to make that transition.
My right hon. Friend raises a very important point. I hope he has taken note of the £20 million commitment to the south Wales industrial cluster. That is driving carbon capture initiatives and similar initiatives. He and I frequently speak to big employers in our area, such as Valero on the Milford Haven Waterway, which are an absolutely critical part of our net zero ambitions in Wales. Of course, the floating offshore wind opportunities in the Celtic sea are well known to both of us and I hope that developers will be able to bid for contracts for difference later this year.
When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, I am sure the Secretary of State will agree that the Welsh Labour Government have led the way: banning fracking, legislating for net zero, establishing a new ministry for climate change, and generating more than 50% of the energy we use from renewable sources, a figure higher than the UK average. Does the Secretary of State also agree that those efforts are undermined somewhat by his own Government’s decision to drop binding commitments on climate change from the free trade deal with Australia? What message does that send to the world ahead of this country hosting the COP26 summit later this year?
I do not acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s challenge in quite the way he would expect me to. I think it has been made perfectly clear that our net zero ambitions are not going to be solved by one country or one Government; it will be resolved by a very serious and joined-up approach to net zero across the UK and beyond. I am very happy, as he knows I am, to work with the Welsh Government to achieve those aims. If we relegate this issue to some kind of political spat, it will make the challenges harder, so I hope he will join me and Welsh Government colleagues in trying to make sure we achieve the mutual aims we claim to share.
Will the Secretary of State look at the recommendation of the Welsh Affairs Committee that Wales should get its fair share of HS2 funding, the same as Scotland, so we can invest in a modern infrastructure and meet net zero, in particular with the Swansea Bay metro, more quickly?
The hon. Gentleman and I share many common ambitions for the rail network in Wales. He knows my views on that. He also knows the Union connectivity review will be published shortly. I do not want to second-guess what is in that, but I suspect that he and I need a conversation shortly after that has been published.
There is great potential for small scale renewable energy schemes in the more rural parts of Aberconwy. What discussions has my right hon. Friend had to ensure that the grid connections are in place to make them viable?
It is fair to say that they are in their early stages. I enjoyed my visit to my hon. Friend’s constituency last week, where these points were raised. He is right to point out that we can come up with all the initiatives in the world, but unless there is a supportive grid to cope with that, our progress will be slower than we would like. Those conversations are in play and I look forward to sharing them with him at the earliest opportunity.
5. What recent discussions he has had with the First Minister of Wales on the adequacy of the operation of the devolution settlement.
8. What recent discussions he has had with the First Minister of Wales on the adequacy of the operation of the devolution settlement.
My discussions with the First Minister and his ministerial team are focused on how our respective Governments can use the powers at our disposal to deliver jobs and economic growth for Wales.
Hijacking pots of money for Wales in the UK Government Departments that have not operated in Wales for 20 years undermines the devolution settlement and, by extension, the Union, but just as damaging is the bureaucratic delay caused by the uselessness of UK Ministers. Why have Welsh councils still not had a response on community fund renewal projects that are supposed to be completed by March 2022? If the Secretary of State and his ministerial colleagues cannot do the business, they should get off the pot.
In the last 18 months or more, I have spoken to numerous individuals, charities, churches, universities, the private and public sectors, businesses, investors—you name them, we have spoken to them. Not a single one has raised the concerns that the hon. Gentleman raises this morning. They are committed to the economic recovery plans that we are talking about, and, as I said in answer to a previous question, if all these question sessions do is relegate these exchanges to some kind of cheap political point scoring, we will not make the progress that he seeks.
The landslips in the Rhondda last year sent a shiver down the spine of the valleys communities, and many of my constituents in Cynon Valley live in fear of future coal tip disasters. Three hundred of the 2,000 coal tips in Wales have been classed at high risk of endangering life or property. We need to know that they are safe and the UK Government have a clear duty to make them safe. [Interruption.] What discussion has the Secretary of State had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer ahead of the forthcoming spending review to ensure that sustainable funding is provided to deal with the legacy of the coal tips? [Interruption.]
I think I caught most of that question, but the hon. Lady will no doubt recall that the UK Government put over £30 million into coal tip renewal and coal tip safety issues. It was the UK Government who joined forces with the Welsh Government to make sure that that approach was collegiate and addressed all the concerns that were raised, including those that fall into the devolved space just as much as the reserved space. If she wants an example of the UK Government and the Welsh Government working together and the Treasury picking up the tab, that issue is a perfect example.
Respecting devolution cuts both ways. Recently, the Welsh Government published a written statement on the evolution of the national grid. It was very welcome—we need to work together—but clearly, the 132 kV lines are a UK competence. Will the Secretary of State pull Ofgem and the operators together to build and evolve the national grid, with consensus from the people of mid-Wales?
I can go a little further than that, having spoken to the Busines Secretary on this topic only yesterday evening. My hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Craig Williams) raises a very important point, especially around where the devolution settlement and reserved responsibilities sit. It is absolutely right to raise that but it is also fair to say that an issue of that significance will require a UK-wide approach and, of course, the views and responsibilities of the Welsh Government will be taken very seriously in those discussions.
If the devolution settlement is to work, the UK Government have to match their rhetoric on the respect agenda. Given that all devolved Governments in the UK have asked the UK Government to cancel the cut to universal credit, can the Secretary of State say that he made that representation to his Cabinet colleagues, or is the post of Secretary of State entirely redundant? [Interruption.]
I barely caught a single word of that, but on the basis that I have heard the hon. Gentleman’s views on this subject before, I will simply repeat my views and observations. Over the past 18 months during the covid pandemic, there has been a very analytical look at what works and what does not work in the devolution settlement by businesses, employers, wealth creators, investors, universities, churches and members of the public. I have to say that this fixation with the niceties of the devolution settlement is not reflected by businesses in Wales at the moment. [Interruption.] If by any chance I have missed the hon. Gentleman’s question, which, by the shake of his head, I suspect I have, we can have a conversation in the Tea Room later.
6. What steps he is taking to increase the number of apprentices in the Wales Office.
We fully support the Government’s apprenticeship scheme. We have employed apprentices in the Wales Office, and our most recent apprentice has just been promoted.
Will my hon. Friend set out what he is doing to encourage apprenticeships across Wales? Will he ensure that all new jobs offered in the Wales Office are offered as apprenticeships, not just graduate schemes? Will he ensure that the Wales Office meets the public sector target on apprenticeships?
I can assure my right hon. Friend that we will certainly meet the public sector target—we have been meeting it. We will be taking on further apprentices and we have just taken on a kickstart worker and somebody from the care leavers scheme.
Q1. If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 15 September.
I know that the whole House will want to join me in congratulating Emma Raducanu, Joe Salisbury, Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid on their victories in the US Open. They have made the whole nation proud On Battle of Britain Day, we honour the legacy of those brave aircrews who defended our nation I am sure that hon. Members will also want to join me in wishing you well, Mr Speaker, for the G7 Speakers and Presiding Officers conference in Chorley later this week This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
I would like to pass on my condolences to the Prime Minister on the sad loss of his mother Raising children is very expensive—more so when they are disabled. The children impacted by sodium valproate have suffered physically, mentally and indeed financially. When the Cumberlege report was published, there was real hope that they would get support. However, on the last day before the summer recess, a written ministerial statement indicated that recommendation 4 of that report would not be actioned. May I please ask my right hon. Friend to urge the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to look again at that and give the parents of those children the financial redress that they so desperately need?
I thank my right hon. Friend for her kind words. On her substantive point, she is entirely right to raise the issues investigated by Baroness Cumberlege. We have given the report full consideration, accept its overarching conclusions and are committed to making rapid progress in addressing all the areas that it mentions, including the one that my right hon. Friend covered today.
I join the Prime Minister in his comments about Emma Raducanu—a tremendous success in the US Open—the Battle of Britain and the G7 Speakers conference. May I also offer my condolences to the Prime Minister on the loss of his mother? As I know at first hand, losing a parent is never easy How many extra hours a week would a single parent working full-time on the minimum wage have to work to get back the £20 a week that the Prime Minister plans to take away from them in his universal credit cuts?
First of all, I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his kind words. On his substantive point about universal credit, it is absurd, because the Labour party—[Interruption.] I will give you a statistic, Mr Speaker: every single recipient of universal credit would lose their benefits under Labour, because it wants to abolish universal credit. I think that this House and this Government should be very proud of what we are doing and continue to do to support the low-paid. It was another Conservative institution, the living wage, that increased the incomes of families on it by £4,000 a head. What the Labour party wants to do is keep this country in lockdown and keep this country in furlough without moving forward at all.
The Prime Minister did not answer the question. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions seems to think that it is an extra two hours a week, so let me make it even easier for the Prime Minister: is the correct answer higher or lower than that?
What I can tell the right hon. and learned Gentleman is that under this Government, for the first time in decades, wages are rising. Wages across the board are rising, and they are 4.1% up on where they were before the pandemic. In fact, I am very pleased to say—[Interruption.] Of course, what the Opposition want to do is continue to take money in taxation and put it into benefits. We do not think that that is the right way. We want to encourage high wages and high skills. That is the difference between this Government and the Labour party. I think it is a good thing, for instance, that Costa Coffee is now paying 5% more than it was before the pandemic—and never forget, Mr Speaker, that if we had listened to Captain Hindsight, Costa Coffee would still be closed.
It wasn’t a difficult question, Mr Speaker. [Interruption.] It is silly, they say. “How many hours would someone working full time on the minimum wage have to work to make up for the cut?” is apparently a silly question. I will give the Prime Minister the answer to the question. The number is much, much higher. A single parent—who could be a constituent—working on the minimum wage and already working full time would need to work more than nine hours a week on top of that full-time job just to get back the money that the Prime Minister has taken away from them. They are already working full time. They have kids. How on earth does the Prime Minister think they are going to find the time to work an extra nine hours—in truth, an extra day every week?
I will tell you what we are doing, Mr Speaker, to support people on low incomes. We are supporting them not only with the living wage, but with 30 hours of free childcare, and by freezing petrol duty and extending the heating allowance to 780,000 people across the country—but, even more important than that, for the low-paid we are encouraging measures to see their wages rise. We are investing in their skills. We are investing in work coaches There is now a dividing line between this Government and the Opposition. We want a high-wage, high-skills economy with controlled immigration; what they want is low wages, low skills, and uncontrolled immigration. That is what they stand for.
Let us test that right now. We have had three questions and the Prime Minister has not answered one of them, and it is obvious why The truth is that these low-paid workers cannot work longer hours to get back the money that the Prime Minister is cutting from them. He knows it; they know it. Millions of working families will be hit hard—very hard—by the Prime Minister’s universal credit cut, and the reason, I tell the Prime Minister, is this. Why would those people have to work an extra nine hours—a full day every week—to get that £20 back? It is because of his broken tax system. He has just said how good it is, so let us test it. After his national insurance rise, for every extra pound that those workers earn, his Government will take more than 75p from them. That is why they have to work for those nine hours—one whole extra day The Prime Minister has just said that he is going to raise wages, and what else he is going to do, but that is the situation. Why is the Prime Minister making a bad situation worse for working people by hammering them with a cut in universal credit and a tax rise?
Actually, what we have done with our local housing allowance is increase by £600 the amount of money available to exactly the type of person the right hon. and learned Gentleman has mentioned. He has attacked the plan that we announced last week to fix the backlogs in the NHS. I have to say that I thought it utterly incredible that the party of Nye Bevan should have come to the House last Wednesday and voted against measures that would fix the NHS. It is quite clear that ours is now the party of the NHS, and that the Opposition simply do not have a plan. They do not have a plan for universal credit—they want to abolish it—and they do not have a plan to fix the NHS or social care.
An unfair tax rise which will not fix social care and will not clear the NHS backlog is not a plan. The Prime Minister pretends that there is no alternative but to hammer working people with tax rises and universal credit cuts, but that is not true. His approach means that a working single parent who is a qualified nurse would lose £1,143. A supermarket worker could lose £1,093. A teaching assistant could lose £1,081. At the same time, the Prime Minister has wasted billions on crony contracts, cut taxes for people buying second homes and handed out super tax deductions for the biggest companies. That is not taking difficult decisions; that is making political choices. So why is the Prime Minister choosing to take a tax system that is already loaded against working people and making it even more unfair?
It is absolutely ridiculous that the right hon. and learned Gentleman should attack the Government over salaries for nurses when we have put them up by 3% on top of the 12.8% rise that we introduced, when we are hiring 50,000 more nurses and when we are putting another £36 billion into the NHS and social care on top of the £33 billion that this Government invested when we came into office. One in 10 of the people in this country are now on an NHS waiting list. Labour Members know that the NHS backlog needs to be fixed, they know that this Government have a plan and they know that Labour has absolutely nothing to say.
I just wonder what the millions of people on low wages who are facing a £1,000 cut will think of that. This country’s success is built by working people, but the tax system is loaded against them. The Prime Minister may not understand the pressures facing families across the country, but we do. The reality is this. Taxes on working people: up. National insurance—[Hon. Members: “”Up!”] Council tax—[Hon. Members: “Up!”] Energy bills, food prices, burdens on families: up, up, up. The Prime Minister needs to get real and understand the terrible impact of his decisions on working people across this country. This afternoon, he has the chance to change course, to vote with Labour to cancel the cut to universal credit and then to stop clobbering working people with unfair tax rises. Will he do so?
I can see that the panto season has come early—[Interruption.]
Order. If it has, it is certainly behind him.
Let me ask you, Mr Speaker, since you are a man of great restraint and taste and judgment: which country has the fastest growth in the G7? Where is employment up? Where are job vacancies at the highest level? And as for wages, they are up. They are higher than they were before the pandemic. I have listened to the right hon. and learned Gentleman carefully over the last fortnight, and I am told that he has a 14,000-word essay in gestation. I do not know why he cannot produce it right away. Why does the world have to wait for the thoughts of Chairman Keir? Having listened to what he has had to say—his non-existent plan for universal credit, his non-existent plan for health and social care—I could compress those 14,000 words into four: vote Labour, wait longer. That is what he stands for. Our plan for jobs is working and our plan for covid is working.
The Prime Minister needs to count the number of words—come on, Sheryll.
Q2. Be it farm workers or lorry drivers, my employers are saying that they want more staff. What more can the Prime Minister do to increase the training and mobility of jobseekers to help them into the jobs they need?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the problem of lorry driver shortages, which is affecting the whole world, from Europe to North America. What we are doing immediately is working to get out more licences. We are taking advantage of our post-Brexit freedom so that all the young thrusters on the Conservative Benches with a post-1997 driver’s licence can now drive a vehicle with a trailer as well—everybody can drive a vehicle with a trailer as well. But after a long period of stagnation in wages for those in the road haulage industry, we are also seeing a long-overdue increase in wages. That is part of the same phenomenon that this Government are introducing and the Labour party is opposing.
I pass on my condolences to the Prime Minister and his family on the sad loss of his mother the other day. And I join the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in congratulating Emma Raducanu on her fantastic success in New York last Saturday Of course, we mourn the anniversary last Saturday of 20 years since the horrors of 9/11. We remember all those who paid the sacrifice in that outrage This morning we learned that the rate of inflation has reached its highest level in a decade. For ordinary workers and families, prices are going up at the very moment when they can least afford it. Workers and families need more than just a winter plan for covid; they need a winter action plan to fight a Tory poverty pandemic that is only going to get worse Does the Prime Minister know, and can he tell us, how much Tory Government cuts to social welfare will cost the average nurse?
We are protecting people on low incomes up and down the country—[Interruption.] Indeed we are. And we are freezing fuel duty and supporting childcare. We have brought in a huge package of measures, not least the living wage, which has already seen an increase of £4,000 for every family on the living wage More importantly, the right hon. Gentleman talks about the income of nurses. We are investing massively in health and social care up and down the country. That will help to fund, apart from anything else, the increase in nurses’ pay that they so thoroughly deserve. I hope he will support that package.
My goodness, my goodness, an increase in nurses’ pay. Either the Prime Minister does not know or he simply does not care. When we take the cuts to universal credit and the increase in national insurance, the figure he was looking for is that the average nurse will lose £1,736. Once again, this Government are cutting the pay of key workers, the very people we are relying on to see us through another difficult winter. The cost of living is spiralling and people are left with a Prime Minister who does not know how much his cuts are hitting key workers and a Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who does not know how universal credit works If any Scottish Tories are in possession of a backbone, now would be a good time to find it. Does the Prime Minister expect any MPs from his Scottish branch office to stand against the callous cuts to universal credit, or has he already bought them off with promises of jobs in his reshuffle?
What is actually happening is that we are funding the NHS across the whole of the UK, including in Scotland I am proud to say, with record sums. We have ensured that nurses have access to a training bursary worth £5,000 and a further bursary of £3,000 for childcare costs, and that is before we put up their pay by 3%. That is only possible because of the investment we are making, the measures I outlined last week and the package we are putting forward for health and social care. If the right hon. Gentleman is really saying that the Scottish nationalist party is opposed to that investment, if he is really saying that he would send it back, he would be better off banging on, as he normally does, about a referendum. He is better on that.
Q3. Now that the move to have a domestic identity card for each of Northern Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland has started, what consideration has my right hon. Friend given to how the nationalists will use them to break our Union?
I am very grateful for the vigilance of my hon. Friend about the matter of ID cards. I can tell him that we have absolutely no plans to bring them in, but I will watch the nationalists very carefully.
I, too, offer my condolences to the Prime Minister on the loss of his mother Health waiting lists are through the roof in Northern Ireland and hard-pressed families are being hit by decisions from this Government, but the Democratic Unionist party has been hit by a bad opinion poll so it is threatening to bring down the very institutions of the Good Friday agreement. Will this Prime Minister commit today to fast-tracking the legislation going through this House, agreed at New Decade, New Approach, to stop the institutions coming down if one political party has a petulant strop?
I thank the hon. Gentleman. I agree with him that it is very important that the institutions of Northern Ireland should be robust and should continue, but I also think that a responsible Government have to address the issues of the protocol, the lopsidedness and the way in which the European Union has chosen to interpret those issues, which I do not believe satisfies the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. That is what we are going to do.
Q4. May I start by expressing my condolences to the Prime Minister? As my right hon. Friend knows, yesterday I led a Westminster Hall debate on the British fur trade and the import of dead animal products from abroad. I know he cares deeply about animal welfare. Will he please join me in denouncing the horrible, cruel and unnecessary slaughter of an average of 1 million animals every year, just for their skin? In a post-Brexit Britain, we can outlaw this horrible practice, one that I am sure he and many, many other British people hate. Will he meet me to discuss my campaign to end the import of fur to Britain and truly make a fur-free Britain?
I am sure that my hon. Friend speaks for millions and millions of people up and down this country who abhor the fur trade and do not want to wear fur. Obviously, we have banned fur farming in this country for a long time, and we are going to look at what we can do, working with the fur sector, to prevent fur from being imported into Britain.
Q6. By the time my wonderful friend Lynda went to the doctor, the cancer was already so advanced that she had only a few weeks to live. Many hon. Members have been through cancer and they know well that early detection saves lives. Unfortunately, of course, long waiting lists will make it more difficult to save lives. The real problem we have is a massive shortage, in the thousands, in the number of pathologists and radiologists to catch the cancers in the first place, and a massive shortage of oncologists and dermatologists to do the treatment. So regardless of the money, how are we are going to make sure that we have the personnel, not in five or seven years’ time, but now, to be able to save lives?
First, I want to say how sad I am to hear about the hon. Gentleman’s constituent Lynda. I think her experiences have been shared by literally millions of people in this country during the pandemic, because they have not been willing or able to get the oncology treatment that they need because of the pressure of covid on the system. The system is now coming back, trying to help everybody as fast as possible to fix the backlogs. So yes, it is necessary to hire more nurses and doctors, and there about 10,000 more nurses now and about 6,000 more doctors—
Pathologists and radiologists.
The hon. Gentleman is totally right in what he says about radiologists and pathologists, but may I respectfully say to him that that must be done by means of the big powerful package that we put forward last week to raise the funding necessary? I believe his party should have supported that and it is incredible that it did not.
Q5. Work continues to improve maternity services at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. Last week, local MPs heard from those affected—including a former constituent of mine whose baby died only eight weeks ago—in a meeting with the Minister for Patient Safety. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is right that there is going to be an independent review of local maternity services? Will he join me in asking those affected to come forward to give evidence to that review, so that in future mothers throughout Nottinghamshire get the maternity services that they both need and deserve?
Yes. I thank my hon. Friend for raising this matter; I know he has campaigned on that issue. The review is going ahead and we will look at what to do once it has been completed, but in the meantime Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust is going to be supported through the national maternity safety support programme.
Q10. Throughout the country, there are children who have not gone back to school because their schools say that they cannot meet their needs. Do the continued delays to the Government’s review of special educational needs and disability mean that the Government have abandoned those children? Will the Prime Minister listen to the concerns of parents and young people and make sure that their voices are heard in the review?
The hon. Lady raises an important point. When the Government came into office, a key part of the extra £14 billion that we put into education was for investment in special educational needs, to allow local areas to build more SEND schools where they were necessary. We are putting another £780 million into extra SEND education for our kids. If the hon. Lady wishes to raise a particular shortfall in a particular school or area, will she please write to me about it?
Q7. I know that my right hon. Friend wants to see the United Kingdom growing more crops. We are not going to blaze a trail to self-sufficiency by building over our finest agricultural land. That has to stop, now.On this, Back British Farming Day, we are in harvest time, and all is not safely gathered in. In three weeks, Thanet Earth in my constituency, which is one of the largest glasshouse companies in the country and grows tomatoes, has had to trash £320,000-worth of produce because there are no pickers and no drivers. Because of the lack of labour force, the crops are rotting in the fields and on trees. Will my right hon. Friend seek to introduce immediately a covid-recovery visa, so that this year’s crops are not lost?
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right in what he says about the importance of buying British and eating British. Our food is the best in the world. He is also right to address the problems that we are currently seeing in the supply chain, but we are taking steps. Of course, it has been a problem for a long time, but we will use the seasonal agricultural workers scheme to ensure that British farms get the labour that they need.
Q11. I express my condolences to the Prime Minister and his family.Does the Prime Minister believe that the burning of fossil fuels will not be a source of energy in the UK in future?
Yes. Since just 2012, when I think I was Mayor of London—I was—we have cut CO2 massively and we have cut our dependence on coal from 40% to less than 1%. How about that, Mr Speaker?
Q8. Ullswater Community College, which is led superbly by headteacher Stephen Gilby, is a fantastic school in Penrith with 1,500 pupils, more than 200 staff and a 600 square mile catchment area. The school is in desperate need of redevelopment to keep the site fit for purpose. In partnership with Myerscough College, the school is providing a lifeline for land-based education in Cumbria, after the sad closure of Newton Rigg College in July. This is a great opportunity for the Government to level up rural areas, so will the Prime Minister join me in supporting the proposed rebuild of Ullswater Community College.
Yes. My hon. Friend is a great campaigner for the people of Penrith and The Border, and I can tell him that in addition to our support for 500 school-rebuilding projects in the next decade—we are doing 100 immediately—Cumbria County Council has been allocated £5.3 million for the financial year 2021-22 to improve buildings, including Ullswater Community College.
Does the Prime Minister agree that the impending cuts to universal credit will not just have a devastating financial impact on people, but lead to stress and anxiety and undoubtedly have a hugely detrimental effect on their mental health, which, on top of the pressures of the pandemic, could prove devastating for some?
I have answered that question many times. The answer is no, and, in any case, Labour would abolish universal credit altogether.
Q9. Back in 2004, Scarborough hit the national headlines when rumours of a new dental practice opening led to hundreds of people queuing round the block in the vain hope of registering as NHS patients. Today, while many better-off families continue to enjoy the discounted prices that the NHS offers, many children and vulnerable families still cannot register as NHS dental patients in Scarborough and Whitby. Does the Prime Minister agree that that needs fixing?
Yes, I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. That is why we are investing in the NHS, and we want the NHS to be a better place for the dental profession. Would it not be a fine thing if this House of Commons voted overwhelmingly—with all Members voting—for our package of measures to support the NHS?
September marks Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Every day across the UK, 12 children and young people will be diagnosed with cancer, and, of those, two will not survive. My constituent Nadia Majid and her family are campaigning to improve research and funding in this field. Nadia’s son, Rayhan, was only four years old when he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. Rayhan tragically passed away only four months after his diagnosis. Will the Prime Minister join me in thanking all the doctors, nurses and support staff who work tirelessly to fight against childhood cancer and meet with me to discuss how the four nations can work together to improve research and funding into childhood cancers and to support families like Nadia’s?
I know that the hon. Lady echoes the thoughts of millions of people. There is not a family in this country that has not been touched by cancer. Childhood cancer is particularly tragic, which is why the Government are investing huge sums in research and also in supporting some of the fantastic charities that she mentions, particularly those investigating brain cancers.
Q12. Dr Camilla Kingdon, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, thinks that the routine testing of children without covid symptoms is still interrupting children and teenagers’ school attendance and does not believe that it should continue. She thinks that covid should be treated like other diseases and that only children with symptoms should be dealt with. I agree with her and her colleagues in the royal college; does the Prime Minister agree with them?
I have great respect for Dr Kingdon as I have for my right hon. Friend. It is one of a number of views in the scientific community, but we continue to think that testing is a very important route for keeping schools open, which is the best possible thing for the physical and mental health of our kids.
My condolences to the Prime Minister on the sad loss of his mother I was privileged to be able to take the time off work that I needed to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, but that should be a right for everyone, not a privilege. Far too many people cannot take the time off that they need because, by the former Health Secretary’s own admission, statutory sick pay at £95 a week is not enough to live on. This is a simple question—yes or no? Will the Prime Minister today commit to full sick pay at a real living wage, not the Government’s current age-restricted minimum wage?
As the whole House will know, what we have done is make sure that everybody who gets covid-related statutory sick pay gets it on day one. We have also ensured that most people in this country, when they fall sick or when they need to recover as the hon. Lady has, receive considerably more than statutory sick pay.
Q13. As a Queen’s scout, I am always keen to encourage young people to get into the most successful youth organisation in the world, so last week I was delighted that the Scout Association announced the first new age range in scouting for 35 years—namely, the Squirrels—which allows young people of four and five years old to become part of the scout movement. This is particularly aimed at areas of deprivation and disadvantaged children. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should congratulate the Scout Association, thank the volunteers who give up their time to enable young people to take part, and encourage young people to get involved in a safe environment for adventure and new challenges?
Yes; I had no idea that the Scout Association was doing that, but I think it is fantastic. Uniformed youth services make a huge difference to outcomes for young people, and it is fantastic that the Squirrels are now starting them off at the age of four.
You could register Wilfred. I call Jack Dromey.
For more than half a century, the GKN factory in Erdington has produced high-quality parts for the automotive industry. Now, following the hostile takeover by Melrose, the company has announced its intention to close the factory, sack 519 workers, and export jobs and production to continental Europe. There has been some welcome engagement with Ministers on this issue, but does the Prime Minister agree that, in one of the poorest parts of Britain, if the levelling-up agenda and support for British manufacturing mean anything, this factory cannot close? Does he therefore also agree that it would be a betrayal of the British national interest were this great, historic factory to become history?
My right hon. Friend the Business Secretary is working with GKN to do whatever we can, but I believe that the future of the UK automotive sector is incredibly bright. That is because—to go back to the question of the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse)—we are the Government who took the historic step, ahead of every other European country, to move towards electric vehicles by 2030. We want this country to be in the lead. We are making sure that we get the investment in the UK that will drive new technology, drive growth, and drive high-wage and high-skilled jobs in this country.
Q14. At a time when our economy desperately needs investment, right now we are missing out on hundreds of millions of pounds of private capital that is flowing into the geothermal sector across Europe, because the UK does not offer a competitive long-term tariff. Geothermal will help us to heat homes, create jobs and level up the UK. We have not yet found time to meet and discuss the subject, but will the Prime Minister find time in his diary in the coming weeks, so that we can discuss the issue and do not miss out on further investment?
I am sorry that we have not yet found time to discuss this matter properly, person to person. The Government are very much interested in what my hon. Friend says about geothermal projects, so I will ensure that a meeting is arranged as soon as possible.
I am sure that the Prime Minister will be as pleased as I am that the Scottish Land Court has this week given the final green light to establishing a space launch facility in Sutherland. This is great for the UK, and it is time to bury party political differences. On behalf of the delighted crofters of the community of Melness, I extend a warm invitation to the Prime Minister to come to the first launch, where he will be given a delicious highland tea, including some home-made scones.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind invitation. I look forward to taking it up. What we need is a suitable payload to send into space, and I think the hon. Gentleman would do very well.
Q15. On Monday, it was a pleasure to meet the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Leicester as they discussed a zero-carbon future with British Gas. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the development in neighbouring Derby of the modular nuclear reactors can play a major part in this zero-carbon future? What steps are the Government taking to facilitate the roll-out of this technology to the UK and the world, especially this week, which is nuclear week—perhaps in more ways than one?
I thank my hon. Friend. We are already working with Rolls-Royce. We gave £20 million seed money to the Rolls-Royce-led consortium when this Government first came in to help them to develop their small modular reactor design. As I said to him the other day, we want to see that company coming forward with a fully worked out plan—a fully worked out business case—that we can all get behind.
The Prime Minister has set out today that he wants a high-skill, high-wage economy. He has also been on the record as saying that the tactic of fire and rehire is “unacceptable”. Surely the best way of ensuring that we have a high-wage economy is to work with the proposals in my private Member’s Bill so that we end that tactic of fire and rehire.
The most vivid example of fire and rehire is that conducted by the Labour party. If I recall, the leader of the Labour party himself fired his deputy leader and then rehired her as shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow Secretary of State for the future of work. The future of work under Labour is low wages and low skills driven by uncontrolled immigration. The people of this country have had enough of that; what they want to see is high wages, high skills and controlled immigration, and that is what this Government are committed to deliver.
Will my right hon. Friend come to No. 1 George Street and celebrate great British farming today, can we have public procurement that uses British food, and can we have food envoys all across the world promoting our great British food and farming?
Yes. I thank my hon. Friend, who is the living embodiment of the robustness of British agriculture, and indeed of the benefits of English food—of British food, particularly the beef of Devon, or Somerset. He is right in what he says about food envoys. We have taken that up. Every single embassy across the world has a food envoy.
My constituents in Bridge House, Croydon live in flats covered in dangerous cladding that will cost millions to remove. They are not eligible for the Government’s building safety fund because it is the wrong type of cladding. Can the Prime Minister confirm: do my constituents have to pay the £23,000 each that they are being charged to remove this cladding, or does he have a better plan?
If the hon. Lady’s constituents are being told that they do not have to remove that cladding, then the answer is no. It is very, very important that this House should recognise that too many buildings have been unnecessarily—unfairly, I believe—categorised as dangerous and unsafe. Of course we must remove dangerous cladding, and we are doing that, but I want householders and leaseholders—people living in flats across this country—to have the confidence that they can do so in safety, and that is what this Government are doing.
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for and in connection with offences relating to verbal and physical abuse of public-facing workers in the course of their employment “Abuse is a regular occurrence unfortunately. I’ve been sworn at, spat at, pushed, had trollies rammed into me, had grown men tell me they will rape and kill me. I have plenty of colleagues that have been assaulted, one had a man wait in the car park for him and smashed a glass bottle over his head.” That is one constituent’s account of the abuse they face at work, but there is more: “I’ve had threats to ‘smash my face in’ and threats such as stabbing, threats to my family, punching threats, needles, threats to follow me home, waiting around until I’ve finished work, arson and generally abusive shouting, swearing, and spitting” These stories are a part of a wider pattern that goes beyond only one section of the economy or one type of workplace Many people will have looked in horror at the footage from Asda in Clapham, which showed a man brutally attacking workers and customers at that store. My union, the GMB, is campaigning for stronger legal protections for workers because of such assaults. I have also heard from cabin crew workers, who have suffered rising levels of abuse as they try to enforce social distancing protocols on planes; journalists facing increasing harassment, abuse and even assault by far-right groups; NHS workers being accosted by anti-vaxxers and covid deniers while going about treating the sick; librarians facing rising levels of abusive behaviour; workers in bars and restaurants facing violence and intimidation from customers; and transport workers, often working alone, who have been spat at, threatened and physically assaulted. Everywhere, we have rising levels of abuse directed at people who work with the public Last June, a survey conducted by the Institute of Customer Service found that more than half of customer-facing employees have experienced increased hostility from customers during the coronavirus crisis. More than half of the participants in a survey from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers reported being threatened with physical violence. Some 88% had been verbally abused, 13% reported being racially harassed and 16% had been spat at or targeted with other bodily fluids. In a 2010 survey, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers reported very similar Covid has made this growing problem even worse, but it would be a mistake to think it was the cause. Before the outbreak, the 2020 crime report found that 83% of people in the convenience store sector had been subject to verbal abuse. It is estimated that there have been more than 50,000 incidents of violence. Some of the responsibility lies with individuals. We need to see a change in behaviour and in the culture of how we treat front-facing workers. That change will not happen on its own. Part of our discussion should include what employers can do to protect workers. We need better reporting, better support and a more robust pursuit of prosecutions, but we also need to see the Government take action. Today, with this Bill, I am here to propose that the verbal or physical abuse of public-facing workers carrying out their duties has to be made its own specific offence. Some say we already have enough on the statute book on this and that there are already laws that, taken together, cover the offence of abusing frontline staff, but our laws reflect and shape our society. If the existing legislation reflects a situation in which we have seen spiralling levels of abuse, it is time that changed, because the status quo simply is not working The British Retail Consortium reports that only 6% of incidents of violence and abuse ended in prosecution, and in only 3% of cases was the victim performing a public service an aggravating factor. The lack of action has consequences. In a survey conducted by the RMT, 43% of respondents said they had not reported the incidents to their managers. When asked why, the most common reason was that they did not feel it would be taken seriously or that it was just part of their job. A quarter said that they had reported incidents and no action had been taken. USDAW found similar, with a survey saying that a quarter of its members had never reported the abuse they have suffered and that it was a regular occurrence The most recent polling from the Institute of Customer Service reports that nearly half of the workers who participated in the survey do not report incidents of abuse. Over half of those who had been abused did not think it would make a difference, and why would they when the rate of prosecution is so low? No wonder the system is not working. The sentencing for common assault is complicated. There are three categories of harm and culpability, 19 aggravating factors and 11 mitigating factors. A new law would make the process far simpler. We have already seen how it could look in practice. The Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018—the “protect the protectors” Act—provides a good template The 2018 Act was a welcome step forward, but the law has been applied inconsistently. For example, the Prison Officers Association told me that it has been unevenly applied to its work context, with different rulings classifying prison officers as emergency workers or not. Similarly, social workers, who are often required to engage in emergency work, are not included in the Act, but they are protected while enforcing child protection orders or carrying out mental health assessments in Scotland under the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005. Those inconsistencies would disappear if the law encompassed all public-facing workers A new offence would simplify the legal process, iron out inconsistencies and encourage law enforcement to proactively investigate and support complainants against perpetrators. It would also empower frontline workers to speak up and report incidents of abuse, knowing that there is a greater chance that they will be listened to and investigated It should be an inalienable right to be treated with respect and dignity in the workplace, but many people feel that they are ignored by a system that does not care about them or take them seriously. Today we have an opportunity to demonstrate that we do care. I commend the Bill to the House Question put and agreed to. Ordered, That Olivia Blake, Andrew Gwynne, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Rachel Hopkins, Kim Johnson, Navendu Mishra and Kate Osborne present the Bill Olivia Blake accordingly presented the Bill Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 28 January, and to be printed (Bill 157).
I beg to move, That this House calls on the Government to cancel its planned cut to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit which from the end of September 2021 will reduce support for many hard-working families by £1,040 a year I reiterate what I said when we had this debate in January: while, understandably, strength of feeling is high when talking about something that affects so many families and households across the country, this should not be a debate with personal abuse or accusations of bad motive. I ask everyone following the debate at home to consider that, too. If we instead took a moment to assess the matter properly and considered not just the impact on the 6 million affected families but what is in the best interests of our economy as we recover from the pandemic and, crucially, what we need as a country to be able to face the inevitable shocks and economic problems that will come our way in the future, we would decide that it would be unconscionable to take this money away.
In my constituency, £10.5 million will disappear from the spending capacity in our local economy when more than 10,000 people and working families lose access to this benefit. Does my hon. Friend agree that that will have a tremendously bad effect on local spending power?
My hon. Friend is exactly right. The reduction of £20 a week for 6 million low-income families will be the single biggest overnight cut in the history of the welfare state—bigger even than the cut to unemployment benefit in 1931 that caused the Government of the day to collapse. The scope of the cut, affecting one in 14 British workers, is also unprecedented. For those reasons alone, it is right that we are having this debate and that our constituents know where we stand.
The hon. Member is courteous in giving way, but his proposal would cost £6 billion. Which tax would he raise to pay for that?
Will the hon. Member tell me how many households in his constituency are in receipt of universal credit? I am giving him a chance to put on the record how many of his constituents are affected. There is a whole section of my speech in which I will tell him how the Government can afford to pay for this I did not know that the hon. Member did not know the figure for his constituency—I promise that I was not trying to catch him out. I was simply trying to make the point that the recovery of his local economy would be adversely affected by taking that spending power away, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) made clear for her constituency.
I thank the shadow Secretary of State for introducing this important debate. Northern Ireland has the highest levels of child poverty in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. My mailbag, like everyone’s, is full of real-life stories of people worried sick about how they will be affected. Does he agree that the removal of the £20 universal credit payment will plunge even more people into food poverty and have a detrimental effect not just on their pockets financially but on their health? It is a double whammy, and they just cannot take it.
I agree with the hon. Member. Opposition to the cut is truly universal, for those reasons. It includes MPs, charities, unions and six former Conservative Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions. If we are being honest, I think several serving Conservative Ministers also share that view. In this debate, I want to knock down the fiction that there is somehow a choice to be made between cancelling the cut and getting people back into work. I want to talk about what the cut will mean for the families affected and the impact that it will have on all our local economies and the national resilience necessary to meet future challenges. I also want to talk about how the Government could easily fund universal credit at its current rate without making this counterproductive and harsh cut.
I am inundated every week by employers who simply cannot get workers. Should we not be seeking to raise the sights of many working people to get another, better-paid job? They are out there.
In the right hon. Member’s constituency, 4,000 households are in receipt of universal credit. I want to ensure that, at the beginning of the debate, we knock down the argument, which we have also heard from the Prime Minister, that a focus on jobs will somehow mean that we do not need to keep universal credit at its current level. Of course we should get people back into jobs, but it is simply false to say that the choice is between keeping the uplift and doing that Let me remind the House again that universal credit is an in-work benefit. Almost half of the incomes that Government Members wish to cut are of people in work. Either the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and several Conservative MPs do not know how universal credit works or they are being wilfully misleading. I do not know which is worse. Let us have a real debate rather than this ignorant rhetoric about work or welfare, because—this is the crucial point—if as a country we could get the people affected into better-paying jobs, the cost of keeping universal credit at its current level would go down automatically. That is exactly how the system is designed to work. Anyone saying that the cut needs to happen to get people back into work, or to get them working more hours, does not know what they are talking about.
rose—
I will give way to the hon. Member one more time.
The hon. Member is kind. I hope he will answer my intervention rather than re-intervene on me; I found that very odd earlier. Is it better in principle that people receive £20 through the benefits system or through going into longer hours, with more progress in work and building up a career where there is no limit on what they achieve?
Of course it is better that people are in work, but the whole point of reform in this area over the last decade and a half has been to try to create a system that integrates with the world of work. I cannot see how the hon. Member does not understand that. I cannot see the logic in his argument that a cliff edge is necessary for the outcome that he wishes to see.
My hon. Friend makes a compelling argument about universal credit being an in-work benefit for many people. I have been inundated with calls from constituents who are supermarket workers, teaching assistants and carers. They are already working long hours and they have gone above and beyond during the pandemic. Does he agree that this is not the way to thank those hard-working key workers for everything that they have done for this country?
I agree absolutely; that is the point. We saw in the exchanges between the Secretary of State and me on Monday, as well as in Prime Minister’s questions, that the Government’s proposition is that somehow people working full time will be able to work 50 or 55 hours a week, on top of what they are already doing. The Opposition are more than happy to have a discussion about raising pay—we have plenty of ideas. Let us discuss raising the minimum wage to at least £10 an hour now or reducing the universal credit taper rate so that people keep more of what they earn. To dress up this devastating cut as a choice between supporting jobs and supporting families is an insult to the millions of working people who will see their incomes drop. Hon. Members who support the cut should at least have the decency to stand up and say so rather than hide behind straw men.
I will give my hon. Friend some statistics from my constituency, where 37% of all children—that is 6,802—are living in poverty, a figure that has increased considerably under the Tories. Thousands of them and their families rely on universal credit to put food on their tables. With the latest figures showing inflation rocketing, and that is very much on food, does my hon. Friend agree that adults and children will go hungry if the Government do not do the right thing?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. However, it is also important to say that there are 1.7 million people this will affect who cannot work, owing to disability, illness or caring responsibilities. I have not heard a single mention of them from the Government, or the offer of any help coming their way to mitigate this cut.
The Government said at the time they increased the universal credit payment that it was to pay for essentials during the pandemic. I take that to be food and fuel. Does the shadow Secretary of State believe that food and fuel prices have fallen since the pandemic, and if not, does that not just do away with the Government’s argument altogether?
I am grateful to the hon. Member, who makes two points: first, if the Government believed this level of need was evident during the pandemic, the crisis that people face—whether that is illness or redundancy—does not change whether or not there is a global pandemic; and crucially, yes, he is right that fuel costs are going up. We had the announcement this morning that inflation is over 3%. Anyone who has been to a British supermarket in the last few months knows how much food is going up, so the need is absolutely there. Frankly, the Government’s case that somehow this support was needed in the pandemic and can be taken away has absolutely nothing to it That brings me to one more point I want to raise before I talk about the impact on people. I want to highlight again the situation for people on legacy benefits, such as employment and support allowance and jobseeker’s allowance, who never had this uplift to begin with. I believe, and I have said so many times, that these people are the victims of discrimination. Universal credit is the clear successor benefit to these benefits, and the decision to not uprate them was initially presented to this House as a technical problem, rather than a policy choice. The situation they have been put in is grossly unfair, and we will continue to keep raising this. The only reason I did not include those benefits in the wording of this motion today is that I did not want any Conservative MP to be able to cite that as a reason to refuse to back this motion It is the impact on people that should be paramount in our minds. I am sure all hon. Members, whichever side they are on, have been inundated with people getting in touch to tell them exactly how much this money means to them. The leaked internal analysis from the Government that appeared in the Financial Times last week described the cut, in the Government’s own term, as “catastrophic”. The human cost of taking this money away cannot be overstated: £20 may not seem like much to some people, but it is makes the difference of having food in the fridge and still being able to put the heating on, or being able to get the kids new school shoes without worrying how to pay for them.
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. In Oldham, there are over 11,000 people in work reliant on universal credit with 22,000 children. Is he as concerned as I am that the long-lasting impacts of driving these children into further poverty—as we saw, for example, in the Nuffield Foundation report yesterday—are going to be detrimental not just for those families, but for society as a whole?
My hon. Friend is my constituency neighbour, and she knows that her constituency is very much like mine. We have seen the impact of the austerity years and what that has meant, not just in terms of the impact on people, but with how much need that has pushed on to other services—the NHS, the police force—and, frankly, with how so many of the preventive services that were once there have had to go from local authorities. The position people are in, as things stand today, is not one in which anyone could reasonably say that there is capacity to further reduce support and take so much money out of local economies.
According to the Resolution Foundation, over 40% of people on universal credit were food-insecure before the Government introduced the £20 uplift, so does my hon. Friend agree that by cancelling the uplift and cutting universal credit by £20 a week, the Government are taking the money from people that they need to put food on their tables and to support their families?
Again, no one could dispute that case. Last week I went on a visit to Peterborough, which is the Conservative constituency most affected by this cut, and I went to volunteer in a local food bank. Anyone volunteering in that situation and simply observing the level of need coming through the front door could not in any good conscience say that the people going there could sustain themselves if this cut were to take place. Some of the volunteers there are people who work for the NHS, who in their spare time are volunteering on the vaccine programme and, in their spare time from that, are volunteering at the local food bank. That is what the people of this country are doing, and if only they had a Government who were willing to give the same level of commitment, how much better things would be.
My hon. Friend is making an extremely powerful speech. We have been through a period when communities have come together, and he has just talked about volunteering and the way that communities have come together to deal with food poverty in particular. Children have been involved in that, and this is the Government who failed to feed our children during holiday time, so it is no surprise that they are bringing in this cut. Even in a constituency such as mine in London, over 5,000 children live in households that receive universal credit and are going to face a cut on top of what we have all been through over the last 18 months. It really is time that this Government started to think about the consequences of what they do to the poorest people in our communities.
Again, I think the case my hon. Friend has made is self-evident. I would also say that if we look at the moments of national crisis in British history and at how the country has responded to those, we see that we have always sought to learn from those crises and to take the best bits of our response to them. This announcement from the Government—the debate today—is their saying, “There’s nothing to take from this; there is nothing to keep that sense of solidarity or that action to try to improve things for people, and we are walking away from it.” I think that that, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes so many people frustrated with the tin ear the Government are showing.
Erdington may be rich in talent, but it is one of the poorest constituencies in the country. Some 63% of working age families with children in my constituency face a £1,040 cut in the biggest overnight cut to social security in the history of the welfare state. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that the Government seem to be oblivious to the despair of mums and dads who are wondering how they are going to be able to feed their kids as a consequence of soaring bills—electricity, gas—and prices in supermarkets, and that at a time like this this cut is truly the cruellest cut of all?
Again, I am pleased my hon. Friend has been able to place this on the record for his constituency, because that is how everybody sees it Last week I met some of the families who gave evidence at the Work and Pensions Committee—great people, real people—and they told it exactly how it is. On Monday, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), tried to say this actually is not a cut because the Treasury never budgeted to keep the uplift in place. Let me tell him that it is a cut to those families who came here to give evidence in the session last Wednesday, and it is a cut, as hon. Members have said, at a time when other things—the cost of heating, the cost of food, the rate of inflation—are already going up in real terms. Let us in this debate deal with the reality of people’s lives, not with Treasury fictions.
I took a moment to look back at some of the calls the hon. Gentleman has made over the last couple of weeks to increase benefits. When I added them all up, I found that there is not just the £6 billion for this benefit, but a total of about £15 billion that the Labour Front Bench has called for. Can he tell us how we are going to pay for that, because it is real people who will be paying for those benefits?
I will tell the hon. Member about the real people. There are 7,700 families in his constituency whom this cut will affect, and the decisions the Government will make—[Interruption.] I am not going along with Conservative Back Benchers trying to tot things up and coming out with them in the middle of a debate. No, let us talk about the real impact on the 7,700 families in his constituency. The message he should be considering is: what will happen to his local economy and what will happen to national finances by taking that money away from them? This is a very important point.
Some 7,850 of my constituents will in three weeks’ time also lose £20 a week. Does my hon. Friend agree that the real cost will be the impact on people’s lives—the lost opportunities for those children’s futures and the hopes we all carry? Is it not right that we invest in people, not see this as a cut in itself?
Absolutely. That investment in people is essential, and this uplift that we are talking about today cannot be considered without remembering the benefits freeze that lasted for four years prior to 2020. As the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), has said, the uplift only really restored what the value of UC would and should have been The pandemic exposed what many of us already knew: that social security in this country had become so threadbare it simply would not have got us through the pandemic. Since 2010 there has been unprecedented growth in in-work poverty in the UK, and food banks have become the norm in every town and city. No constituency has been exempt from that, and, most of all, one in eight working people in the UK is currently living in poverty. So the Government should not be seeking to congratulate themselves on making this uplift during the pandemic; they should ask themselves why they let things get so bad to begin with. There was another laughable moment in Question Time on Monday when the Secretary of State compared the Government’s response to that of the Labour Government after the global financial crisis. Back in 2008 there was a functioning and supportive welfare state: tax credits acted as a superb automatic stabiliser; Jobcentre Plus had already been created, bringing together the old social security offices with the jobcentres, which all Governments since have recognised as a huge strength; unemployment did not hit 3 million, as initially predicted; and initiatives such as the future jobs fund played their role. So that Government had already done the hard work back then, and that is the lesson this Government need to learn As many Members have said, great as the impact on families is, we also have a responsibility to consider the impact of this on the country as a whole. The money we are talking about is spent in local shops and on local services, the very businesses that have had such a tough time because of the necessary public health restrictions most of us here backed for good reasons The recovery is promising, but it is not a done deal and there is a lot of ground to make up. This is the wrong decision for the economy and it also fails to learn the lessons from the pandemic and build the resilience we need as a country to face future challenges.
I absolutely support everything my hon. Friend is saying in his speech, and the Government should listen hard, because we have all lived through a very difficult 18 months and there are increasingly difficult times ahead as well. We have learned many lessons during this period, such as that we should invest more in the things we value most. This money is targeted at families; 40% of families with children in my constituency will lose out as a result of this decision, and that will have an impact on those children. We have one of the most expensive childcare systems in the world and we know that working families are struggling. The Government can do something simple to support those families by changing their direction on this cut today.
My hon. Friend is right. The lever the Government have to alleviate this basket of problems—childcare costs, fuel costs, food costs—is to not go ahead with this decision My hon. Friend’s intervention brings me to my next point. If it really is the Government’s ambition to level up the UK, it is hard to see how that can mean anything when this cut disproportionately affects the places the Government say they want to boost. Despite all the rhetoric, this cut will take £2.5 billon out of local economies in the north and the midlands, including Stoke-on-Trent which would lose over £32 million and Blackpool which would see £23 million cut We all know this money is not being invested or hidden away; it is being spent. It is being spent in shops and restaurants in local high streets that desperately need a boost after last year. After the last week, it seems that the Government are keener on taxes up than levelling up.
On the hon. Gentleman’s comments about the last Labour Government and the 2008 financial crisis, what support did that last Labour Government give to those families?
I addressed that in an entire section of the speech so I refer the hon. Gentleman to Hansard.
Actually, that is a really important point because the hon. Gentleman was guilty in his comments on the previous welfare system of looking at it through rose-tinted lenses. There were huge problems with the previous welfare system. It caught hundreds of thousands of families in poverty traps, and at every opportunity since 2010 the Labour party resisted our efforts to reform welfare, to make work pay and to provide better financial support for families in Britain.
I have a lot of time for the right hon. Gentleman, as he knows, and he has been vocal in opposing the Government and we all have respect for that, but I must put a few things on the record in response to his intervention. The reductions in poverty under the last Labour Government were tremendous, and we did not even know how good they were until we got the evaluation, sadly a few years later when already so much of that had been taken apart. Of course there were problems with the previous system, but no one should try to claim that the last Labour Government were not a reforming Labour Government. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, after that Labour Government came to power a single parent did not have to go out and look for work until their eldest child was 16—there was no regime in the world like that—and Jobcentre Plus did not exist. So there was a lot of reform and the system was improved, but crucially—this is the big difference from the reforms of this Government—our reforms brought poverty down, brought more people into the workplace, and made this country stronger, more resilient and a better place for everyone. That is why, sadly, our record is overwhelmingly better than this Government’s.
Everybody acknowledges that the way out of poverty is employment; why when a Labour Government leave office is unemployment always higher than when they first went into office?
I have dealt with this intervention before—being involved in so many Finance Bills does give that experience—and that is false; a quick Google search will put the record straight for the hon. Gentleman The great Labour Government after the second world war who created the welfare state, built 1 million council houses and created the national parks while having to deal with demobilisation after the war are not hugely relevant to people who want to cut £20 a week from 6 million families today. But I will always defend the post-war Labour Government, the greatest Government in the history of this country.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
No, we have had enough history and the hon. Gentleman has intervened twice; we can look forward to his speech In relation to the tax rises announced last week, the combination of this cut and the rise in national insurance is absolutely outrageous. As many as 2.5 million families will lose £1,300 a year. This Government are already a high tax Government, and due to that and the decision to freeze personal allowances and hike council tax combined with the much lower than expected Government borrowing costs, projections are already coming in for the October spending review suggesting that there is far more room for manoeuvre than anyone previously thought The Resolution Foundation, the most respected analyst of the labour market and welfare state in the country, said last week that the Chancellor “will be significantly boosted by the good news the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) will deliver within its updated forecasts on 27 October. Borrowing this year is likely to come in several tens of billions lower than expected, having already borrowed £26 billion less than previously forecast in the first four months of 2021-22. More importantly, if the OBR moves its forecast for the long-term scarring effect of the pandemic on the British economy (currently 3 per cent of GDP) into line with the more optimistic consensus (the Bank of England now expects scarring of just 1 per cent) he will have a windfall that lasts, possibly to the tune of around £25 billion a year.” I believe the final forecast might be slightly less generous than that, but the point remains that a decision to keep UC and working tax credit at the current levels could be made within the fiscal headroom the Chancellor already has when the spending review takes place As the Resolution Foundation made clear, “To govern is to choose”, and the question for hon. Members today is do they really believe that those on the lowest incomes, in some of the hardest jobs in the country, who got us through the pandemic, should take a disproportionate share of the burden going forward? Is that fair, is that a recipe for national success and is that ensuring our country is as resilient as it needs to be to meet future challenges? No, no, and no again Looking to the future, I want to replace UC with a better system because I recognise that the argument we are having today over the core amount is not the only problem: the five-week wait is a huge issue for people; the level the taper rate is set at is wholly wrong; and people should be able to keep more of the money they earn. Fundamentally, the Treasury caused a huge problem by causing UC to be associated for many of our constituents with austerity, cuts and sanctions, but that is an argument for another day. The choice we have to make right now is whether to proceed with this cut and, whichever way we look at it, we should not. I hear there are rumours that a reshuffle is under way. As Members will know, if a Cabinet Minister were to lose their job today and return to the Back Benches, they would receive a pay-off of £15,000. Will anyone in this debate say that that is unaffordable? It always seems to be a different rule for the people we are talking about than for everyone else in the country I implore Members to think about the wide-ranging effects of their decision in this place today. Charities say that the cut will cut a lifeline to millions. Economists say it will suck spending from our local high streets. Even the Government’s own internal analysis makes it clear that it will be catastrophic. No one in this House can say they did not know. No one will be able to say they were not warned. The effects of this cut are clear as day. It is wrong for our constituents, wrong for the British economy; quite simply, it is wrong for Britain. Conservative Members have a choice to make. I, and the millions this cut will hit, implore them to see sense, back the families who sent them here, and cancel the cut.
Just this week, the official jobs statistics showed that more people are getting back into work and there is a record number of vacancies. That is a tribute to the British people and businesses. It shows that our plan for jobs is working. It shows that our comprehensive and unprecedented support for citizens and corporations as well as the NHS, in trying to protect lives and livelihoods, has worked. After the terrible personal and economic impact of covid, boosted by the successful vaccination roll-out, Britain is now rebounding It was right that we took prompt and decisive action to support our nation during this challenging time. We had the job retention scheme, the self-employment grants, the VAT changes, the business rates relief, the suspension of evictions for people and businesses who were renting—I could go on. We could only do that, though, because we went into the global pandemic with strong economic foundations built as a result of 10 years of Conservative measures to restore the nation’s finances after the financial crisis on Labour’s watch, when, memorably, there was no money left. Those measures included a sustained focus on supporting people to move into and progress in work through universal credit, with the highest level of employment ever seen in this country just before covid hit.
If this cut goes ahead, with £20 a week taken off universal credit, it will reduce the support for an unemployed family to the lowest level as a proportion of average earnings at any time since the welfare state was established after the second world war. How can that possibly be justified?
As I will probably say a bit later as well, this was indeed a temporary uplift, recognising the financial impact on people newly unemployed and that the uplift would be somewhat of a cushion for their financial circumstances. However, do bear in mind all the other support that we have given to help families get back on their feet, all the other elements that we have used to help people manage the cost of living, as well as the extra welfare grants that we targeted specifically through local councils. They have all been actions to help people, and we are helping people back into work, and better-paid work.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I am going to make a little more progress and then I will come to the hon. Gentleman Those foundations meant that we had the fiscal firepower and responsive welfare system to take decisive and unprecedented action in the face of the covid emergency. We delivered a package of over £400 billion to support the British people and businesses through the economic shock and injected over £7 billion extra into the welfare system, increasing local housing allowance rental support by nearly £1 billion, as well as over £400 million of targeted grants for local government to directly help the most disadvantaged and vulnerable families in local communities.
If a constituent comes to my surgery saying that they cannot afford to eat and have to go to a food bank because of the removal of the uplift, does the Secretary of State think they will feel any better when I say, “It’s not a cut; it’s just the removal of a temporary uplift”? What does she say to constituents who are on universal credit for the first time? They will have no idea that this cut is coming.
We have communicated once already with recipients of the universal credit temporary uplift. That has already gone through. The second message is under way, and the third message will be done. I think that we have taken responsible action to make sure that people realise that this change is coming, but of course the hon. Gentleman’s constituent will still be engaging with their work coach about how we can perhaps help them into better-paid work than they had before.
The Secretary of State started by listing the support that this Government have given to businesses, and specifically small businesses, which are very important in my constituency. How can she justify taking £5 million out of the local economy in Arfon?
I would expect the hon. Gentleman to be welcoming the investment that we will be making in getting people not only into work but into better-paid work. I am sure that will have a direct impact on supporting the economy in his area.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I have already given way a bit, so I will make some more progress Let us recognise that not everyone was fortunate enough to be furloughed; sadly, many people were made redundant. Fortunately, we had the universal credit system, and with the mass efforts of the great civil servants in my Department, we responded instantly to support the millions of people who turned to us for help. I will never tire of praising my Department for how we helped those at their lowest ebb. I know that that would simply not have been possible with the old benefits system. People would have been queuing round the block trying to get into jobcentres, especially in the middle of a lockdown. It may be an inconvenient truth for Opposition parties, which have constantly tried to demonise universal credit, but universal credit proved itself even more during the pandemic, showing that it worked both by design and in delivery.
I, too, pay tribute to the civil servants and the work coaches in the Secretary of State’s Department. That is the point that I want to explore with her. We all understand that unemployment is yet to spike. We expect that there will be problems as a result of the furlough scheme ending. I think that is widely anticipated; indeed, the Government have gone around opening temporary jobcentres and appointing more work coaches until March next year. If the Government understand that unemployment is about to spike, why are they removing this uplift to universal credit right now?
Of course, we now have a record number of vacancies, but we are also about being ready and anticipating. The OBR forecast that there would be a significantly higher unemployment effect as a result of what happened, and it mattered that we had jobcentres and work coaches ready to help people with that. I hope that we can now make sure that our army of work coaches can continue to help just under 2 million people still looking for work to get into those 1 million vacancies, as well as their efforts to help people progress in work.
rose—
rose—
I give way to my honourable neighbour from Suffolk.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and neighbour, who is making an excellent speech. She is right to highlight the resilience of the universal credit system, but on the point that is made about taking money out of local economies, is that not an insult to John Maynard Keynes? Is it not a fact that if individuals get more hours and better-paid work, there will be more money going into their economies, and on a more sustainable basis?
I would not normally rely on John Maynard Keynes to help the cause, but undoubtedly, there is an element of investment; we are seeing plenty of investment by the Government in our economies and in businesses in support of that, not least the £650 billion programme announced by my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor earlier this week, which we estimate will generate an extra 425,000 jobs just in the next few years. We want people to have more take-home pay. That is why we have pursued increases to the national living wage, which is now at 60% of median earnings. The intention is that it will reach 66% of median earnings before the end of this Parliament—and that is just the minimum. We want people to have high-skilled, high-paid jobs, and that is why our plan for jobs is all about helping people take advantage of the support that is there.
Spending £6 billion handing an uplift to all recipients of universal credit, irrespective of their circumstances, was never a targeted way of affecting those people who are most in need. That is why it was temporary. When the Secretary of State comes to the longer term, will she consider the taper and the way that childcare costs are met?
My right hon. Friend is right that it was quite a blunt way of quickly delivering instant support, particularly for those most financially impacted by covid, many of whom were made redundant for the first time in their lives. I am conscious that we have still more to do to try to make sure that people can keep more of what they earn. I also have strong views that we need to continue to try to make best use of the funding that goes into childcare. As my right hon. Friend will know, under universal credit 85% of childcare costs, worth up to £13,000 per family, can be reclaimed. That is higher than that possible under tax credits Coming back to universal credit, the point has been made by hon. Members across the House that it is a dynamic benefit. It supports people in work and out of work, which is exactly what it was designed to do. People are better off working than not working, unless they cannot work. That is why, automatically and instantaneously, when people started to see a change in their working patterns due to the covid pandemic, it responded to the needs of people already in the system. Those affected saw their universal credit payments rise straight away when they lost working hours or found themselves out of work completely. That is a key part of why the UC system is absolutely vital. I am pleased that the Opposition seem at least to have decided to drop their opposition to that, even if it is just to rebrand. Nevertheless, we decided to somewhat cushion the fall of people made redundant.
Does my right hon. Friend not agree that it would be quite nice if the Opposition actually came here and apologised for year after year, in Opposition day debate after Opposition day debate, spreading scare stories and terrifying the poorest and the most vulnerable in the country by telling them that universal credit would not work? When we were under the biggest strain this country has ever faced, universal credit worked. That is a testament to my right hon. Friend, her great Ministers and the thousands of DWP staff up and down the length and breadth of this country.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are still 3 million people on legacy benefits. We estimate that about half of those people would be better off on universal credit and that a significant number of people would see no change, yet the scare stories and the fear that the Opposition generated are why people are still not transitioning across the system. They will do just that now, because this Parliament voted to end legacy benefits; it voted to have universal credit, so we are still, through our action programme, going to move people across to universal credit. I am with my hon. Friend that many people would actually and substantially be almost certainly better off if they moved. For those people, we have to have a managed migration. We have, of course, already put in place a transitional payment.
The Secretary of State said a moment ago that we are spreading scare stories. Can I say to her—she may wish to comment on this—that talking about the very real impact of losing £20 per week for people who are already struggling is not a scare story, but reality?
I recognise what the hon. Lady says. I am talking about the fact that universal credit has been demonised ever since it was introduced, yet people on legacy benefits—about half of them, we believe—would be financially better off if they moved over to universal credit, regardless of the £20. A significant proportion more would see no change to their financial income. People are scared to move over and that is why there is a missed opportunity for them to access some of the support we have today.
I am going to make some more progress and then I will come back to the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) Returning to the crux of the debate, the temporary £20 uplift was an important intervention to help people facing the greatest financial disruption to get the support they needed. It brought the universal credit standard allowance close to the level of statutory sick pay, the minimum amount required to be paid by employers for people who could not work In the Budget earlier this year, recognising that the country was still under restrictions, the Chancellor set out that we would continue covid financial support until autumn, several months after the country came out of lockdown. That helped many people stay on furlough and be connected to their employers as businesses gradually opened, and meant keeping that extra financial support for people on universal credit and tax credits for an extra six months. As our economy continues to recover, it is right that we are investing in jobs and skills to boost pay, prospects and prosperity for people right across the UK as part of our plan to level up and build back better.
On universal credit, I have spoken to dozens and dozens of work coaches all over the country. Every single one of them has told me, without a shadow of a doubt, that universal credit is a better benefit than what was before. It is down to the enthusiasm and the skills of work coaches, to a large extent, that universal credit has been such a success during this very difficult period.
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We already had about 640 jobcentres. We are opening a further 200 by the end of the year, recognising that we need to support more people. Of course, work coaches do not just deal with helping people—people with disabilities and a limited capability to work—to get back into work. Work coaches do a wide variety of work to support some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. Again, I thank him for paying tribute to our work coaches. They will play a key role in the time ahead. Perhaps the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth would like to intervene now?
I would be delighted to, although it is not specifically on work coaches. The right hon. Lady is absolutely right that there are winners and losers with universal credit. Last week, the Select Committee heard from four single parents about how they are the losers. I would add that disabled people are also losers. What is the cumulative impact of the cuts to universal credit, the introduction of the new national insurance contributions payment, the rise in food prices and energy bills, and the childcare costs which we have already heard about? What would the impact be on a single parent with two children living on the minimum wage with support from universal credit?
The hon. Lady will know that every individual or household on universal credit has very distinct relationships, which is why we can find households earning up to nearly £40,000 still being recipients of universal credit. It depends on the circumstances. As the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) said the other day, trying to do some kind of analysis by trying to make individual assessments is just not viable. However, we know, and she knows—
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I will give way to the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions shortly. The hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth must agree with me that the best way to get more pounds into people’s pockets is through work. We have universal credit work allowances for people with children—this may have covered some of the people who gave evidence to the Select Committee—who have a limited capability to work, so they can keep all the extra money they earn until the allowance is used up and the taper rate kicks in. That is why we have given extra support for people who may not currently be working full time. That is an extra way for them to get all the money they earn for more hours.
I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. A care worker or a low-paid public sector worker—for example, a nursery assistant—who works full time, loves their job and has no prospect of a pay raise any time soon, is now about to be told that they will have £20 a week taken away from them. What does she say to those care workers about why that is fair?
The right hon. Lady is right to praise care workers, who played an important part during the covid pandemic. It is my understanding that half a billion pounds of the health and social care levy, which was passed yesterday—the Opposition voted against it—will go to supporting the workforce in the care industry, recognising aspects of skills and pay. I want to put across to the right hon. Lady that we know—there is evidence on this—that where both parents are working full time, 97% of those households are not technically in poverty. That is why we have such emphasis. Households with children working part time are more likely—substantially higher, closer to 42%—to be in poverty. Frankly, five times the rate of people who do not work at all—workless households—are in poverty compared to those who are working. That is why we have worked really hard to reduce the number of workless households. I think there are 650,000 fewer workless households, lifting children out of poverty.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I will make some progress if the hon. Lady will allow We know that the best way to get more pounds into people’s pockets is through work. Those of us on the Conservative Benches believe in a welfare safety net, not a welfare trap, where it feels the Opposition are keen to keep people. We know that work and progressing in a job is the best route out of poverty, and I have spoken about parents working full time. That is why the Government, having provided unprecedented support during the height of the pandemic, are now right to focus on helping people back into work and helping those already in jobs to progress in their career Although the legacy benefits system penalised people for taking on more hours, universal credit ensures that working always pays. We got rid of the cliff edge that was part of working tax credits where people were penalised for working more than 16 hours and of the other cliff edges. I repeat that that is why we have UC work allowances focused on people with children or with limited capability to work, so that they can keep all the extra money that they earn until the allowance is used.
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. She says that universal credit is responsive, but when she announced this cut, we did not know that there would be a 3.2% increase in inflation. My constituents are in work; it is just that the cost of living in York is exceedingly high. This proposal will hit them significantly, so will she take it back and reconsider in the light of inflation rising?
The hon. Lady represents a beautiful city—a magnificent city—and she will know that the jobcentre and our work coaches are working hard there with the communities. In lifting the local housing allowance rates, we made nearly a £1 billion investment, and we have maintained that in cash terms to recognise some of the costs of housing, which are truly challenging in very popular areas such as hers, and I am sure that she will welcome that We are making the most of our 13,500 extra work coaches. Right across the country, we have doubled our jobs army, which is helping people to get into work and to progress in work by accessing skills and job schemes. Our plan for jobs employment programmes are providing tailored support to help more people to move into and progress in work.
Last week, I visited the jobcentre in Warrington and saw for myself the work that the new job coaches are doing, particularly with young people. Does the Secretary of State agree that we need to focus on young people and that that is exactly the work that the kickstart programme is doing?
I agree. Kickstart has so far given over 69,000 young people a foot in the door as they start their working lives. There are more jobs to be filled and we are working with employers to accelerate the recruitment process in that regard We also have a scheme called SWAP—the sector-based work academy programme—where people might consider changing their career. The beauty of SWAP is that it is employer-led. We have helped 64,500 people gain the skills that they need to land a job in a whole range of growing sectors. At the end of the training and work experience, there is a guaranteed job interview.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I will make some progress and then come back to the hon. Lady. We also have the job entry targeted support scheme, which, again, provides tailored support, and 138,000 newly unemployed people have got a leg up that way to make sure that they can try to find sustainable work. The restart scheme has recently started. That will provide intensive help, supporting over 1 million jobseekers who have been out of work for over a year. That is not all, but I will give way to the hon. Lady.
I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. Will she explain to the House why, if everything is reasonable and as it should be, her six predecessor Conservative Secretaries of State for the Department for Work and Pensions have all come out against this cut?
I think it is fair to say that in the letter I saw that my six predecessors had signed—they are magnificent people and it is an honour to follow in their footsteps—they were keen to have the extra financial support that has gone into aspects of the welfare system and to help people in that way. It was not specifically about the £20 but about recognising, as has been said today, that there may be better ways of using that financing. I am conscious that the media may have reported that in a slightly different way and I am not going to put anybody on the spot. However, I think they valued the extra money that went in, and I want to continue to support people.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I will give way to my right hon. Friend, one of the co-authors, but I am conscious that the universal support, alongside universal credit, was a key element of their request.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way again; she is being incredibly generous with her time this afternoon. The central argument of the letter that we sent to the Secretary of State and other colleagues in Government was about trying to retain the investment in universal credit. There are different ways to spend that money. All the evidence that I have seen suggests that investing in the standard allowance gives us more bang for our buck in protecting families against poverty. It was really a last-ditch attempt by me and a number of my colleagues who had served in that Department to persuade the Government to hang on to the crucial extra investment that had been put in at the start of the pandemic and which has made such a powerful difference to so many poor families up and down the country over the last 18 months.
I thank my right hon. Friend. Anybody who has served in this office, including the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), will recognise, for the people we meet daily, as other hon. Members do in their constituencies, what a difference an intervention from a work coach or a decision maker can make to really boost people when they are at their lowest ebb. I do not know whether any hon. Members watched the series “The Yorkshire Jobcentre” on Channel 4. Our social justice team there go above and beyond in trying to help people who have been rejected by the rest of society to get their lives back on track. That is the sort of work we can do. I understand why my right hon. Friend is keen for the welfare budget to still be substantial in supporting such people.
My right hon. Friend is being very generous with her time. She has been talking about work coaches and how these fantastic people can support people into work and the different people they help. Will she tell the House more about how work coaches and universal credit are helping disabled people back into work?
I will. I am pleased to say that I think there are more people with disabilities in work at the end of the pandemic than there were at the beginning. There is a number of things and I encourage my hon. Friend to read the Green Paper on what we have set out as possible ways forward. We want to make elements such as the Access to Work programme work better in terms of potentially being transferrable. In particular, we have some specialist schemes that we target on people with disabilities, and particular efforts are being made to help people with disabilities to access kickstart. We will continue to try to support people with disabilities to make the most of their potential, as we set out in our broader approach in the national disability strategy.
Will the Secretary of State give way?
I will not, because I am conscious that we are nearly an hour into this debate and many hon. Members will want to speak about this important matter Right across Government, we are investing to help people to get better-paid jobs, whether that is through digital boot camps, the lifetime skills guarantee, the £650 billion infrastructure programme that will generate 425,000 jobs, the £8.7 billion affordable homes programme expected to support up to 370,000 jobs, and the green jobs taskforce, which goes from strength to strength as we work our way towards net zero. I have referred to the extra funding through the health and social care levy, which will include support for care workers, but we will not stop as we help people to progress in work. This Conservative Government and Conservative party want people to prosper as we build back better and level up opportunity across the country Tackling poverty through boosting income is one element and we will continue to support people with the cost of living. We have kept the uplift in housing support through the local housing allowance rates, as I mentioned to the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), maintaining it in cash terms this financial year. We spend over £6 billion on supporting childcare, which is equivalent overall to about £5,000 per family. As I said to the House, that can be up to £13,000 per family for people on universal credit We have increased the automation of matching benefit recipients with energy suppliers to make it easier for the warm home discount to be awarded almost automatically. I was very pleased to see that more mobile and broadband suppliers stepped forward with social tariffs for people, which is why I am delighted to let the House know that we are working with those suppliers to make it easier for them to verify the identity of people seeking those special discounts. I am also leading cross-Government action to do more on tackling poverty and the cost of living, which will help many families with their day-to-day costs We have heard that universal credit is flexible and that people are treated individually. I am very aware of the challenges on food insecurity. That is why we included the questions we did in the family resources survey so that we can start to think about how we can direct our policies specifically to those people. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra) was trying to get out of the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), what is accurate—I am pretty sure to say—is that, in 2008, tax credits may have changed, but that was effectively for people in work. What we did not see was a boost in the unemployment benefits, so when the shadow Secretary of State criticises us for putting an extra £20 a week in the pockets of people who were newly unemployed, I do not think that his assertion is defensible One thing that the House may see in a couple of years is that, although in the last year of the last Labour Government we saw a reduction in relative poverty, that was largely driven by the fact that higher-paid people were unemployed—we saw a shrink in relative poverty simply because of a statistical anomaly. We have to deal with real-world facts and make sure that the provision of cash, by helping people with their income, is really the way to help them to get on in work but also to help them with the cost of living.
It is incredibly generous of the Secretary of State to take an intervention from me on the Front Bench, but if relative poverty is what we are measuring—although Conservative MPs have broadly run away from that measure since saying that they would accept it—I have to say that child poverty in the UK is heading towards 5 million under this Government If the Secretary of State wants a discussion about the legacy of 2008, rather than about what is happening today, let me say first that benefits had not been frozen for four years under the Labour Government, so they kept their real-terms value. Secondly, the Secretary of State says that she has put more money into the system, but take the money for housing that she mentioned on Monday. That was not more generosity; it was not a boost; it was funding the level of policy that the Government already had with the 30th percentile. They were not improving on it; they were simply putting in the money that should have been there from the beginning. That is the crucial difference.
The last Labour Government—admittedly that was quite a long time ago and many Members of this House will not have been serving here then—did not build enough homes. Prices were not tackled, money was not well spent and we were left with no money The shadow Secretary of State will be aware that I am not a fan of talking about relative poverty, because it is simply a statistical element. However, since 2010, there have been 60,000 fewer children in absolute poverty before housing costs. Children living in workless households were around five times more likely to be in absolute poverty last year than those in households in which all adults worked. We know that full-time work reduces the chance of being in poverty. Overall, there are also 220,000 fewer pensioners in absolute poverty.
When we talk about the legacy of the last Labour Government, we must never forget the sky-high rates of youth unemployment that we inherited from them. Will my right hon. Friend commit to carrying on the brilliant work that she has done to reduce youth unemployment in the midst of this crisis?
My hon. Friend will be conscious that we are making progress right across the country in tackling that issue. I am conscious that we intend to level up. That is why we are doing a lot of work to make sure that communities right around the country, as well as in her great constituency of Sevenoaks, can take advantage of the schemes so that they can get on and prosper With the economy rebounding, now is the time to trust in our track record, which delivered the highest ever employment levels before the pandemic. We know that work and progressing in work are the best route out of poverty. We now have a unique opportunity, with more than 1 million vacancies in the labour market, to help people to move into new and better-paid jobs or to progress in their existing job, raising their earnings and building their financial resilience. We will continue to deliver our plan for jobs, because as we build back better and fairer, a working Britain is at the heart of a Britain that works.
It will be obvious to the House that a great many Members wish to catch my eye. I do not think that there will be time for everyone, but we will start with a time limit of five minutes—which, of course, does not apply to the spokesman for the SNP, David Linden.
I want to begin by describing the importance of this debate: “There are plenty of times where I’m getting such bad hunger pains that I can barely move I can last for a while without eating. I’ve been trying to put my mind off the hunger by either doing exercise, or maybe doing a bit of work on my computer.” That is a quote from Morgan. He is 23 and has spent six months sleeping on friends’ sofas and occasionally on the street. He is currently suffering from severe depression that impacts on his ability to work. As a universal credit claimant, Morgan has stated that the proposal to cut the £20 uplift is “literally like taking food off my table.” That is the reality of life in Tory Britain—the reality of a decade of austerity measures and cuts to social security. Morgan is just one of 5,917,053 people, because that is the number of people who are relying on the £20 uplift to universal credit. Throughout this debate, when we inevitably get drawn into the hurly-burly of parliamentary politics, I want us all to keep in mind Morgan and the nearly 6 million people we are talking about, because it is their livelihoods that are on the line and their financial security that is at risk We are not talking in hypotheticals. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report lays it bare: cutting the universal credit uplift will plunge 500,000 people into poverty overnight. We all know the impact that the universal credit uplift has had on claimants. The additional £20 per week has been monumental in helping families get by. Audrey Flannagan, who runs the Glasgow SE food bank in my home city, recently told the media: “If you look at the impact it”— the universal credit uplift— “has had on the food bank, last year in the first three months from January to March we saw 601 single people pre the £20 uplift. January to March this year, we saw 151 single people. That’s a massive difference, not all because of the £20 uplift, but a lot will be because of the £20 uplift.” The uplift to universal credit was desperately needed before the pandemic, and its impact can be seen right across the voluntary sector The British Government now have the opportunity to address the failures of universal credit and truly help those who are most vulnerable as we seek to recover from the pandemic. The first step should be to make the £20 uplift to universal credit permanent; indeed, it should also have been extended to those on legacy benefits, who have been so cruelly overlooked and left behind by this Government I have heard Ministers defending removing the uplift by repeating the line that it is best for people to get back into work rather than rely on benefits. In fact, the Chancellor himself has said that “going forward, my view and the government’s point of view is the best way to help people is to help them into work and make sure those jobs are well paid” That only goes to show just how little Tory Ministers know about the benefit that they pontificate on. For their benefit, I will explain Universal credit supports both those unemployed and those employed on a low income. More than a third of people claiming universal credit are in employment. Of the nearly 6 million people on universal credit, 2.3 million are actually employed. On top of that, a great number of those employed claiming universal credit are parents. The latest figures show that roughly 1.9 million families with children will see their benefits cut at the end of this month The Child Poverty Action Group has stated that the number of poor children in working families is on the rise. Even before the pandemic, there were 4.3 million children growing up in poverty in the UK. That is nine children in a classroom of 30—a shocking indictment of Tory Britain. The proposed cut to universal credit will put a further 200,000 children into poverty, including those in working families. It is simply unthinkable.
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about the impact on families of low-paid workers. We heard this morning that inflation has now gone up to 3.2%. Workers in my constituency now face an increase in national insurance and higher food costs. They are already facing higher heating costs, and let us not forget that many people in rural constituencies are off the grid for electricity and gas, so it is more expensive for them anyway. This cut to universal credit, according to the Government’s own advice, will cause a catastrophe. Does he agree that, for families in constituencies such as mine, the catastrophe will be even bigger?
My hon. Friend’s constituency was one of the earliest areas where universal credit was rolled out, so he is familiar with it, and as a highland MP he is acutely aware of the much higher energy bills. The universal credit cut will probably mean a choice between heating and eating this winter for people in his Inverness constituency. He is right to put that on the record, and I hope that Members who represent constituencies in other parts of rural Scotland will bear that in mind, particularly on the Conservative Benches. It is simply unthinkable that the UK Government are even considering this policy. All MPs must consider whether they want it on their conscience when the Division bell rings tonight. Whether or not someone claiming universal credit is in employment, the £20 uplift is vital to their income. To quote Morgan again: “We should not have had to have gone through a pandemic just to get that increase” Morgan is right. The most vulnerable people in our society had been suffering for decades, long before the pandemic hit these shores. Years of austerity have deepened the inequality and poverty in our society, and the pandemic has only magnified those pre-existing inequalities. Years of austerity have deepened the inequality and poverty in our society, and the pandemic has only magnified those pre-existing inequalities in our welfare system A decade of Tory rule has left workers, on average, £l,000 a year worse off. Analysis by the Office for National Statistics shows that, when inflation is taken into account, the average wage is worth less in 2021 than it was in 2010. Despite the continual Tory mantra that getting people into work is the best route out of poverty, wages continue to fall, and austerity continues to deepen inequalities. The pandemic has only served to bookend the decades of cruel welfare cuts and truly highlight how inadequate support has been.
Does my hon. Friend share my concern about the fact that, while much of the debate focuses on young people and people with children, older people, particularly older single people, will be affected by this cut as well? I have a 60-year-old female constituent with a mortgage whose hours of work have been cut from full-time to 26 hours a week. At her age, it will be hard for her to find more work, and she tells me that losing this uplift will mean the difference between keeping and having to give up the home that she has worked so hard to pay for.
My hon. and learned Friend is right to place on record the impact of the pandemic on not just young people but women in particular, especially older women. On Monday we will have before us a Bill that suspends the triple lock; that is another betrayal of a manifesto commitment from the Conservatives—something that may not come as a surprise to those of us on these Benches I want to emphasise the sheer number of organisations that are campaigning for this uplift to be kept in place. One hundred organisations, including charities, children’s doctors, public health experts and research groups, have signed a letter calling on the Prime Minister to abandon the plans to cut universal credit. One such signatory was Bright Blue, a Conservative think-tank; some on the Government Benches are members of that very think-tank. We have also seen a letter signed by no fewer than six previous Conservative Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions who have condemned the proposed cuts. All the devolved Governments have also called for the £20 uplift to remain Analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that more than a third of working-age families in 413 parliamentary constituencies will be hit by the cut. Of those, 191 are represented by Tory MPs. The Scottish Conservative MPs on the Benches opposite me—if they have bothered to turn up for the debate—will know the consequences of the universal credit cut that they plan to reaffirm tonight. They know the statistics; they know the threat of poverty that hangs over their constituents; and yet they do not care In Moray, 6,110 households will be at risk of sliding into poverty. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the hon. Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) clearly does not care. In West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, 3,620 households will be going into winter facing harsh decisions between heating and eating. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) does not care. In Banff and Buchan, 6,280 households will have to face relying on foodbanks to feed themselves this winter. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid), does not care. In Dumfries and Galloway, 8,190 households will experience huge anxiety and worry over their financial futures, which will take an immense toll on their mental health. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the right hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Jack) , does not care In Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, 7,150 households will have their incomes slashed by £1,040, a figure that has become increasingly necessary during the difficult months of the pandemic. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) does not care. In Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, 6,050 households will be victims of this heartless Tory austerity policy, which will cement poverty and inequality in that community for years to come. If he does not vote for the motion tonight, the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) does not care. It will be clear that the Scottish Conservatives do not care about some of the most vulnerable people in our constituencies.
My hon. Friend has set out a powerful series of facts. Given what he has just said, does he agree that it is interesting that the Tories in the Scottish Parliament make great play of trying to address the attainment gap, something which cannot be done as long as children are living in poverty? The House of Commons Library tells us that inequality in Britain has been the worst in north-west Europe in every year of the 21st century for which figures are available.
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the difference between what the Conservatives say in the Scottish Parliament and what they do—that is, in Westminster, probably not vote for this motion tonight. Of course, there is a wider question: what is the purpose of devolution? Is it meant to be a sticking plaster for bad social security policy coming out of Westminster? The Scottish Government can introduce measures such as the game-changing Scottish child payment, and can go further and double that, but if the Government vote for this cut tonight, it will mean that the Scottish child payment is essentially nullified, and that will be in the hands of Scottish Conservative MPs.
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point about the families who will be affected by this cut. I believe that my constituency holds the record, with 63% of working age families with children who will be affected. Does my hon. Friend agree that, no matter how hard charities, Glasgow SE Foodbank, the local authority and the Scottish Government try to help mitigate that, the cuts from the Tories are so deep that families in my constituency will go hungry this winter, and the Tories will not lift a finger to do anything about it?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to the work that she has done in trying to lobby the Chancellor, who appears to have decided that he will deploy the politics of Margaret Thatcher and pit people against each other. Unfortunately, it is my hon. Friend’s constituents who will feel the wrath of that The British Government need to face the reality of what the cut will mean for people across these islands. Slashing universal credit will impose the largest overnight cut in the basic rate of social security since the modern welfare state began. It will mean millions of families being plunged into poverty, facing real financial hardship as we go into the cold, harsh winter months. So when the Division bell rings tonight, my party will vote Aye to this motion, and we will continue to push for these cuts to be cancelled. However, it is increasingly clear that independence is the only way to keep Scotland safe from the cruel Tory cuts that only seek to deepen inequalities and poverty in our communities Independence will guarantee Scotland the full powers needed to build a strong, fair, and equal economy, while eradicating poverty and supporting the most vulnerable people in our communities. So yes, we will vote for the motion on the Order Paper tonight, but I suspect that the only vote that will truly end the ongoing Tory assault on social security is a vote for Scottish independence in the upcoming referendum, and, frankly, it cannot come fast enough.
Order. We now have a time limit of five minutes. I call Stephen Crabb.
I will keep my remarks fairly short. My views have not really changed since the last time we debated and voted on this issue. On that occasion I voted against the Government for the first time ever, because I felt so strongly about the course of action that we were intending to follow and the impact that it would have on workers on low incomes and their families up and down the country The truth about the pandemic is that it has not been a time of increased hardship for everyone. For the lucky few, it has been something of a gold rush; for large numbers of other people, it has been a period of reduced household expenditure and increased household savings. Many people have become richer during the pandemic. However, those are not the people we are talking about this afternoon. Many of the people we are talking about this afternoon carried on working throughout the pandemic. They did not enjoy furlough, or some of the comforts of working from home. Typically, these were people working in supermarkets, doing cleaning jobs or working in the care sector. I believe that as the modern Conservative party, we should be standing on the side of people like that: people who go out to work, who choose to work, and who want to improve their circumstances. I was surprised when the standard allowance was increased by £20 a week; I had not seen it coming. I was delighted when it was increased, but I was surprised that it had been increased by that amount, and it was not immediately clear to me why the amount in question had been chosen. I must confess that I am not sure that the Government have been very clear about why they picked it, unless it constitutes a recognition that the standard allowance in March 2020 was too low to provide anything like a decent, respectable level of income replacement as an out-of-work benefit. It is that question of adequacy to which I think we will return time and again during the remainder of this Parliament I came to the view a while ago that the level of universal credit in March 2020 was too low. One of the key reasons that it was too low involved decisions that I was part of in 2015 to begin freezing that benefit and seeing the value of it eroded at the time. I used some of the exact same language and arguments when I was doing her job that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State used this afternoon at the Dispatch Box. The assumption at the time was that we were in a time of almost full employment, and we assumed that there would be a virtuous cycle of wage increases and that people would be living demonstrations that work was the very best route out of poverty. That did not happen. Instead, we saw an increase in in-work poverty, and that fact should be profoundly troubling to those of us on this side who really believe that work is the best route out of poverty. I fear that we are in danger of repeating the same cycle of assumptions that were proved incorrect last time One reason that in-work poverty increased in the years leading up to the pandemic was, I am afraid, directly related to the fact that we had frozen the main rate of working-age benefits that supported families on low incomes. If we look at the data and the evidence, that conclusion is unavoidable. Anyone who thinks that we have generous benefits in this country is wrong. If we look at this internationally or historically, there is no way we can describe UK benefits as generous. We do not have generous benefits. I do worry—this has come across a bit in the debate this afternoon—about the view that if we can only make welfare just that bit tougher and more uncomfortable for the families who rely on it, we will get better engagement with the labour market and see more people going out to work. The evidence does not point to that either. It shows that a family living in destitution and with anxiety and mental health problems that are a direct result of their financial circumstances is less well able to engage with the labour market productively or to increase its earnings or its hours I know that the views of No. 10 and the Treasury are firmly locked down on this, but this is not going to be the end of the matter. We are going to keep coming back to talk about this issue for the remainder of this Parliament.
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
I will give way just to give myself a bit more time.
The right hon. Gentleman is certainly making a very valid point. Does he agree that, with one in four children in Northern Ireland growing up in food poverty and with 22% in fuel poverty, this proposed cut along with the increase in national insurance contributions will plunge people into further poverty and that the Government need to cease with this plan and support the most vulnerable in our society?
The hon. Lady makes a strong point We on this side of the House do not believe that benefits alone are a route out of poverty. We emphasise things like work and the importance of education, but what a scandal it is that we are still churning out so many 16, 17 and 18-year-olds whom employers reject and do not want to see because they do not see them as fit for work. We also emphasise the role of communities and the importance of family structure and role models. These are all things that can help to move people out of poverty, and we are not wrong to do that. The Labour party is guilty of over-emphasising the important tool of social security, but I say to my colleagues on the Government Benches that we should not make the mistake of overlooking the importance of good welfare policy. This is not about being wet on fiscal discipline or about being Labour-lite. It is about recognising what is good, responsible social policy, and I am clear in my mind that this sudden, abrupt withdrawal of the £20 uplift that millions of families will experience in the coming weeks is not the right way of doing welfare policy.
I very much welcome the argument that the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) has just set out, and I am grateful to him for reaffirming his support for the £20 a week rise. Like him, I want to focus on the question of adequacy If this cut goes ahead, it will reduce real-terms support for an out-of-work family to the lowest level since Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. The economy has grown by more than 50% in real terms since then, but the Government’s proposal is that support for unemployed families should not have grown at all over those 30 years. That support will be about one seventh of average earnings, which is, as I said in my intervention on the Secretary of State, the lowest proportion of average earnings it has been since 1948. The Secretary of State made no attempt to justify why it was so low. I invited her to do so, but she did not, and of course it cannot be justified. The House of Commons Library tells us that, if we go back to 1911 when unemployment benefit was introduced, it was set at a higher level as a proportion of average earnings than the system will deliver if this cut goes ahead. The cut will take effect just as we are seeing prices surge, including food prices, as we have seen in today’s inflation figures, and energy bills, with the Ofgem price cap lifted The Work and Pensions Committee heard last week from a lone father of two children who told us what this was going to mean for him: “The uplift sent some relief and for that to be removed is going to leave us with that big question again: do I go hungry, do my kids go hungry or do we keep the house warm?” Somebody worrying about how to buy their next meal is not going to be able to focus on finding a decent job. Taking away £20 a week will leave the level of support below the basic minimum that is needed and that we require the system to provide The cut will hit working families hard as well. The Committee heard from working lone parents who will lose £86 a month from their income. One of them told us that “if one of the children gets a party invite—which some weeks is my worst nightmare because then I have to find the money for them to be able to do that—it is kind of a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul all of the time anyway. There have been months where I have to decide which bill I am not going to pay this month...you are constantly playing catch-up on utilities particularly...The extra £86 a month has allowed for us not to be doing that so much.” And that is a parent who is in full-time employment. If this cut goes ahead, it will reduce support for working parents and unemployed parents below the basic minimum that we all want people to have to enable them to look for a job, or for a better job, and to care for their children—things we all want them to do. We will instead be imposing grinding hardship on a very large number of people at a time of surging costs and inflation. Taking away the £20 a week now will mean that the level of support provided will be less in real terms, given today’s inflation figures, than the support that was available going into the pandemic The Government have lost touch with what people are having to deal with. The Secretary of State’s claim that people could make up the extra £20 a week by working an extra two hours is simply wrong. Governments do lose touch, but this House must not. We must retain a recognition of the realities that people are dealing with. We need to grasp what this will do to families, even though Ministers do not. It is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet. Half of those claiming universal credit only started doing so during the pandemic. They are not returning to their former level of support. Many will have to get used to a lower income than they have ever had to cope with, and that will come as a rude shock to those who were convinced at the 2019 election, maybe for the first time, that the Conservative party understood what they were dealing with. Every former Work and Pensions Secretary since 2010 opposes the cut, as the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire reminded us. It will leave the system unable to do the job we need it to do, and the House must reject this cut.
The right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) talked about people finding jobs and finding better jobs, so I thought I would start by talking about what is happening in the jobs market at the moment. We have seen increasing wage growth and vacancies at a 20-year high, with 1 million vacancies in this country. We have also seen almost record low unemployment—lower than in the US, France and Canada. Those are exactly the kind of market conditions that we want to see to help people to find better jobs. They show how that the plan for jobs—that £400 billion of support that we put into the labour market—has worked. It also shows that we have 2 million fewer people in unemployment than expected. Surely that is one of the best ways to reduce poverty in this country.
I am glad that the hon. Lady is keen to talk about statistics. She will be aware that 2,849 people in her East Surrey constituency are claiming universal credit while in employment. What will she say to them when she marches through the Lobby this afternoon to choose to take £20 a week off their money?
I will talk about the things that I already talk about with them: the youth hub and the work coaches that the Department for Work and Pensions has put into my constituency to help people into work, and the jobs that we are creating in the local economy, which are helping people into work Secondly, on skills, not only have we introduced the kickstart scheme, which is helping 2,500 young people a week into the quality jobs we want to see them in, but we have introduced a lifetime skills guarantee. We have improved schools during our period in government, going from two thirds of children being in good and outstanding schools to 86% of children. We have increased the number of job coaches and the amount of money going into apprenticeships and traineeships. These will all set people up to have a good job and a good life We are also looking at the root causes of poverty. I assume the Labour party would support the national living wage, which is an extra £5,400 going into people’s pockets since 2010. We are doing things like the troubled families programme and the reducing parental conflict programme, about which I am particularly passionate because, unlike some Opposition Members, I think relationships, not just financial benefits, are one of the best ways to help people out of poverty. That is really important I also highlight some of the inconsistencies I have heard today, which I find quite troubling. The Labour party would keep the triple lock, with its 8% rise funded by working-age people. [Interruption.] Let me go through what is happening: 2.5% last year, 2.5% or more this year and back to the triple lock next year. The Labour party would keep it at 8%, funded by working-age people—£5 billion out of their pockets Let us talk about pay rises for those who helped us during the pandemic, which the Labour party voted against yesterday. Let us talk about taxes.
National insurance, there’s one.
Yes, a tax that the Labour party raised in 2003. [Interruption.]
Order. We cannot have shouting from Members who are sitting down. If the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) wishes to intervene, she should stand up and ask to intervene.
Let us talk about taxes. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that the 2017 manifesto on which many Labour Members stood contained the highest taxes in peacetime—£80 billion-worth of taxes—and that was before the pandemic, so I find it surprising that they are trying to paint themselves as the party of low taxes. I do not think anyone in the country will believe that The vision we are trying to present to communities in this country is one of jobs, wages, growth and investment, and those communities are now voting for us because they buy into that vision. Look at people like Ben Houchen, the Teesside Mayor—that is what he is bringing to those communities. That is what people are looking for, and I believe it is the best route out of poverty.
On the face of it, today’s debate is about how we want to protect people’s incomes and stave off the threat of poverty for future generations but, scratching beneath the surface, we see what is really happening. The UK Tory Government have lost sight of what modern work means. They no longer understand the economy in which we live and how to implement policies that futureproof the world of work for tomorrow. In short, they have become stuck in the past, again When the Conservative party introduced universal credit, with the support of the Liberal Democrats, it heralded it as a panacea for poverty in the UK, but we have seen UC used as a vehicle for cuts to working wages. Today is no different. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, repeatedly stoked the idea that those in receipt of welfare were out of work and should be punished, and that they should be ashamed of receiving additional support even when they were in work. Apart from being morally reprehensible, that is utterly wrong. Although the current Chancellor has better polish than the former, he is taking exactly the same path, a path that leads to poverty and the degradation of our local economies In my Ogmore constituency, we currently have 7,060 households in receipt of universal credit or working tax credits. Of those, 36% are in work, but the figure I want Ministers to listen to most carefully is that 4,731 children in Ogmore live in a home receiving universal credit. When Conservative Members vote this afternoon, I ask them to remember those 4,731 children whose families will face hardship. Those children have done nothing to deserve the cut that the Conservatives are pushing on their families, apart from being born into hard-working families who are often already working full time and just need this small piece of additional support that goes so far to ensure that their children can eat or live in a warm house. That is today’s modern Conservative party These numbers may seem abstract and distant, but each one represents a family who will lose £1,040 a year due to the decision made by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. That in turn will snatch £7.3 million from my constituency, which is money that would have been spent in local businesses that in turn could continue to employ their staff and hopefully expand The pandemic has shown us the power of Government—the power of collective risk and shared reward. These are not just high ideals, they are policies that have been put into action by the Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff with self-isolation payments, financial support for utility bills, free financial advice and debt advice, the discretionary assistance fund, the covid-19 statutory sick pay enhancement scheme, the economic resilience fund and the most generous business rates relief anywhere in the UK. All of this has been done by a Labour Government who understand the modern world, the modern economy and modern household budgets. Comparing this forward thinking with that of the UK Government, we see a stark difference between a Welsh Government who care and a Westminster Government who have no interest. The world of work is now more insecure, with a rise in zero-hours contracts and agency work being the main driver. The UK Government have rejected calls to overhaul this outdated system and make it one that rewards hard work. Instead, they cling to the outdated dogma that cutting UC will give people the incentive to earn more, despite the fact that many people in receipt of UC are already working full time. Are people meant not to care for their children or see their family? Are they meant to work every weekend? Is this the modern Conservative party?
My hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful speech that very much reflects the experience of my constituents in Cardiff South and Penarth. Does he agree that these people are also having to deal with a huge increase in food, fuel and energy prices? We are seeing inflation at record levels, having jumped to the highest rate since 1997. These people are having to spend more of their income, at the time of this cut in UC, on food, fuel and other essential items.
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Today’s figures show that the Government are out of kilter with what is happening to constituents across the land. Do Conservative Members not do a weekly shop like their constituents? Do they not see that prices are rising, whether on fuel or food? These things makes a huge difference, and the Conservative party is condemning families to have less in their back pocket as we approach the autumn and winter months. This afternoon Conservative Members will march through the Lobby and pretend it has no impact on their constituents. You could not make it up, Madam Deputy Speaker There are only so many hours in the day. Where are these people meant to find the hours to make up for the cut that the Conservatives are pushing through in the coming weeks? This is why we have seen poverty skyrocket across the country. The cut to UC is simply an old idea imposed on a new generation. If the Government were serious about tackling structural problems in our national economy, they would get to grips with low productivity rates and support investment led by communities, not Whitehall Yet again, the Government’s actions stand in stark contrast to their rhetoric. They claim to be levelling up—it would be funny if it was not so serious—but in truth they seek only a race to the bottom. Conservative Members will show their true colours again this afternoon in voting for stale economic thinking, whereas Labour Members will show a fresh alternative for the future of work.
I am an enthusiastic supporter of the levelling-up agenda. It is a flagship Conservative policy, it was a key part of the 2019 manifesto, and it is very much built on the concept of the northern powerhouse, which was established in 2014. The levelling-up agenda can change lives and communities. People often ask what “levelling up” actually means. I think it is quite simple: the goal is to improve people’s lives. To achieve that, clearly there will be a number of initiatives, on infrastructure—road, rail and broadband; better housing; an improved environment; better health outcomes; and the skills and education agenda, which we cannot get away from and which is vital. In my view, it is also about raising income levels, particularly for the lowest paid. We have achieved much on that over the past 10 years: personal allowances have risen considerably above inflation; council tax rises have been suppressed, particularly in the early years of the Conservative Administrations; the minimum wage has gone up substantially above inflation, improving people’s take-home pay; and, most importantly of all, we have seen the creation of thousands, if not millions, of jobs over the past 10 years, which Conservative Members believe is the best way out of poverty. More money in people’s pockets creates greater freedom for individuals and their families, and can help those families to live better lives Last year, along came the pandemic, and the Government’s response has been terrific: the furlough scheme has been brilliant; other supporting measures, on rates and other funding initiatives, have been very beneficial and supportive to the economy, to communities and to individuals; and of course we have had the £20 a week increase in universal credit Universal credit itself has been a huge success. It coped extremely well in the pandemic, with the many tens of thousands of applications that all came surging at one point. All credit to the jobcentres up and down the country, and I give full credit to Department for Work and Pensions Ministers for the great job they have done. At the time, the Government said that the measures would be temporary, probably believing that they would last only six months or thereabouts. However, £20 a week—or £1,000 a year—has made a real difference to real families up and down the country, and we must remember that 40% of people on UC are in work, 35% of those on UC are actually seeking work, and probably half of those on UC at present have never known anything other than the rate they are currently receiving; they have got used to having it. Let us imagine somebody on £30,000 a year being told that they are having to take a £1,000 salary cut—they would not be in the least bit happy. This is even harder for those who are on less There are consequences of such a cut for the economy of the local areas. In Carlisle, my constituency, there are 8,870 people on UC, so it will take £9 million out of the local economy. I am very conscious that that money would be directly spent in the local economy. I appreciate that the uplift has a considerable cost and fully accept that the Chancellor has some challenging decisions ahead. I am a fiscal conservative and will be supporting many of the measures the Chancellor will undoubtedly have to bring forward. However, I very much believe in the levelling-up agenda, which is one of the great strategic policies of the Conservatives. I fully engage with it and want to support it, and a key part of improving the standard of living of families and individuals is levelling up. As I said at the beginning, it is about improving people’s lives, and retaining the uplift would help to improve many people’s lives. I will therefore support this motion.
As we have heard, the Government’s plan to scrap the £20 UC uplift is causing a great deal of worry and concern for millions of working people across the UK and thousands of my constituents in Halifax. As the Leader of the Opposition outlined at today’s Prime Minister’s questions, this cut is punishing countless essential key workers, who through the weeks and months of lockdowns performed essential and frontline roles, while remaining exposed to the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic The Government may seek to present this as a post-pandemic return to normal, but only yesterday the Health Secretary made it clear in his statement that we are not yet at normal, that the need to manage the risks of the colder winter months was very real, and that further measures may continue to be sought as part of a plan B, as we all keep a very close eye on the data. Instead, this is in reality the biggest overnight cut to a benefit rate in the history of the welfare state, and it is having to be shouldered by working people According to analysis from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, on average 21% of all working age families in Great Britain will experience a cut of more than £1,000 to their yearly incomes, with the midlands and the north of England hardest hit. In Halifax, it is estimated that 56% of working families with children will be affected by the cut. The relationship between this cut and the financial resilience and wellbeing of those families, and the knock-on effect for the fragile, recovering, local economy, is desperately real. Those families do not have the money, meaning it is not spent in local shops or with local service providers. This is a double blow, coming at exactly the wrong time for families and for the economy Universal credit is an in-work benefit, and the prevalence of low-paid work is the elephant in the room here. I have long campaigned for an end to the youth rates of the minimum wage, which devalue work undertaken by young people. The Labour party would put a stop to that injustice. A report last year from the Government’s own Social Mobility Commission concluded that there are now 600,000 more children living in relative poverty than there were in 2012. Evidence published earlier this year by the Child Poverty Action Group, also based on Government figures, revealed that after housing costs are accounted for, about 3.8 million children, nearly a third of all children in the UK, are growing up in poverty Do this Government believe these cuts will impact negatively or positively on these utterly depressing numbers? Polling published by Save the Children shows that three quarters of families with children on UC have a child under 10, and that 47% of UC claimants do not think they will be able to get by on a budget of £20 less a week. This cut will mean that during the formative years of children’s lives many families will have to make fraught decisions, where they are faced with making a choice about which essentials they can and cannot afford to pay for The comments made by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about £20 being the equivalent of two extra hours of work per week do not reflect the reality of the situation in my constituency. My office has received a number of often frantic representations from people who have limited capability for work and limited capability for work-related activity, and are therefore not expected to undertake the work commitments expected of other UC claimants. These individuals are not required to work, let alone work extra hours, and yet are also having their payments cut. One constituent contacted my office, saying: “Until I was forced on to UC, I was receiving ESA…My partner moved in with me and as he was working full time, we were moved onto UC in October 2017. However; my husband suddenly fell ill in April 2019 and was assessed as having limited capability for work. I have two teenage children who also live with us. I have heard the government discussing the withdrawal of this temporary support…today. Their response is that UC is designed to encourage claimants back to work and that they can make up the loss; but I’ve not heard anything about those of us who are unable to go to work due to ill health and what support there is in place for people like my husband and I who cannot work and who need to provide care for each other and financially support our family.” As we have heard from so many today, the planned cut of the £20 to UC is nothing but a further development in this Government’s self-defeating attitude towards working people. Instead of lifting people out of poverty, they are content to allow the UC system to see claimants remain in a perpetual cycle of in-work insecurity.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) This is not a decision anybody or any Government take lightly. Members in all parts of the House are right to raise the real-life cases to which they refer; these are our constituents and the people we are sent here to represent. I have the greatest respect for the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb), and for my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson), who I know feels strongly on this subject. He talked about the need to level up through raising real wages. I totally agree with him on that, and I will be coming back to that point However, I wish to start by focusing on the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds). I have a lot of time for him. He puts his case in a very reasonable tone, and I am sure he feels as passionately about his views as I do about mine. His argument was, in essence, that Conservative Members do not understand the benefits system and the fact that some people in work receive these benefits. That is very far from the truth. Let me share with him my real-world experience. I have put this point on the record several times in these debates, because it is incredibly important to understand this Before becoming an MP, I ran a small business. We decided to award pay rises, and I was shocked when three members of staff declined: one declined the actual pay rise and the other two would not work more than 16 hours. I admit that at that point I did not know about the tax credits system—I had never claimed on it myself and I had not employed people on it—but I then discovered the hard reality of its cliff edges. When two skilled members of staff said to me, “James, I’m sorry but I just can’t do more than 16 hours because of this cliff edge,” I realised the insanity of that—of the state spending billions to put a ceiling on people’s working life and ambitions and on the limits to what they can achieve We should never have any ceiling on ambition; we should always seek to enable people to make the most of the natural talents with which everyone is born. That is a fundamental view that I hold, so although this issue is very difficult—I accept that people will be affected, including in my constituency—the Government are, fundamentally, doing the right thing. We have to consider three key points, the first of which is the impact on individuals, which is the hardest part. It is a question of the extent to which one has faith that individuals can work the extra hours, and that in a vibrant economy with 1.2 million vacancies they can recover that income—and far more, over time—either by working more hours if they are in work or, if they do not have a job, by moving into work.
Just short of two hours ago, the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), asked the hon. Gentleman how many households in his constituency will be affected by this cut; has he been able to work that out in the past two hours? If he does not know that figure, it would be reckless for him to go through the Lobby today and vote for this cut to his constituents.
That was quite an odd moment because, as the hon. Gentleman will have noticed, I intervened on the shadow Secretary of State and, slightly cheekily, he then intervened on me, in a completely novel form of Commons procedure. No, I do not know that figure off the top of my head. I represent those households in this House and I know some of them, and we all know that this change will cause issues. This is not an easy decision, and, as I said at the beginning of my speech, it is not taken lightly, but I have faith in our economy. There are 1.2 million vacancies and the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises—such as me—and the owners of big businesses are crying out for labour. They are desperate for staff On 5 August, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, said something incredibly important: “The challenge of avoiding a steep rise in unemployment has been replaced by that of ensuring a flow of labour into jobs.” What a position to be in. At the start of the pandemic, we were all fearful that we would see a huge rise in unemployment—probably one of the biggest in generations. The peak was predicted to be 2 million higher; that is an entire recession’s worth of unemployment. I am proud of what we have achieved in keeping unemployment far lower than that, because it is so damaging On the impact on individuals, therefore, we must look to the economy and the extent to which people can work the extra hours to make up the lost income, which I am confident people can. The second key point is the impact on the public finances. It would be extraordinary for us, who are charged with being in Parliament to hold the Executive to account for the moneys they raise, not to consider that impact. The hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde said from the Labour Front Bench that we could use the headroom to fund the £6 billion, which basically means borrowing the money. But this commitment will be permanent. The hon. Gentleman wants to use what is potentially a short-term position in the public finances to fund a permanent increase in the welfare state Here is the context. Labour has said that, one way or the other, it will keep the triple lock—perhaps not the exact scheme, but it would cost several billion pounds more than the cost of the decision we have made. Labour has also said that it would keep the overseas development spend at 0.7%. Those commitments amount to more than £10 billion, and possibly to £15 billion. It is not good enough simply to say, “Use the headroom.” We know what happened when we had a Labour Government who were irresponsible with public money: we had the great recession and all that that meant for people’s livelihoods and for the poorest in society in particular The third key point is the impact on the wider economy. As the Governor of the Bank of England said in the quote that I read out, the issue that we now have is not mass unemployment, as we all feared, but a lack of workers. In many ways, that brings its own headaches. Going back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle, the upside is that we could be moving into a new era in which those on lower wages see much higher real-terms pay growth than they would otherwise have had. That is an incredibly important development. The focus of Government policy should be to improve real wages, bring unemployment down even further, manage the public finances responsibly and drive the economic recovery forward. That is the correct thing to do.
Like many MPs, I have heard from many constituents who are dreading the day, in less than a month from now, when they will lose the uplift they are relying on to feed themselves and their families and to pay their bills. The £20 a week is the difference between them holding their heads above water or not. The people who have written to me—some single parents, some living with a disability, but all struggling to manage despite working long hours—struggled to make ends meet even before the pandemic struck Analysis by Centrepoint shows that the cutting of benefits next month will hit young people the hardest. The charity has warned that there will be more homelessness when people will have to choose between eating, paying their rent, feeding themselves or feeding their children. It is truly shocking that so many people in the UK and in my constituency are grappling with the reality of these cruel choices every day A single mother wrote to me to say: “It cannot be right for the Government to take away £20 a week from the precarious incomes of families like mine. Instead, it should keep it and ensure that families on legacy benefits are no longer excluded…While I realise some of these measures have to stop now life is returning to normal for many people, there will still be a high number of people like me who will be left struggling to get by. I am very stressed about the prospect of facing a financial crisis and possibly even destitution and homelessness due to this cliff edge in support.” When the Chancellor announced uplifts to universal credit and working tax credit in March 2020, it was an admission that welfare levels were not adequate to protect families from poverty after a decade of cuts and freezes. In Great Britain, 4.3 million children are living in poverty. That is a shameful number, and I fear that sometimes we do not visualise the trauma, pain and everyday struggles behind such numbers—parents whose bank accounts are emptied on payday, once bills and rent or mortgage costs are covered, leaving the long month ahead over which to stretch the pittance left to cover all other costs I would like to know which living costs are going down to mitigate the loss of the uplifts, because we are all experiencing the costs of this Government’s policies. Prices are going up. Food retailers are fighting to keep their prices down as far as possible, but mounting pressures from rising commodity and shipping costs, as well as Brexit-related red tape, mean that their efforts will not be sustainable for much longer, and food price rises are here to stay The cut to universal credit and working tax credits will be the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the foundation of the modern welfare state. Cutting them now, when all other Government support nets that were introduced to help us through the pandemic are also ending, and when some of the poorest in society will disproportionately bear the Government’s new tax levy, is illogical and will be unnecessarily devastating to many of my constituents. It is short-sighted and should be reversed.
At the start of the pandemic, the Government were right to move very fast, without any prompting, to introduce the £20 uplift to universal credit. Now that we are hopefully in the tail end of the pandemic, it would be wrong to hastily remove the uplift. Yes, there is a need to be fiscally responsible and balance the books, and thus policies are being introduced in this September sitting that sit uncomfortably with many of us. However, at the same time we have a duty and a responsibility to protect those on the lowest incomes and the most vulnerable in society. All the evidence shows that a sudden reduction in income of this magnitude will hit a lot of people very hard Before the introduction of the uplift, the annual uprating of universal credit had been frozen for four years. Now, looking forward, families are faced with rising costs on all fronts: food up; fuel up; rent up; childcare costs up; and getting to work, particularly in East Anglia, a real challenge. The rise in housing costs in particular is driving in-work poverty. For those in work, for those unable to work and for those between jobs, universal credit should allow people to live with some dignity without descending into spiralling situations of poor mental health, debt and poverty The introduction of universal credit over the past 10 years has been incredibly challenging, but, when it was really needed during the pandemic, it worked incredibly well. No sensible voices are now calling for it to be scrapped. What we now need to do is to complete the task of welfare reform. The best way to do that is to retain the uplift, which is targeted at the poorest, helps people to stay afloat and then enables them to make positive decisions to improve their circumstances and to improve their lives We are fortunate, as we have heard, that there is a strong jobs market at the moment, but, unfortunately, there are people who are too far away from the labour market to take immediate advantage of these opportunities. Our welfare system should provide them with stability and security so that they can acquire the skills to move into work and then to climb up the ladder to rewarding and better paid jobs Universal credit has been the flagship of the Government’s essential work to reform welfare. The scale of the task means that there are still many challenges to overcome to ensure that it works for everyone. The pandemic has put the system through the sternest of tests and it has worked well. We now know that it can cope under crisis and, with an increase in support, it is a system that can better protect families when they face hardship At the current time, we face challenges unprecedented in peacetime. In economic terms, these are: building back better from the pandemic; levelling up, so that all corners of our four countries can share the proceeds of growth; and eliminating that stubbornly wide productivity gap Investment in infrastructure is important, but what transcends that, and what is absolutely critical, is investment in people. Retaining the uplift will help prevent many people from falling into poverty and despair. It will also provide the platform from which families can plan for better futures and then realise their aspirations. As a society, and as an economy, we will all be better for that.
I suppose £20 a week may not seem like a great deal of money to many Members on the Government Benches. It is the sort of sum they might spend on a bottle of wine or leave as a staff tip in a fancy restaurant, but for 8,923 people in my constituency of Edinburgh East, it is a very great deal of money indeed. I am talking about people like Nicola, a 33-year-old mother of two, whose partner is in work but does not earn enough to get by without the support of universal credit. The £20 uplift over the past 18 months has been vital for her. She has used it to buy formula for her newborn baby. Then there is Megan, a single mum, who works 24 hours a week as a cleaner and cannot get by without universal credit. She wrote to me to explain that the uplift for her meant that she could stop using the local food bank. If it is taken away, she will have no recourse but to go back to it I know that it is probably difficult for a Cabinet made up of so many spivs and millionaires to empathise with people like Megan and Nicola, but it has a responsibility to do so and it shirks that responsibility if it does not pause this policy and reconsider its impact—an impact that will reach to almost 6 million families in every part of this kingdom. I agree with the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) who spoke earlier when he pointed out that this long, difficult last 18 months has not been a situation where everyone has borne the misery and the burden of the pandemic equally. There are some indeed who have done quite well. I know the wealthy were fearful at the beginning when they saw the share prices tumble, but, perversely, the share prices are now at record levels and dividends have never been better. For those without capital, this has been a very, very difficult time I want in particular to look at the army of low-paid workers who have been responsible for getting us through this crisis: the people who have cleaned covid away; the people who have cared for our sick; and the people who have delivered and maintained essential lifelines during this pandemic. These are people who have not benefited from the furlough scheme; they have been working every day. They are people who have not had business grants or rates relief, and, such is the shameful wage inequality in our society that many of them are in receipt of universal credit and the only thing that they got was the £20 a week uplift and now that is under threat of being taken away. These are people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. The Government should give these people their applause and their thanks and give them a reward. Instead, these people are getting a kick in the teeth There has been a lot of talk about the cost of this. A figure of £6 billion has been suggested as what it would take if this resolution were passed. That is the maximum estimate, by the way, assuming that everyone who is claiming at the minute continues to claim. Six billion pounds is a lot of money, but it is 1.5%—one and a half per cent—of the £400 billion that this Government have deployed during the pandemic. It seems ridiculous that this should be the first thing that is withdrawn, especially when we consider that this measure was brought in as an emergency measure to deal with problems arising from the covid pandemic, because the covid pandemic is most definitely not in the rear view mirror. The covid pandemic is still with us, which is why this policy should be cancelled Finally, let me mention the situation in Scotland. It is particularly cruel that, just as the new Scottish Government are bringing in a remarkable ground-breaking new benefit in the form of the child support payment in Scotland to tackle child poverty, the effect of that policy will effectively be wiped out by this cut in the universal credit uplift. There is not much that the Scottish Government can do about that when 85% of all social security spending rests here, but there is something that the Scottish people can do about that: they can choose not to go on living in this state with this Tory Government. They can choose to govern themselves, and that is another reason why they will choose independence in the referendum that is shortly to come.
It is a pleasure to be able to speak on this very important subject I wish to put on record my thanks to the people who work for the Department for Work and Pensions, particularly those in the Weybridge jobcentre whom I visited just a couple of months ago. The passion of the people who work there, supporting people and helping them back into work, is absolutely incredible. Before I got into politics, my view of jobcentres was as quite negative places, but that jobcentre in Weybridge is a place of real hope and opportunity, and its staff do incredible work The pandemic has thrown us incredible challenges. Sadly, many of my constituents lost their jobs, and people faced increased costs. They found it difficult to reduce their cost of living in response to changing circumstances because of the restrictions that were put in place, and the job market completely went under. On that basis, it was entirely right for us to impose a temporary uplift to universal credit to help people through that difficult time. Now we are in a different situation. The job market is opening up and the difficulties in reducing costs are fewer, but we do have ongoing increased costs of living, and I will come back to that later in my speech We are also in a very different fiscal situation. We have borrowed a lot to pay for the pandemic. That has damaged our economy and we still have an ongoing deficit. It is important to remember that most of the money that we are spending now is borrowed, and it will not be us or our constituents who pay it back; it will be their children and our children who are paying that back in years to come. That is a big problem, of which we need to be mindful We have limited resources, and it is right when we are using them that our first priority should be throwing everything we can into supporting people back into work. I support the Department in seeing that as its priority, with provisions such as the plan for jobs and the kickstart scheme. I support the work we are doing, as we throw everything into helping people back into work, helping people to progress in work and supporting people with disabilities into work to ensure that everyone has the opportunity of a job However, as many Members have mentioned, there are a lot of people in work who are still struggling. Of course, I have sympathy for the calls saying that one option is to continue the universal credit uplift, but before taking such a big decision, I think it is worth reflecting on the issue and ensuring that we get the most bang for our buck regarding the money that we spend on this precious resource. We should look a bit at what is going on for people in these difficult situations—those who are really struggling and who are currently in work As many Members have already mentioned, the Work and Pensions Committee, of which I am a member, last week took evidence from several people on the challenges that they are facing. It is important to ask people about these issues to find out what is going on. What was really striking to me was that every witness who spoke to us was a single parent. When we started to delve into the challenge they faced, the cost of living came up big time, of course, but they particularly mentioned the cost of childcare and difficulties getting childcare. One witness, who was very impressive, explained that she pays £300 for childcare every month, which really blows out of the water the extra £100 she gets in universal credit uplift. That is in addition to all the other costs of living, such as the largely unaffordable rented housing that we have in this country.
I think that, like me, my hon. Friend would prefer to keep the £20 uplift, but we know that it is about £6 billion, which is 10% of the defence budget. Would he support the Minister pressing, in the spending review, for a sum of money—perhaps to improve the work allowance and taper rate—to help just the people he is talking about?
Of course, the taper rate—which essentially operates as a participation tax of 63%—is an issue that I hope the Minister and the Department look into as they put forward bids to the Treasury Let me return to the cost of living. The cost of childcare is really striking. Our childcare market really is broken. Despite multiple Government support and intervention schemes, people still see childcare and caring responsibilities as a barrier to getting into work and a cause of ongoing financial hardship, either because they cannot get it full stop as it is not available, or because of exorbitant costs I remember knocking on people’s doors many times while campaigning in different parts of the country, and people telling me that they would love to work but that caring responsibilities were a barrier to their getting into work. That is a fundamental wrong. We have to do everything we can to support people who want to work into work, and that has to be a part of our efforts on the cost of living As well as childcare costs, housing and rental costs in my constituency are huge issues that put people at risk of financial hardship. We really need to tackle the issue of affordable housing, and particularly affordable rents. I beseech the Minister when he winds up the debate to tell me whether he and his Department will look into affordable housing and childcare costs as part of the cost of living review, and push forward some radical reform to help all our constituents, as many Members have asked for in this important debate.
I would like to try to give everybody the opportunity to speak, although it might not be possible. After the next speaker, I will reduce the time limit to four minutes. With five minutes to speak, I call Naz Shah.
The Government’s cut to the universal credit uplift is beyond a joke and a bad policy decision. The actions of this Government are literally going to starve families across the country. When the Government bring in a jobs tax—the highest tax rise in 50 years—they blame the pandemic, all the while ignoring the stark reality of the effect of the pandemic on the poorest families in our nation. The Secretary of State claims that it was always meant to be a temporary uplift that would come to an end, but let me tell her the reality of the consequences of her Government’s decisions The impact of this cut to universal credit could send 500,000 families into poverty, and research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows that it will be my constituency of Bradford West that will be hit the hardest in the whole country. Some 82% of families with children will feel the pinch of this cut—and all this while food prices rise, with supermarket prices rising by 1.3% just this month, marking significant grocery price inflation as supply chain difficulties begin to affect shoppers. For those Tories who disgracefully shame poor families in this country, I am talking about the price rise not on luxury items, but on household essentials. Vegetable oil is at its highest price for over 30 years. The cost of products such as tomatoes has almost doubled in the past year Energy prices are set to rise, with households braced for the biggest rise in their energy bills for a decade when the price cap is lifted in October; 15 million customers protected by the cap could see a rise in their bills. Just last month, wholesale electricity prices in the UK soared to record levels, stoking concern that more families would be pushed into fuel poverty this winter. Research from the Trussell Trust on this cut to universal credit found that 1.2 million people say that they are “very likely” to skip meals, and 1.3 million people say that they are “very likely” to be unable to afford to heat their homes this winter if the lifeline is cut The story under this Government is not rocket science. It is pretty simple: food prices are rising; energy bills are rising; electricity bills are rising; living costs are rising; the number of families reliant on food banks is rising; child poverty rates are rising; the number of people without jobs is rising; wages are frozen; and this Government are cutting a lifeline to the poorest in our society. This cut is going to hit not just those who are struggling to find work, but those who are already working. Many nurses, primary school teachers, postal workers, retail workers and care workers—our key workers throughout the pandemic—could see on average a loss of £1,790 compared with the past 10 years, according to Action for Children. Single mothers working part-time will be hit by this cut, such as Sophie, who told The Guardian: “This has felt like my rock bottom” At this point, we would expect a Government to support their citizens to get back up, and to provide a safety net, not to burden them further. The same party that dragged its feet to feed hungry children during the school holidays is now taxing working families and taking away the lifeline to the poorest in my constituency. I will not let the Government get away with that.
I hear what the hon. Lady says. She mentions taxes. I agree that taxes are always going to hit people hard, but in order to keep the £20 temporary uplift, taxes will surely have to rise. If she wants to keep the £20 uplift, which taxes would she like to raise?
We have had that debate for hours in this Chamber; I am not going to regurgitate it. It is clear that Members on the Government Benches do not agree and are happy with the tax hike. The tax rise affects those at the bottom end of the scale in terms of work and wages. It does not affect Government Members, as many colleagues commented earlier. The truth is that my constituency is the worst affected in the country—that means the children of Bradford West. When children do not get a healthy meal, they do not learn. When mothers have to make the choice between feeding their children and putting the heat on, that is an absolute shame for our country, which is the eighth or sixth richest in the whole world. That is what we are talking about We will not let the Government get away with the gesture politics of clapping for key workers last year during the height of the pandemic, while they now rush through inhumane reforms to the tune of scraping spoons on empty dining tables across the country. That is the reality if this £20 cut happens. I urge the Minister, and not just for my constituents in Bradford West: please do not take this lifeline away from those who rely on it and who have to make the stark decision between food and heating for their children and families.
I thank the people who work in the DWP down here in London and in Thorne in my constituency. I have spent quite a lot of time there and they are doing some fantastic work I am proud of many of the schemes that the Government have brought in through the pandemic, including furlough, the self-employed income support scheme and the temporary £20 uplift—and it was temporary, to help people through the pandemic, and it was on universal credit, which is a transient benefit in that people are not meant not to stay on it for a long time; this Government are trying to get people off universal credit and into work. I know that many people want to keep the £20 uplift, including many of my hon. Friends, but that would cost us £6 billion. I have not shied away from this issue. I have knocked on doors in my constituency and spoken to many groups. I have put myself in the mix with people who really pushed for keeping the uplift, but the question that I have always asked them is, “Where do we get the £6 billion from?” I have asked and asked, and no one is able to come back with an answer. There are places that we can get it from. We can get it from increasing taxes, which affects the people we would end up giving it to anyway. We could end up with further borrowing, but if interest rates go up, we would end up with even more problems. We can take it from another Department. I have asked, “Which Department do you want us to take it from? Do you want to take it from education? Do you want to take it from the police? Do you want to take it from the council?” Nobody comes up with an answer. They want to shake the magic money tree and they never, ever want to give us a proper answer.
The hon. Member talks about a magic money tree, but does he not think that some of the money could be found if this Government were more aggressive on tax evasion, which they estimate at £70 billion?
I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I will come to other issues regarding similar things towards the end of my speech This Government are trying to help people to get back to work and get into work. I cannot stress how important it is that people work. This debate is about the money, but it is also about the value that it gives an individual when they go to work. We need to take down the barriers to get to work that have been put in people’s way over the years. We need to incentivise people to get to work, which is what the Government are doing with the kickstart scheme, the restart scheme and JETS—job entry targeted support.
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not just about getting people back into work but about getting people back into high-quality, high-paid jobs, and that is what this Government are focusing on?
I completely agree. We need to get people into work so that they start feeling valued and they are contributing to society, which is what most people in this country want to do. Then, with the lifetime skills guarantee, we can educate them more so that they bring more value to the companies they work for and to the state, and we can increase wages and increase the growth of the country in GDP, so that we can probably lower taxes while still pulling in more money. There will be more people working and so maybe we can get more targeted help for those who really need it I have some asks to put to the Government. As I say, we really do need to have some targeted help, because there are people who are going to be particularly hit by this decision. As we have heard, the problem may not be the £20 cut but the benefits system as a whole. Certain demographics really struggle and we need to home in on them as we move forward over the next few months and years. Single people are hit particularly hard. The tapering needs to be adjusted so that it pays to do the extra hours’ overtime that many people need, and want, to do to increase their standard of living. There should be no block on that at all. We need to give some targeted help, and it is important that we look at that, but overall the Government have the right policy. Moving forward from this, we should hopefully see the growth and start getting people into these quality jobs, as the Government want.
Our benefits system in the United Kingdom has gone through many changes and iterations since it was first devised in the Beveridge plan back during world war two. It was felt essential, if there was to be a people’s war against fascism and if people were expected to make the necessary sacrifices, that there would be a fairer future—something that should be borne in mind given the challenges we face with coronavirus at the present moment. Even Winston Churchill was prepared to accept that logic. The system came in with supplementary benefit and the national insurance contributions scheme. It was assumed that supplementary benefit would simply catch a few folk who would fall through the gaps in the system: there would be employment and those who fell from employment would have paid in and would be able to take out before they returned to employment There have been significant legislative changes, and there have also been changes to our society and our economy, but the fact is that the system is not working. Some of those who are receiving universal credit are unemployed, but, as many speakers have said, nearly half—certainly 40%—of universal credit claimants are in work. They are the working poor. I accept the logic of what many Conservative Members have said—that the route out of poverty is normally through employment. I have always believed that the best way of increasing wages is to create full employment and that would be the solution, but it is certainly not working at the moment. That has proved to be a mirage and that is the challenge I am a child of the ’60s who grew up West Lothian and I now represent East Lothian. There is not just a similarity in name but a similarity in heritage—a coal mining heritage. I lived in a prosperous part, but all around there was poverty as the economy and society sought to transform. However, let me be clear: back then I never saw the poverty that I see today. None of it existed. Were there kids who got free school meals in the 1960s? Of course there were, but there was not the hunger and the queues at food banks. Were there people who huddled next to a two-bar electric fire in winter trying to keep warm? Yes, but not people who would have to make a choice between being able to feed their children, feed themselves and heat their home this winter. Yes, there were kids who went to school with holes in their jerseys or, as we said in Scotland, their gutties—you might describe them as black sandshoes—even in winter, but we did not need to have the clothes banks and we did not have kids unable to go to school because they did not have the clothes to put upon their back. That is the society we now have Just last week, I saw a satirical website where there was a spoof: the Secretary of State had declared the majority of Paralympians fit for work. It was caustic but witty. Perhaps it may be reviewed and some may find that they are facing more than a doping test in years to come. That may have been fiction, but the fact has been put on the screen. As Ken Loach has stated, our benefits system is institutionalised cruelty. That has been disclosed on the screen in his movie “I, Daniel Blake”, which won a Palme d’Or. It showed the hardship and cruelty that are inflicted by the system that we possess. That was in 2016, although the film was indeed scripted in the years long before We are now in 2021. Our society has never been richer. Some have never had more wealth. Inequality has never increased at the pace that it is today. Yet the level of destitution and despair that exists in some parts is shameful—it is something that we have to oppose. On that basis, I have no hesitation in supporting the motion. The uplift needs to be preserved because poverty is being imposed not by some misfortune but by a political choice, and that is unacceptable.
We have heard the hon. Member for East Lothian (Kenny MacAskill) absolutely eviscerating this disgraceful Government and the way that so many of our young people, whatever corner of the country they live in, live under the brutal face of Tory Britain. This Government are willing to give tax breaks to their rich pals in the City and blow billions on often failed covid contracts, at the same time condemning the young and lowest paid to a lifetime of hardship and debt In my constituency—these are shocking statistics—almost 19,000 households are now in receipt of either universal credit or working tax credits. Let me repeat that figure: 19,000. That is bigger than the majority of most Conservative Members. It is an enormous figure. It constitutes 35% of all the households in my constituency and more than 50% per cent. of the families with children. That clearly demonstrates the importance of universal credit, which helps to maintain people putting food on the table for their families and prevent them from being plunged into total and abject poverty. It is grim and it is shocking A significant number of claimants are already in work, in poorly paid, insecure, zero-hours jobs. That includes many of the frontline heroes who carried on working throughout the pandemic—nurses, porters in hospitals and people working on buses—while everyone in this House could work from the safety of their own homes. Is this how we repay them, by slashing £1,000 from their pay cheques? Indeed, research by the TUC has revealed this week that 2.3 million low-paid workers will be worse off as a result of this cut, increasing the already record-high poverty levels, and the move will do nothing to address in-work poverty, which is so important and which we should be addressing. Many of my constituents in Ilford are already holding down multiple jobs and doing all they can just to keep their heads above water To give just one of the many stories I have heard on the doorsteps of Ilford South, a young woman called Emily told me that she receives universal credit and uses it to support her young son. However, due to a change in her health circumstances, she was eligible to receive further support. She was told to wait three months for a telephone appointment, at which point she was informed that she had to have an in-person assessment. That was despite having doctor’s notes confirming her medical condition, and despite the fact we were in the midst of the second covid lockdown. Now, 15 months on, she is not only still awaiting confirmation of her case, but she faces losing a further £86 from the Government’s proposed universal credit cut Emily is understandably struggling to make ends meet. In her latest correspondence, she told me: “I’m going to be losing £86 a month and I really don’t know how I’m going to survive.” She speaks for millions of people across Tory Britain and others in similar circumstances. It is a disgrace that the Government are willing to abandon her and millions of others to their fate There is now universal opposition to these plans. It comes not just from charities, third-sector organisations and campaign groups—not to mention millions of the Government’s own voters—but six former Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions from their own Benches, including the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), whose constituency is not too far from Ilford, being just down the road in the other corner of Redbridge. They all agree that this money must remain in place. It would appear that the only thing that is truly universal about these plans is the opposition to them The Government must think again about their decision to make low-income families pay for the Government’s chronic mismanagement of the pandemic and economic recovery. They are completely and utterly out of touch with ordinary working people’s lives and reducing salaries now risks not only further worsening the impact of the recession, but plunging these people into a lifetime of misery and poverty. The £20 uplift must remain in place at least until after the pandemic is over and the economy is on a stable footing. It is moral, it is just and the Government should get a backbone and do it right away.
I cannot claim to be surprised we are here debating the scrapping of the £20 uplift to universal credit. As the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) alluded to earlier, the fact that universal credit had to be uplifted is surely an admission that the provision afforded to those falling on hard times was not nearly adequate in the first place. Yet in this moment, when we are told that our economy is on the road to recovery, this Government shamelessly pull the rug from under the feet of millions of decent people. It is morally reprehensible and also bad economics. In my constituency of Liverpool, Wavertree, it translates to 11,500 households, affecting more than 6,000 children. That number includes the more than 33% of UC claimants in my constituency who are in work We on the Opposition Benches are the party of work and workers. We do not make work pay through a low-wage economy subsidised by Dickensian social security systems, no matter how many times the Government employ divide and conquer tactics through the false dichotomy of strivers and skivers I am sorry that the Secretary of State is not here to listen to how this cut will affect my constituents. She grew up in my wonderful city, and it obviously left a very poor impression on her if she is prepared to turn her back on the 62,000 households affected in the city of Liverpool alone, never mind the many more in towns and cities across this country. Let us say it clearly: this is a grotesque act of levelling down. It is levelling down, not levelling up. Indeed, what is “levelling up”, if her Department is prepared to remove £12 million from the pockets of those in Liverpool, Wavertree, £12.5 million from the pockets of those in Heywood and Middleton and more than £10 million from those in Darlington As the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) did not know the figure for his constituency, for the record it is just over £5.5 million, affecting 5,340 households and 4,008 children. It is shameful. I am sure the penny pinchers on the Government Benches are perfectly aware of those sums, but then of course there are those other sums trotted out by the Secretary of State. For someone with a PhD in chemistry, I thought she would have a good grasp of detail, such as how many hours it would actually take to make up the £20 loss in income. It is obvious, considering the bluster and false rhetoric, that she has no coherent strategy to make work pay on the back of this £20 cut. Ultimately, it represents an act of war on the low-paid and the unemployed. The consequences for ordinary people will be grave: more food banks and hunger, more homelessness and more destitution in our communities. I am sure it will provide ample opportunity for the regular circus of Tory MPs taking selfies at the very food banks their policies helped to create.
I am afraid I have to reduce the time limit to three minutes in an attempt to give everybody a chance to speak.
I am very grateful to be called in such an important debate. The controversial plans to withdraw the universal credit £20 a week uplift are regarded as the biggest single welfare cut since world war two. Anti-poverty campaigners and children’s charities have warned that the cut will be devastating for millions of families already facing the financial cliff edge we have heard so much about We have also heard from former Tory Ministers—I am surprised by that, but we have—who have written to this Chancellor, urging him to make the £20 uplift permanent to avoid sending thousands of families further into financial crisis. If these plans go ahead, the cut will hit nearly 6,000 people currently in receipt of universal credit in my constituency of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill. Thirty-eight per cent. of those who will see their income hit are already in employment. They are hard-working people—key workers, food producers, shop workers, security guards and cleaners—thrown on the scrapheap. Some 16% of that number are under 25. It is another hit for the next generation by this Conservative Government The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said that 6 million will face an income loss equivalent to £1,040 a year. Citizens Advice has warned that a third of people on universal credit will end up in further debt. One hundred organisations, including charities, children’s doctors, public health experts and even a Tory think-tank have co-signed a letter calling on this Government to do a U-turn on the planned universal credit cuts. We have seen plenty of U-turns from this Government—let us have one on this issue please. It comes after a month-long campaign led by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) and the SNP for the UK Government to maintain the £20 uplift and extend it to legacy benefits. It follows a letter signed by six former Work and Pensions Secretaries condemning the cuts The Scottish Government remain committed to doubling the Scottish child payment to £20 a week by the end of the Parliament. In contrast, the Tories are still planning to go ahead with slashing the £20 despite warnings that it will plunge 20,000 children in Scotland further and deeper into poverty. In my constituency, 26% of children live in poverty. It is a disgrace to allow that already shameful number to grow even further, but the Tories do not care On top of that decision, we have another hike in national insurance in Scotland that will most hit those who have least, to pay for a healthcare crisis in England. If that is the Union dividend, for Scotland the Union is a dead end. The youth of Scotland will know that. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor should know that, given the number of U-turns they have had to commit. I will support the motion and hope that everyone else will do so, too.
Low-paid workers are facing not a double whammy but a triple whammy, with prices and bills going up, national insurance contributions going up and now a £1,000 cut in universal credit. Ministers are creating a cost of living crisis for low-paid workers. I do not understand how they think people will manage. On what planet do Conservative Ministers think that that is fair One of many emails that I got last week said: “I am unemployed, 65 years of age and my sole source of income is universal credit. My income will drop from £715 a month (just keeping head above water) to £612 a month (drowning!). When my rent and all other bills are paid, this will leave me with £89 for food, clothing, bus fares for job interviews and everything else for the month. We need help.” A constituent in Pontefract who is working to support himself and his disabled partner, on universal credit but paying off rent arrears, talked about the pressure that he is already under. He said: “I don’t know what to do. I have been crying. I have just half a tin of beans left for us.” In Normanton, Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, 10,000 families—nearly half of all families with children in the constituency—will be hit, losing £85 a month or more than £1,000 a year. That means £10 million will be taken out of the five towns’ economy that would have been spent in our local shops when, frankly, our town centres are under real pressure. Care workers, factory workers, warehouse staff, teaching assistants and hairdressers are all being hit Ministers say that the answer is for people to work harder and work longer, but they are already doing that, and care workers doing 14-hour shifts do not have any hours or extra days that they can work. Ministers claim that the £20 must go because it was only ever supposed to be temporary, but why? Price rises are not temporary; they are getting worse. The debt that people have run up because of covid is not temporary; it still has to be paid off. The hardship and hunger that children face is not temporary; it is getting worse. Even before the £20 came in, families had lost nearly £2,000 a year because of previous Government cuts. Why do Ministers want to go back to that? That is not building back better There is a huge gap between Conservative Ministers’ words and the reality of working people’s lives. The bottom line is that millions of people will be worse off next month because of the Government’s decisions. Some people made more profits during the crisis, and some on higher pay made real savings, but the key workers who kept us all going through the crisis, on the lowest pay, doing the most important jobs, are being hit. Ministers clapped them in the streets; now they are cutting their family income. It is not just a kick in the teeth; it is a complete betrayal. Ministers should have some shame and cancel the cut.
The Government give the impression that they do not think £20 is a lot of money. Although having and spending income is important, it is vital that those who do not have to count the pennies do not forget about everyone else. For many people, £20 is not a box of biscuits from an organic store in west London but what is spent on an entire week’s food shop. The Facebook group “Feed your family on a budget” was set up last year by one woman who managed to do just that on a £20 budget, and that group alone—it is not a unique initiative—has more than 340,000 members. The real impact of taking £20 away from 5.5 million households across the UK is people skipping meals, unable to feed their children, and even more reliance on food banks, which are being used more than ever before—more even than before the pandemic On Monday, the Secretary of State suggested that people could make up £20 by working two extra hours. The Government consistently demonstrate that they do not understand that, for many, universal credit is an in-work benefit and that work has other expenses, such as transport and childcare, which mean that claimants will need to work at least another six hours a week to make up for the cut, not two Some of my constituents will face a £30 a week loss or even more, because, as we have seen so many times before, the Government have failed to understand the impact of their policies on the devolved nations. Parents who receive any amount of universal credit in Scotland—even as little as £20—are entitled to Scottish child payments, best start grants and best start food payments. Altogether, the cut could mean a loss of more than £1,700 a year. The Scottish Affairs Committee report on welfare published earlier this year noted that there appears to be “a good working relationship” between the Governments, but this cut suggests otherwise Of course, “just work more” is never as easy as this Government seem to think it is. There are 1.1 million single parents eligible for universal credit, many of whom need to work part time. I have raised this issue before by asking the Secretary of State to explain the disparity between universal credit and legacy benefits for young parents, where the former benefit acknowledged the additional burden of parenthood and provided the higher rate of payment usually given to those 25 and over. She has failed to provide an adequate explanation to me or 100 charities from around the UK, and indeed other hon. Members, who signed the letter I wrote about this The bottom line is that reducing an already inadequate safety net is not going to get more people into work. Research by the Trussell Trust shows that 900,000 people say they will not have enough money to travel to work or essential appointments, and this is a particular concern in rural constituencies such as North East Fife. If people cannot afford to get to work, how are they supposed to get those extra hours? It is a vicious cycle, only worse. Indeed, figures from Fife Council today suggest that crisis applications to the Scottish welfare fund have rocketed since the start of this financial year. This cut is taking place while the effects of the pandemic are still being felt, and we need to make sure that those people and families are supported.
I rise to speak on behalf of the 17,296 adults in claimant households in my constituency who are about to be hit by the universal credit cut, nearly 40% of whom are in work. Before the pandemic, the majority of local universal credit claimants were working, due to the high levels of low-paid work in Hounslow borough and its environs. Many of my constituents who are now unemployed worked in live events in the arts or at Heathrow airport, and the downturn in international aviation since covid has exposed the over-dependence of our local economy on Heathrow. This means that Hounslow has gone from being an area of very low unemployment to having one of the highest levels in the UK Behind every one of the 17,296 local claimants there is a person, often with children, and for them the proposed cut will have a very real impact on their households—households already living in poverty. Many have told me what it will mean. One said that the payment makes “a lot of difference and helps us to eat” “Helps us to eat”, in the 21st century in the UK, is disgraceful On the one hand we have had Ministers’ weak attempts to defend this cut, but why do they not also mention the countless acts of wasteful spending we have seen over the last 18 months, such as a test and trace system that does not really trace and unusable PPE? We should also not forget the wider context of this cut. As the Government push through this £1,000 cut per claimant, they are also increasing taxes on working people through the national insurance hike and forcing councils to increase council tax, while today we hear of the rise in inflation to 3.2%. Furthermore, in high rent areas such as my constituency, the benefit cap and local housing allowance levels mean that many of my constituents are using the money from their standard allowance, which should be for food and utilities, to pay the rent. As the Leader of the Opposition highlighted at PMQs today, a full-time worker on the minimum wage will need to work for nine more hours to make up for the £20 cut Cutting UC on top of all this is not only cruel, but economically incompetent. Some £15 million will be taken out of our local economy in my constituency. We know from research that when there is more money in poor people’s pockets, it goes to local businesses and local shops—businesses that themselves employ people and pay tax. It is such a shame that the Chancellor and his Ministers are not here to lead for the Government in this debate rather than the DWP team, who we hear privately share our concerns about the impact of this cut.
On the final night of the Tory party conference, as the Government wine and dine their billionaire donors, the same Ministers have decreed that millions of our fellow citizens will face the biggest cut to social security benefits since the 1930s. On 6 October, the Government will ram through their plan to scrap the £20 uplift to universal credit, at a stroke leaving 6 million households more than £1,000 worse off a year. By next April, 2.5 million will be £1,300 worse off because their national insurance tax contributions will rise by 10%. In Wallasey alone, more than 10,000 households will lose £10.5 million in support. That money provided a vital lifeline to those struggling throughout this pandemic, many of them key workers. This callous Government have made a political choice to withdraw that support. This is money that is currently spent in our local economy but which will disappear overnight The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that these cuts threaten to push 750,000 people into poverty and 500,000 further into deep poverty, which is defined as being more than 50% below the poverty line. There are 6,000 children whose parents are reliant on UC in my Wallasey constituency. This callous cut will be the difference between them putting food on the table or not in the coming months Analysis by Action for Children found that almost 30% of children in Wallasey already live in poverty after housing costs. In supporting this cut, every Conservative Member is voting in full knowledge of its effects. The Government’s own leaked assessment has described the cut as “catastrophic” So egregious is this cut to UC that six of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ Tory predecessors have spoken out against it, yet she has pronounced herself “happy” that it is going ahead, and yesterday she was being either disingenuous or ignorant when she claimed that just a couple of hours of extra work would make up for the cut. We know that is not true, and we know that while 40% of those on the benefit are in work, some claimants cannot work for various reasons ranging from illness to child caring responsibilities In Wallasey 36% of people claiming UC are in employment, and nationally one in six working households cannot make ends meet already. The last decade of benefits cuts has left working families worse off than they were 10 years ago. The pandemic uplift has acted as a vital buffer, and now even this is being taken away To govern is to choose; the Conservatives have chosen hardship over hope, and poverty over support. As they sip their champagne and hobnob with their millionaire supporters at their conference, we will never let them forget that.
If this debate was a boxing match, those opposing the motion would have thrown in the towel a long time ago, but I do want to praise all those supporting the motion today including on the Government side. I am, however, sad that some on the Government side treated us to their usual Marie Antoinette routine, saying that somehow people are not trying hard enough and have got themselves into these difficulties Some of the contributors from the Government side have said “Let’s talk about jobs.” Yes, let’s talk about the public sector jobs this Government have cut in the last 10 years. They praise DWP staff and I agree, but in the next breath they say, “Let’s talk about pay.” Yes, let’s talk about the pay freeze for public sector workers in the last 10 years and pay restraint, and how many, and why, people working in the public sector are having to get support from the UC system because their wages are too low and the Government have taken that position. Let’s talk, too, about tax avoidance. If the same number of people employed by the Government to tackle social security fraud were tackling tax avoidance and evasion we might get more money in tax and perhaps we would get that £6 billion that we keep hearing about. I believe that the social cost of cutting £20 a week from claimants is far more important, and there will be an explosion in food insecurity in this country. When asked, every food aid provider will explain how nervous they are if the cut goes ahead and what that will mean to the people they support The uplift was set by the Government to pay for essentials such as food, energy and fuel. Those essentials have not suddenly disappeared, and claimants were never told this was to be temporary: those who applied for UC during the pandemic were never told at any time, “By the way, some of the money we’re giving you is only a temporary payment.” It is very concerning that those of us on the Select Committee were told by claimants that they had not yet been informed that the £20 was to be removed. If that is the case, I think the parliamentary ombudsman is going to be very busy. This might be WASPI 2. We talk about putting people in jobs; the ombudsman may have to employ many people to deal with all the complaints from universal credit claimants who have not been told that this money is being cut. I will be proud to support the motion and to support my constituents.
It is frustrating once again to have to plead with the Government not to take a key financial lifeline away from my constituents and working families across the country. As so many of today’s contributions have shown, for many hard-working families, the £20 a week universal credit uplift has been the difference between children going hungry and having food on the table, or between turning the electricity off and topping up the meter If the Government push ahead with this cut to universal credit, it will affect 6 million families across the country, and it has the potential to push 700,000 more people, including 300,000 children, into crippling poverty. In my constituency of Manchester, Gorton, the cut will directly affect 12,000 children This cut will be utterly devastating for my constituents. It will be the single biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the creation of the modern welfare state. Not only that, but for all the Government’s talk of levelling up, the north will bear the brunt of the cut’s impact. This cut is not necessary; it is a choice that this Tory Government are making. They are choosing to take money out of the pockets of working families struggling to make ends meet. It is a disgrace If the Government will not listen to me, my colleagues on the Opposition Benches, their own colleagues, six previous Conservative Work and Pensions Secretaries, numerous all-party parliamentary groups, or endless charities and campaign groups, then perhaps they will listen to the powerful words of one of my constituents. He is an NHS worker claiming universal credit to make ends meet, and he wrote: “My morale has gone, my head has gone, my heart has gone. Ripped out by a system that doesn’t care for those of us who worked so hard to keep the country together during one of its darkest hours.” He is not the only one to have contacted me; hundreds of constituents have written to me desperate for the uplift to be maintained. The hard-working families of Manchester, Gorton do not want this £20 a week; they need it. Will the Government listen to them?
Last Friday, a blue plaque was unveiled in memory of Rev. Don Robins, who was appointed vicar of St George’s church in the heart of Leeds at the time of the great depression. Looking around his new parish, he saw the homeless, the hungry and the destitute, and he decided that he must do something. He had an old crypt below the church, and he resolved that it should be used for the living and not the dead, so he turned it into a soup kitchen and night shelter. Since that day, the St George’s crypt has been serving those for whom life has been hard. I sit here and wonder, if he was still with us, what he would have to say about the choice facing the House today. Although the great city of Leeds has seen much prosperity and development in the intervening years, poverty and inequality and hunger have not gone away. They continue to bear down on our communities My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) talked about shame. It is shameful that three in 10 children in my constituency live in absolute poverty. It is shameful that in the three or four miles from the most prosperous to the least well-off parts of our city, life expectancy declines. It is shameful that some children come to school too hungry to learn and that the number of people who have to go to a food bank—that is, after all, going up to a complete stranger and saying, “I know we’ve never met, but can you help me to feed my family this weekend, because I cannot?”—has risen in the last decade There is only one conclusion we can reach. The former Work and Pensions Secretary was absolutely right. There are too many households in our constituencies where the money coming in is insufficient to feed, clothe, shelter and look after a family. That is why it is completely unforgiveable that even though Ministers know this—even though they are well aware that poverty and hunger have got worse during their time in Government—they are still determined to go ahead with the cut to universal credit on which so many of our constituents rely, as we have heard today. One woman put it to me like this: “It may not seem like a lot, but it is absolutely vital to me and my family.” I am sure there are many Government Members who, as they vote to make the cut today, will know in their hearts it is wrong. But it is what we do, as Don Robins showed, that counts. He committed himself to be where the work is hardest. It is really hard work to raise a family when you want to do your best but do not have enough money. This cut is wrong and the Government should think again.
Order. I am going to make every effort, and I am determined to get everybody in. That may mean that at some point in the very near future I have to reduce the time limit to two minutes, but if we help each other and take less time we might be in with a better chance.
The Secretary of State said that the best route out of poverty is to work. If only that were true. When I came into this place, I knew there would be Tory Members who believed that poverty was a self-infliction, or a “personality defect” in the words of Margaret Thatcher herself in 1978. But I also naively hoped that there might be one or two good people on the Tory Benches who understood that the struggles of many people’s lives were not self-inflicted, but imposed upon them by an economic system that was simply stacked against them and that possibly, just possibly, they might stand up when the time was right So I ask Tory Members today: what kind of Tory are they? Are they one who understands that 40% of the 15,000 universal credit claimants in Salford and Eccles are actually in work, work that pays so little they have to rely on Government support to top it up? Are they a Tory who would help my constituent who wants to work, when she says: “With the amount I would get from Universal Credit coupled with the childcare costs and my potential wages, what I would have left at the end of the month will leave myself and my husband very tight on finances. The £20 uplift makes a huge difference in our finances and my ability to work” Or are they a Tory who simply dismisses her, and indeed analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that shows the majority of families that lose out will be working families who were already suffering before the pandemic hit For those unable to work, the situation is even bleaker. The reality is that the basic rate of universal credit is only a sixth of average weekly pay, and many on legacy benefits did not even get the uplift at all. Frankly, rather than being cut, universal credit should be increased to at least 80% of the level of the living wage and the temporary £20 top-up extended to those on legacy benefits If the Tories mean it when they say that the best route out of poverty is work, then I say to them: do something about it. Outline an ambitious agenda to tackle in-work poverty, including a higher minimum wage, collective bargaining, secure work, a ban on zero-hours contracts, progression opportunities, and affordable childcare and housing costs. Tory Members, prove to me today that my naive hope that there is some semblance of common decency on the Government Benches is true, and stop this cut.
I rise to speak against the cut to universal credit, which is cruel, illogical and unnecessary. It is cruel because £20 a week makes all the difference to those on the lowest incomes, many of whom are already working all the hours they can but simply cannot make ends meet. Norwood and Brixton food bank, which serves many of my constituents every week with love and care, has been warning for many months that if local people on universal credit are subjected to this cut, the need for emergency food support will increase, placing even more pressure on its staff and volunteers. Our welfare state was established to provide a security safety net for people who cannot make ends meet, yet this Government are taking us back to Victorian Britain, where people forced into appalling hardship by the Government’s failures are reliant on the good will of our communities in ever-increasing numbers This cut will cause unspeakable hardship. Parents will go without food so that their children can eat. People will suffer in cold, damp homes because they will not be able to afford the heating. Debt will increase and physical and mental health will deteriorate. This cut is illogical, because at a time of fragile economic recovery, when high streets up and down the country are struggling and shops are closing, it makes no sense to be taking millions of pounds of expenditure out of every single constituency in the country. And this cut is unnecessary, because it is a political choice There are many ways in which the Government could lift people out of poverty. They could raise the minimum wage to the real living wage, make housing more affordable, make childcare more affordable and ban zero-hours contracts, but they have failed those on the lowest pay for more than a decade and now they are punishing the same low-paid workers. These are the same people who have been at the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic: social care workers, shop workers, childcare workers, delivery drivers, hospital porters, bus drivers and others. This is no way to treat those who have seen us through the greatest crisis since the second world war It does not take a degree in engineering to know that if the screws are too tight, the pressure will buckle and break even the strongest of materials. Make no mistake, this cut will break people who have already faced so much pressure from the cruel policies of this Tory Government bearing down on them. Government Members have a choice: they can live with this cruellest of cuts or they can join us in the Lobby and vote against it, because it is wrong and unacceptable.
After the next speaker, I will reduce the time limit to two minutes, but that is because I want to get everybody in. I call Zarah Sultana.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. “I will not have enough money to buy food or heat my home…I don’t know how I will eat...I am afforded no dignity...I am thrown on the scrap heap”— those are the words of Joan, a woman in her 60s who wrote to me about the effects of the cut to universal credit. She said: “I am ashamed to be in this situation” Another person who wrote to me was a single mum who told me about her beautiful daughter. They escaped domestic violence but now, even “with the uplift... life is crushingly hard”, she wrote. She continued: “But losing 20 pounds a week will send us spiralling down.” She said that she does not know “how the Conservatives can do this to people” That is a tiny snapshot of the correspondence that I have received about the cut to universal credit and working tax credits. “How can they do this to people?” was the question. It is the single biggest overnight social security cut in the history of the welfare state, hitting more than 6 million families, including around 10,000 households in Coventry South. It is expected to push 700,000 more people, including 300,000 children, into poverty, with more than 500,000 pushed into extreme poverty Let us look at who is pushing this through. In the words of Amy, another person who wrote to me: “I truly wish the Conservatives understood the impact of this cut. I don’t want to be on benefits” But what makes it “really humiliating”, she said, is “that we have to prove we’re worth an extra 20 pounds a week to people who say they can’t survive on 150,000 pounds a year.” That is the truth. The Conservative party is from a different world from those who are being hit by this cruel cut In one of my first speeches in Parliament, I called for an end to the inequality in opportunities that exists between working-class children and those born to wealth and sent to schools like Eton. For that simple demand, a Government Member accused me of “class warfare”. But if there is class warfare in Britain, this is it: led by an old Etonian, a Chancellor who is the richest member of the House, a Cabinet that is two thirds privately educated, and funded by the super-rich. The Conservative party is launching one of the biggest ever attacks on the living standards of the working class in this country, pushing millions more into desperation and misery. If Government Members have even a single scrap of decency, they will vote against this cut and instead, at the very least, extend the uplift to all legacy benefits.
Some 10,406 of my constituents in North Ayrshire and Arran, where one in three children lives in poverty, will be negatively impacted by the cut. The Government are willing to impose such a cruel cut when they know the severe consequences that it will have for those on whom it will fall That tells us the vision that the Tories have for society. It is a vision of a society in which the disabled should be punished for having an extra bedroom through the bedroom tax, which the Scottish Government fully mitigated; a society in which the local housing allowance is frozen, which is why the Scottish Government invested £80 million in discretionary housing payments; a society that is relaxed about child poverty, while the Scottish Government introduced the Scottish child payment for those on the lowest incomes But the Scottish Government, with their limited powers, cannot mitigate every single cruel cut imposed on Scotland by a Tory Government who were roundly rejected by the people of Scotland. That is why we need all the powers of an independent country: to protect our people from Tory Government cuts that we did not vote for and that we reject. When the time comes, soon, the people of Scotland will make their voices heard. They will make their own decision, take their future into their own hands and look after their own families—and they will vote for independence.
There are 14.5 million people living in poverty. The Government’s cut to universal credit at the end of this month will cast more than half a million people, including 200,000 children, into poverty. Let us digest those figures, the human cost that they entail, and how they shame one of the richest countries in the world and shame this Government I ask again the question that the multimillionaire Chancellor failed to answer last week: “what assessment the Government have made of the impact of the cut, and how many…people in Liverpool, West Derby”— where 20% of my constituents are on universal credit— “will be forced into poverty”.—[Official Report, 6 September 2021; Vol. 700, c. 145.] I also ask whether the Minister has considered whether the cut is a violation of international human rights obligations In Liverpool, Fans Supporting Foodbanks fed 4,000 people last month. Next month, it is looking to expand that to 8,000 people. That is where we are at the moment. That is where we are under this Government. I remind them that it is 2021, not 1821 I ask the Minister to digest this list: Manchester, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Liverpool, Liverpool city region, Rotherham, Totnes, Brighton and Hove, Haringey, St Helens, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Durham, Preston, Sheffield, Coventry and Birmingham. All those places have declared themselves Right to Food towns and cities in response to the humanitarian crisis of food poverty in our communities before the cut. I say to the Minister: end this immoral plan to cut universal credit, extend the uplift to legacy benefits, and, instead of attacking our communities, focus your energy on addressing the injustices of inadequate Government support, low pay and insecure work.
I got into politics in 2013 because I saw the devastating impact of the bedroom tax on my community, my friends and my neighbours. In 2013, we were angry and we were tired of three years of public sector cuts, but never for a minute did I think that I would be here, eight years and billions of pounds of cuts later, asking the Government not to implement the biggest welfare cuts in the history of the welfare state. It is not only the universal credit cuts that will hit low-income families; those cuts are combined with the 3.2% rise in inflation, the national insurance rise, the end of the furlough scheme and the resumption of evictions. It is not the Tory party’s billionaire donors, who have increased their wealth during the pandemic by more than £100 billion, who are paying the price; it is key workers like my former colleagues in social care, shop workers and teaching assistants For many of the families I represent, £20 is the difference between eating and not eating. International law is very clear that cuts should not occur if human rights violations would occur, so is the Secretary of State still “entirely happy” with a cut that will plunge 730,000 children into poverty? What does she have to say to the 14,250 families in Nottingham East and the six million families across the country who will lose £1,000 per year? I do not want to hear about incentives to get people into work—the Conservative party knows full well that the cut hits people who are in work, because work does not pay. Cancel the cuts, introduce a real living wage and scrap the benefit cap.
It is abundantly clear that Conservative Members do not care about or understand the human cost of the decision that they are about to make. Far too many in this House live, and have always lived, lives that are miles away from the reality of life for constituents of mine—constituents like Sara, who is petrified of what impact losing the £20 uplift will have on her and her family. How will she pay the rent? How will she feed her family? How will she pay all her bills? She is afraid of losing what little she has, and of losing her dignity To a member of that exclusive club of millionaires, property owners and bankers to which so many Tories belong, this must seem like another country, but it is not. It is our country, the fifth richest nation in the world, and Sara, like other constituents, is one among millions throughout our country whose lives will be devastated by this cut. In my constituency, 43% of families with children are receiving universal credit or working tax credit, and our community will be particularly impacted by this cut However, the cut in universal credit is not just cruel; it is economically unsound. The Bevan Foundation, a Welsh think-tank, has calculated that it will take approximately £286 million out of the Welsh economy, potentially damaging the economic recovery. Talk of levelling up is cheap. This cut does nothing to aid any levelling-up process in my constituency. It actually does the opposite. It is clear to me that the Government are pursuing an economically illiterate policy. The cut will have catastrophic consequences for millions of people across the country, and will cause immeasurable hardship to millions I implore the UK Government to do the right thing and cancel the cut; to go further and extend the uplift to people on legacy benefits; and even to take more radical action such as trialling a universal basic income.
In my two minutes, I want to make a couple of key points. The Conservatives’ planned £20 cut in universal credit is truly callous, but it is also economically illiterate. I am astounded that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions should agree that she is “entirely happy” with this decision. Five million households, including 3.5 million children, will suffer a cut of £1,000 a year, and that personal impact will be exacerbated by the damage to our recovery, as local economies are stripped of vital money that would otherwise be spent with local businesses. In Luton, we face an estimated £16.5 million being stripped from our local economy. That will impact on local businesses trying to recover after the pandemic, as we have heard from other Members Luton has been particularly exposed to the economic fallout of the pandemic, because it has one of the highest proportions of workers in sectors that are vulnerable to lockdown and restrictions, notably aviation, retail, hospitality, food and accommodation. As a result, it has seen one of the biggest claimant count increases anywhere in the country. With furlough ending next month and no sector-specific financial support package for the aviation industry, I cannot but foresee more people having to rely on universal credit In Luton South, 16,000 households may have to choose between heating and eating. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, one in six working households cannot make ends meet. I recently met representatives of the citizens advice bureau in Luton, who told me that one of the biggest concerns they have will be the increase in personal debt as a consequence of the cut in universal credit Fundamentally, the Government should listen to the families who need this money, listen to key workers who are struggling to make ends meet, listen to the charities and civil society organisations, and cancel the cut.
The points that I was going to make have already been made eloquently by other Members on these Benches, so I will make my remarks very brief I draw attention to the adverse effect on people who are disproportionately affected by this, particularly the WASPI women, who have already been robbed of their pensions. I also suggest that this is an opportune time for the Secretary of State to consider introducing a universal basic income The hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) asked how retaining the £20 could be paid for. I would say to him that we could get rid of Trident and HS2, neither of which Scotland wants or benefits from. It is disgusting that the six Scottish Conservative MPs are absent from the debate today. That shows a total disregard for the views of their constituents. The only way to ensure justice for the people of Scotland is for it to be independent and to have full control over the levers of the economy. This is the opportunity for Scotland to be independent.
Late last night on social media, I invited my constituents who will be affected by this cut to write in and explain how they would be affected by it. I tell you what, my phone was buzzing all last night and all this morning with messages from distraught constituents, and it is no wonder, because 14,000 families my constituency will be affected by the cut. Two thirds of people in my constituency who work and who have children will be affected by it I want to use the time I have today to read from just one of the messages I received, a message from young woman who wrote to me and said: “Hello Richard, I’ve seen your tweet about you hopefully speaking to parliament about the cut and just thought I’d like to say how it’d affect me I was homeless from the ages 16-20 almost as I left an abusive home from my father and lost all my family and most friends I had. I finally got my own flat this year and the amount that I have been living on has the increased boost from coronavirus payment. After this has been cut I am not going to be able to afford food, phone bills, electricity/gas/wi-fi, council tax and the odd few bills like Netflix here and there. After all these payments have come out I will have about £5-£10 to live off for the month and that’s not even enough to travel for places I need to be or in case of emergencies. My mental health is at an awful place at the moment and I’m trying to attend counselling for it but my anxiety and depression are so bad that I can’t work right now.” [Interruption.] I hear chuntering and I see grinning from people on the Government Benches I think it lets the Tories off the hook to say that they do not know the reality and that they do not live in the real world. In a way, they do. They know that this is the effect, but they are not bothered. They are taking the immoral choice, the shameful choice to stick the boot into the people we as a society should be supporting. That is a disgrace in one of the richest countries in the world. This is the choice that they have made. Don’t make this cut.
South Belfast is a relatively prosperous constituency. It is one of those that would be described as “leafy” in political commentary, along with the presumptions and generalisations that mask the economic diversity and substantial need that exist in the community I represent. It includes the highest levels of universal credit claimant rises in Northern Ireland throughout the pandemic, and those reduced earnings are in the context of higher utilities costs—gas prices have risen by a third in Northern Ireland, as was announced last week—and higher food costs, as well as an acute crisis in the availability of affordable rented accommodation Colleagues on this side of the House have rightly countered some of the myths that still persist about the reasons that people claim universal credit and, with a number of honourable exceptions, it has been helpful to hear some of the speeches from the Conservative Benches, as well as the interventions from former Ministers. However, some of the commentary that we have heard betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the lives that the people in all our constituencies are living, of the work that they did during the pandemic and of the fact that it is not always as simple as just getting on your bike The SDLP has always been critical of the universal credit system. We refused to rubber-stamp it when others in the Assembly adopted it. We saw its inadequacies and the flaws, particularly in the context of insecure work and of Northern Ireland’s completely underfunded and inadequate childcare system. Yesterday, the Northern Irish Economy Minister came to my constituency and announced a high-street voucher spending scheme. Every adult in Northern Ireland will be given £100 in vouchers to prop up our beleaguered retail offerings. That is what one hand is giving while the other is removing £7 million in universal credit money from my constituency alone. We know that those funds are spent promptly and carefully on the local high street. This cut is not progressive, and this is not joined-up government. This is not doing the economy any favours, but it is not too late to change course.
This cut to universal credit is perhaps one of the most callous and cruel policies this Government have proposed, and we have a long list to choose from. After more than a decade of brutal austerity measures and chronic Tory mismanagement, absolute poverty and child poverty were soaring even before the devastating impact of the pandemic. In my Liverpool, Riverside constituency, where child poverty, relative poverty and absolute poverty already soar above the national average, it amounts to more than 3,200 families and nearly 6,000 children This draconian Tory Government are dangerously out of touch with the reality of millions. They have no comprehension of the reality of poverty, of missing meals and going cold. They claim that the need for fiscal responsibility overrides the need for just and fair policies, as if the two are mutually exclusive and as if economic prosperity cannot exist without inequality and poverty. The cut of £1,000 from the pockets of those most in need is the ugly face of that ideology of class warfare—let us call it what it is As a black, working-class woman born and raised in Liverpool, I know full well the impact of this class warfare. Thatcher’s policies of managed decline in the 1980s threaten to pale by comparison with the cruelty of this Tory Government. The bare, honest truth is that this cut is not fiscally competent. Hitting workers’ spending power with cuts to universal credit, a rise in national insurance contributions, a public sector pay freeze and a personal income tax freeze is not the economic competence that the Tories claim. It is the opposite Instead of taking money out of the pockets of those most in need, the Government must wake up to the reality facing millions of families who will be pushed into Dickensian levels of poverty and misery. I call on Members on both sides of the House to cancel this cut.
Before I call the Front Benchers, I should say that they have agreed to cut down their contributions to allow everybody to get in.
I thank so many of my hon. Friends for their powerful contributions to today’s important debate. Time is short, so I apologise that I am not able to mention them all personally. I also acknowledge the small number of Conservative Members who called on their own side to think again on this issue This debate has been rich in statistics, which reflects both the scale of the mistake the Government are on track to make, and the horror so many of us feel at the simple evidence of the numbers affected and that the impact on each family seems to bear such little weight on the Government’s decision making This debate has also been rich in powerful stories about what £20 each week, £100 each month, means to families right across our country. It means enough food to get through the week, it means being able to keep the house warm as the nights grow longer and it means growing children having clothes that fit them properly and warm clothes to see them through the winter My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), in opening the debate, set out powerfully that the cut to universal credit hurts families in work, as well as those out of work. It is no solution to tell people who are about to be clobbered by this cut that they need to go and get a job when so many are already working all the hours God sends. Nor is it any solution for those who, by reason of disability, illness or caring responsibilities, simply cannot work This decision to cut the incomes of millions of families is a choice, but it is a choice that sadly fits with so many recent decisions made by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. Last November, the Chancellor chose to put up council tax for the very families we are talking about today. He chose to freeze the pay of millions of frontline workers. In March, he chose to freeze income tax thresholds. Last week, he had a brand new tax on working people and their jobs. And today we are debating cutting universal credit Again and again, this Government look first to working people, rather than looking across the piece at our tax system. There was a stamp duty holiday for buy-to-let landlords and second home owners, but they have taken £1,000 a year out of the incomes of working people who are doing all that is asked of them The most recent figures show that GDP growth is stalling, and this morning’s inflation figures show us that the weekly shop is getting more expensive. Now is not the time to be sucking demand out of our economy. The Government are taking away £20 each week from budgets that are already stretched and from our high streets and local businesses that are getting back on their feet after a tough 18 months When I talk of universal credit as a meal on the table for families, heating for homes and coats for children, it is because I know the difference that the money makes. For me, this is more than political—it is personal. Growing up in the north-east in the 1980s, I was one of those children. Not long after starting school, as the winter drew in, my mam could not afford a new coat for me. She was a single parent, money was tight and we did not always have much. I was kept warm by the generosity of a neighbour, who himself did not have much, who saw me and put some money through our door in an envelope marked, “For Bridget’s coat”. I never forgot that kindness I thought, and hoped, that more than 30 years later we had moved on. I thought that as a society we would never again allow children to grow up in poverty, never again allow families like my own to be so dependent on random acts of kindness from others. As I grew up, I saw a Labour Government lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. I saw that poverty is not inevitable: it is about the choices politicians make. Poverty is not about coats or food in and of themselves—it is about the power to make choices for yourself and to have control over your own future. Today, we are seeing a Government about to plunge hundreds of thousands of children back into avoidable poverty Today’s debate is not about me. It is about the worried families in my community and across our country starting to think about the same horrible, painful decisions that my family faced all those years ago. At tables across this country, in every constituency, those discussions, those calculations, will be happening this evening and in the weeks to come. They are not decisions I would wish on anyone. They are not decisions Conservative Ministers should be forcing on anyone. That is why I urge all Members to make a different choice this afternoon. I urge Conservative Members to abandon their plans to take away £20 each week from struggling families, and to remember the common decency and compassion that should unite us all. I urge them to support our motion and join us in the Lobby this evening. It is time to cancel the cut.
Let me begin by thanking all hon. Members who have taken part in this important debate, and I will endeavour to respond to the points raised in the short time left available to me This debate has been wide ranging, and there is no question but that the last 18 months have brought unprecedented challenges. We have all had to change the way we have lived and worked, but in the face of adversity this Government provided an unprecedented response and delivered support to families across the country in response to this crisis We have heard how the £20 per week uplift to UC has made a difference to households facing economic shock and financial disruption as a result of the pandemic, and we have heard calls for the uplift to be made permanent and extended to those on legacy benefits. But I have to remind the House that the Chancellor has always been clear that the UC temporary uplift was a pandemic response, and he ensured that the support was in place well beyond the end of restrictions and reopening of our economy Not one Member of this House wants to see anyone in our constituencies in poverty. It is incumbent on all of us to work together to tackle the root causes and drivers of poverty. No one Member of this House has a monopoly on ideas and solutions to tackling poverty, and I have no doubt that everyone taking part in today’s debate wants to achieve the same outcome, but via differing means As we have heard in the debate, there have been significant positive developments in the public health situation since the extension to the uplift was announced: the vaccine roll-out is progressing well; restrictions have been eased; and our economy is opening up. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in her opening speech, job vacancies are currently above pre-pandemic rates. They are sitting just below a record high since the series began in 2018. There are more than 1 million active vacancies in our labour market and hundreds of thousands are moving into employment every week. That is a very promising sign that our economy is recovering, and quickly. Universal credit provides a safety net, but it is not designed to trap people on welfare. Fundamentally, we recognise that work is the best route to prosperity and it is therefore right that the Government should now shift their focus to supporting people back into work and to progress in work. We have a comprehensive plan for jobs to help us achieve that objective Several Members called for the uplift to be made permanent. I want to tackle head-on the suggestion that this is a cut. I have to say that this is what turns people off politics and politicians. The removal of a clear, time-limited measure for a specific purpose is clearly not a cut and to describe it as such is disingenuous. There is no saving; in fact, it is quite the opposite: a further £6 billion would need to be raised through taxation just to maintain the uplift, let alone to extend it to legacy benefits. To my knowledge, not one Opposition party called for an uplift to the standard allowance of universal credit 18 months ago. In fact, when the Labour party was last in Government, it did not increase the rate of unemployment benefit above inflation because it was concerned about work incentives Several Members raised the annual cost of the uplift, which I can confirm would be £6 billion. The Chancellor has been absolutely clear that new day-to-day spending must be funded through savings or taxation, as part of a return to living within our means. This all has to be paid for. As hard as these decisions are—and they are hard—we have a duty to be fiscally responsible and to ensure that we have a welfare safety net that is there to support those who need it, that incentivises work, that is fair to taxpayers and that is sustainable for the future It was precisely because of our fiscal prudence since 2010 that this Government were in a position to put in place an unprecedented support package during the worst stages of the pandemic, to protect people, jobs and livelihoods. For context, it may assist the House to know that to raise £6 billion in taxation would require the equivalent of adding 1p on the basic rate of income tax in addition to a 3p increase in fuel duty. That would be a significant tax increase for hard-working families next year Several Members expressed concerns about poverty, which of course concerns me too. As I have said, universal credit provides a safety net, but it is not designed to trap people in welfare. All the evidence suggests that work, particularly full-time work, is the best route out of poverty and to prosperity. In 2019-20, there was only a 3% chance of children being in absolute poverty if both parents worked full time, compared with a 42% chance for two-parent families with only part-time work. Whether it is kickstart, restart, JETS or the 13,500 additional work coaches, this Government have a comprehensive plan for jobs to help us to achieve our objective In 2021-22, we will spend more than £111 billion on benefits for working-age people. On our support for those who are struggling, there will be £670 million in funding for local authorities, to help with council tax support; nearly £2 billion to increase the local housing allowance and maintain it in cash terms; £140 million in discretionary housing payments; and £220 million to extend the holiday activities and food programme. We have increased Healthy Start voucher payments from £3.10 to £4.25, and we have increased the national living wage by 2.2% to £8.91 an hour and extended it to all those aged 23 or over In conclusion, as we have demonstrated during the pandemic, the Government are committed to supporting the poorest, the lowest-paid and the most vulnerable in our society and to ensuring that people have the support that they need. Now is the time to be positive and ambitious and to look to the future. The expected rise in unemployment during 2021 has not materialised. The unemployment rate is now around half a percentage point lower than it was at the start of 2021. Vacancies are up to record numbers and now stand at more than 1 million, which is more than double the number this time last year. The number of furloughed workers is falling each week and the number of payrolled workers is up by nearly 1 million since the start of the year. Everything is moving in the right the direction, so our focus is rightly on continuing the implementation of our multibillion-pound plan for jobs. After all, a working Britain is a Britain that works. That is a pillar of our agenda as we build back better and fairer for our whole United Kingdom Question put.
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it not a disgrace that the Government have developed this habit of abstaining completely from Opposition day votes because they do not have the guts to oppose in the Lobby the things that we suggest, and they are frightened of the effect that it will have in their constituencies? It was once the case that when Governments lost Opposition day votes they put into effect the will of the House. This Government are showing such contempt for the House that they cannot even be bothered to take part in these votes. Is that not a disgrace? Is there anything, as a House, that we can do to prevent this despicable behaviour?
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The House has expressed itself very clearly in saying that there are concerns about the £20 of universal credit being taken away from the people who need it most. That being the case, how can we ensure, legislatively, that we turn that into a victory for the people we represent in this House and for those who want that universal credit money to continue for at least a period of time?
I thank the hon. Lady and the hon. Gentleman for their points of order. How the Government choose to vote is not a point of order for the Chair, but it might be helpful if I remind the House that on 26 October 2017 the former Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), set out the following: “Where a motion tabled by an Opposition party has been approved by the House, the relevant Minister will respond to the resolution of the House by making a statement no more than 12 weeks after the debate.” I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard that. To address the hon. Gentleman’s point directly, the resolution on an Opposition motion is not a binding resolution, hence my drawing attention to the fact that we assume that a Minister will come to the House within 12 weeks to respond.
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. You will be aware that if the Government do not take action on the universal credit cut, in 12 weeks that £20 a week will be gone from the constituents who we all represent. On a broader point of consistency, the Government have clearly abstained on the vote on the first motion of this Opposition day. The subsequent motion is essentially a motion about House business and would instruct Mr Speaker to set up a Committee. How can the Government claim to have consistency when they abstain in the vote on the first motion and will almost certainly vote against the second motion this evening?
I am afraid I am not really answerable for whether there is consistency in the choices that are made. Every Member has the right to decide whether they want to vote or not vote. I assume that these issues could well be addressed later in the debate, to which we now come.
I remind hon. and right hon. Members that I will only call those who are here at the beginning of the debate. It is important to keep bobbing to show that those who have put in for the debate still wish to speak. All Members must be present at the end of the debate, too, so Members should bear that in mind when considering whether they definitely want to speak.
I beg to move, (1) That it is expedient: (a) that a Joint Committee of Lords and Commons be appointed for the remainder of the current session to consider: (i) Government policy on Afghanistan from the Doha Agreement in February 2020 to the conclusion of Operation Pitting on 27 August 2021; (ii) The intelligence assessments made of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan during this period, the extent to which those assessments were accurate, and the decisions taken by Ministers in response to that intelligence; (iii) The ARAP scheme, including eligibility for the scheme, and policy towards civilian resettlement; (iv) The planning of the Government, including any contingency planning, the crisis management process of the Government, and planning for the availability of Ministers if the situation deteriorated; (b) that the Chair of the Committee shall be a backbench Member of a party represented in Her Majesty’s Government and shall be elected by the House of Commons under arrangements approved by Mr Speaker (2) That a Select Committee of eight Members be appointed to join with any committee to be appointed by the Lords for this purpose (3) That the Committee should publish its first report no later than 31 March 2022 (4) That the Committee shall have power: (a) to send for persons, papers and records; (b) to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House; (c) to report from time to time; (d) to appoint specialist advisers; and (e) to adjourn from place to place within the United Kingdom (5) That the quorum of the Committee shall be three (6) That, in addition to the Chair elected under paragraph (1)(b) above, the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, the Chair of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and the Chairs of the Defence Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Home Affairs Committee, the International Development Committee and the International Trade Committee shall be members of the Committee This has been a painful few weeks. The chaotic end to 20 years in Afghanistan left hundreds of British citizens and thousands of Afghans behind. Two decades of work, the transformation of the economy through landmine clearance, the improvements to healthcare, media freedom and the education of millions of girls are now at risk as the Taliban regime returns. A generation of young Afghans are watching the future they were promised disappear before their eyes. We owe it to them, to the 150,000 brave military personnel, to the families of 457 British soldiers who never made it home and to our diplomats and aid workers who fought for a better future, to tell the truth about what went wrong over the past 18 months and what is still going wrong at the heart of Government, and to do everything in our power to support the people of Afghanistan and secure the safety of British people.
I fully agree with the hon. Member that we need to get to the bottom of what has happened in the past 18 months, and I agree with the motion. Does she also agree that we need to look at the past 20 years and how we even got to where we were 18 months ago? That means looking at why we went in, how the objectives changed over the years, who supported the Taliban and who kept them strong in Afghanistan and enabled their resurgence. Does she agree we need a full public inquiry to get to the bottom of that?
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention and say to him that I absolutely accept that lessons have to be learned from the experience in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. There are a range of views in this House about the decisions taken over two decades by successive Governments on different sides of the Atlantic. All of us in this House should approach that inquiry with a level of humility and introspection. That does not mean we cannot learn the lessons right now from what has happened over the past 18 months, and learn them quickly In 20 years, not a single attack has been launched against us from Afghanistan. Those gains must be protected. We need to learn lessons and chart a course for the future. We deserve to know why for years successive Conservative Governments have dragged their heels over the resettlement of Afghan interpreters. One of my hon. Friends still has an interpreter who is in hiding and is being hunted door-to-door by the Taliban. We deserve to know why, when the Government had 18 months to plan, they were so completely unprepared that troops had to be sent into danger to pull people through crowds and on to planes.
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. Many of us on the Opposition Benches and across the House will have constituents who have family members in Afghanistan—for example, I have a mother whose husband and two of her children are in Kabul, left behind in the chaos. While I pay tribute to the bravery of people who were working on the frontline, does my hon. Friend share my concern that we have heard so little from the Government over these weeks? Those desperate families are simply not getting the information or advice that we all need.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her work on behalf of her constituents and their family members in Afghanistan. Members across the House have been working tirelessly to raise cases with the Government only to be told suddenly—despite the Prime Minister’s promise that we would all receive answers by last Monday—that we should not send emails and that not a single one would receive a response. It is disgraceful We deserve to know why, when the Foreign Office’s own assessment warned on 22 July that the Taliban were advancing rapidly, no action was taken, and why the Foreign Secretary appeared not to be aware of the report when it was raised with him by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat). We deserve to know why the Foreign Office crisis centre was set up after Kabul had fallen, why crucial papers identifying local employees were left abandoned on an embassy floor and why thousands of emails from Members of this House addressing urgent cases are sitting unopened and unread in inboxes Ministers still come to the Dispatch Box unable to answer basic questions such as how many British nationals have been left behind, Departments are still unable to pick up the phone to each other to resolve basic issues, and the Prime Minister pledges that all cases will receive a response within hours but, weeks later, it has not been done. It is disgraceful. Lives are at risk.
My hon. Friend mentions the plight of British nationals still stuck in Afghanistan. I have 11 such constituents, including an 18-month-old baby, yet the Government refuse to respond when we email them. Does she agree that that is completely unacceptable and that they must put a plan together urgently to get these British nationals home?
I completely agree. I am aware of that case and how hard my hon. Friend has been fighting on behalf of her constituents. How on earth are we supposed to trust that the Government are dealing with the serious security threats we face or the evacuation of thousands whose lives are urgently at risk if they cannot even keep a promise to reply to emails? Quite simply, it is Parliament’s job to get answers to those questions, and the Opposition believe that we need proper tools to do it.
Is there not another issue? Lots of the people about whom many hon. Members have been writing to three Departments—let us hope that, as I think the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa said last week, we will get the reply from the Foreign Office, which will apparently be by the end of tomorrow—will now need consular support from somewhere, either in country or out of country. However, as I understand it, the Government have done nothing to make that provision available to them. Unlike what the Americans are doing, it feels like we have given in and surrendered.
I thank my hon. Friend for saving me a bit of time in my speech. I hope the Minister heard that and will provide us with answers today.
These are all important questions, but, notwithstanding the bravery of 70,000 Afghans who gave their lives over recent years and against the background of the howl of the loss of rights, opportunities and futures for women and everyone, is not the burning question about the failure of strategic policy and how, in the recent conflict, the Taliban walked into Kabul without having to fight for it? We must answer the question of why that happened.
The right hon. Gentleman and I have many disagreements, but I think we can agree that, over 20 years, our troops played an incredibly important role in supporting the work of the Afghan forces and that we should all honour and respect that. We should also learn the lessons from why the withdrawal ended up in such chaos, why our troops had to be sent into danger, why so many people were left behind, why the Taliban were able to advance so rapidly and why the morale of the Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly. What were the intelligence assessment failures that meant we did not see that coming? We need to answer all those questions relatively quickly. That is why Labour proposes this motion The motion would create a Committee of Members from across the House, with a Chair chosen by the whole House, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the other place. Its remit would be to examine the full story of the last 18 months from the Doha agreement to the conclusion of Operation Pitting and provide for the inquiry to be done in a timely manner so that this Parliament ensures that responsibility is taken and lessons are learned.
rose—
I will take one more intervention and then try to get on with my speech.
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. It strikes me, having been in this place for some time, that it is the role of Select Committees to undertake such inquiries. Is it not up to Select Committee Chairs to make that judgment?
A number of Select Committees—I pay tribute to their Chairs and members—have announced their own inquiries, but the failings we have seen most pressingly in recent months have been the failures of co-ordination between different Government Departments, and it would be a serious mistake to replicate the siloed approach that has failed so badly in the work this House does to ensure that lessons are learned and mistakes are put right If the Government do not learn from these mistakes, they will repeat them. The problem is that the failures over Afghanistan are indicative of a wider pattern—a foreign policy that is reactive rather than strategic, and improvised, not planned. Setting up a crisis centre after Kabul had fallen, ignoring phone calls in the build-up to the crisis and then rushing on a hastily organised regional tour, and cutting aid to Afghanistan only to have to restore it—this is a foreign policy of negligence that is careless about the consequences for people’s lives. It is disjointed and incoherent when we need principled and consistent leadership. We need a Government who can build consensus with international partners and who are trusted and credible on the world stage We must look forward as well as back to understand not just where Government policy has gone wrong, but to confront the reality of Taliban rule. This requires action on several fronts, starting with those left behind. We are so grateful to the soldiers, diplomats and civil servants who flew into danger to evacuate thousands as part of Operation Pitting—they remind us what courage looks like—but they are heartbroken at how many people were left behind. MPs and staff from across this House have been working around the clock to escalate the cases of British nationals and Afghans who were left behind. Many of them are still being hunted from door to door because of their connection to Britain and their support for our efforts. How on earth could it be that, when I asked the Foreign Secretary how many British nationals are in contact with his Department seeking help with evacuation, he did not know? Can the Minister tell us how many people that is today It is not just about the numbers; it is about the complexity of the cases. We are in touch with British nationals who are wheelchair-bound, while babies and one-year-olds have been left by themselves. One man is on dialysis, and he cannot follow the Defence Secretary’s advice to try to get to a border. Every Government have a duty above all to protect their own citizens. That there is still no advice for them is a first-order failure of Government, and it must be resolved We were infuriated and dispirited to learn that thousands of our emails had not even been opened by the Department. The Minister told MPs they would get a reply by tomorrow about British nationals stranded in Afghanistan. Will he respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and make sure that those replies are forthcoming? I did a ring around before I left the office, and I could not find a single MP who has had a substantive reply to those emails from the Foreign Office yet Is the Minister going to do that, or is he going to follow the appalling example of the Home Office? In a letter to MPs this week, it told us that we must “deal with the circumstances as they are, not how we wish them to be” The letter confirmed that it is just “logging the cases we have and considering how this data will be used in the future”, and it asked MPs not to “pursue cases” any more. This is utterly shameful. For the Prime Minister to stand at the Dispatch Box and say that he is moving heaven and earth to sort this out, promising responses by close of play over a week ago, and then leave it to a junior Minister to tell us that the Afghans who supported and helped us—they went into the crowds and pulled people into the airport in the face of gunfire—are on their own is an absolute disgrace, and the Minister has to set it right today I know the Minister has made some limited progress with keeping the borders open, but there are immediate practical steps he must take now. Countries in the region tell me they need far more support with covid testing facilities for new arrivals and a greater UK presence at the borders. Because many of those travelling are considered special cases under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy, there is no guarantee of onward travel to the UK, so they are not being admitted.
There are 100 people with a connection to my seat in Reading who are still stuck in Afghanistan. My hon. Friend has spoken eloquently about the plight of these people, who urgently need our help. Does she agree that the Government should have taken much earlier action to secure access at land borders to get these people out?
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and I want to pay tribute to Lord Ahmad for having, belatedly, rolled into action to try to overcome some of those difficulties, but I say to those on the Treasury Bench that far more can be done. I have a list of Afghan women MPs who need paperwork to cross the border to neighbouring states and onward travel to the UK. I know Lord Ahmad, the Minister for South Asia, has this list too; can the Minister replying to this debate assure me he will work with me so this can be resolved in the next 24 hours?
Does my hon. Friend agree that we only have to look around these Benches to see the powerful and important role women play in the political arena, and that we must therefore do all we can to support and protect the brave women who served in the Afghan Government?
I could not agree more and am sure we can find cross-party consensus on this, but those women need practical help now. There is a way to get them to the border if we can issue them with the paperwork, so will the Minister commit to working with the Ministry of Defence, which is represented here today, to make sure that paperwork is issued within the next 24 hours Beyond the help for those left behind, we need urgent action on the humanitarian crisis. There are 37 million Afghans now living under a Taliban regime. The pledging conference was a start, but there are practical challenges. I was very concerned to speak to aid workers in Afghanistan recently who have been told that women aid workers cannot return to work. They are understandably unwilling to operate under those conditions; what discussions has the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had with our allies and with the Taliban to ensure that that work can begin again without conditions We need a global agreement to deal with the refugee crisis, as the Minister knows, but we also need to make sure the UK plays its part. Pakistan is, for instance, home to 3 million Afghan refugees already and is being asked to take more when the UK has capped its contribution at 5,000 over the next year. Can the Minister see the problem? If we want to keep the borders open he will have to pick up the phone to the Home Office to see what more can be done, and while he is doing that perhaps he will mention to the Home Secretary that this warm welcome looks pretty chilly indeed when families are being dumped into overcrowded hostels and hotels without local authorities even being notified that they are there No one in Government has yet been able to outline a political strategy. We need clarity on how the Government intend to try to influence the new Taliban regime, a clear assessment of the financial and economic leverage available, and clarity on the Government’s approach to conditionality. We are now in the unpalatable position of being dependent on the Taliban’s promises that they have changed; I am sure I am not the only Member who is deeply sceptical about their assurances. Whatever the PR operation in Qatar is telling us, on the ground there are daily reports coming into my office of journalists being beaten, women being hunted and minority groups being tortured and killed, so how does the Minister intend to use our leverage, particularly financial and economic, to ensure the Taliban keep that promise Finally, on national security we must have assurances that effective security checks are applied to those coming to the UK, and that there is clarity on the threat assessment and a plan to strengthen our intelligence coverage of Afghanistan now that the UK is no longer present on the ground. As well as the reality of those left behind in Afghanistan, what keeps me awake at night is the unknown security risks we now face. There are ways to address this, but one consequence might be that we become more reliant on countries that are not our natural partners. When we went to the UN, we were reliant on China and Russia in order to establish a joint international approach. What does this mean for Britain as we enter the next few weeks or the great strategic challenges that will become apparent in just a month’s time at COP26 It did not have to be like this; we could have used the last 18 months to plan our exit and to recommit to the aspirations of the Afghan people for a peaceful democratic country. Although we are withdrawing troops, we should not walk away from the people of Afghanistan. The alternative to chaotic exit is not endless war, as the former Foreign Secretary the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab) suggested, but the endless, tireless pursuit of peace that shows leadership on refugees instead of simply lecturing other countries, and that invests in friendships and alliances so that when we most need them we find willing partners who stand with us and readily answer our call. That was the spirit shown by our troops, our diplomats, our civil servants and the Afghan people over two decades. We owe it to them to learn the lessons, we owe it to them to do better. I commend this motion to the House.
Before I call the Minister, I have further news in relation to the points of order that were raised earlier. Initially, the Government committed to making a statement in response to any such votes as took place earlier within 12 weeks. However, in 2019, the Government reduced that deadline to eight weeks. I thought it would be helpful for the House to know that so that it is clear about the position. If there are any further concerns, I am sure that Members will consider raising them with the Leader of the House at business questions tomorrow There is pressure on time in this debate, so there will be an immediate time limit on Back-Bench speeches. It may be five minutes, but it might be four, depending on the length of the Front-Bench contributions. Just to reiterate, if anyone stands who was not here at the beginning of the debate, they will not be called.
I thank the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) for calling today’s debate on an incredibly important issue In response to the crisis in Afghanistan, we have delivered the largest and most complex evacuation in living memory. In the space of just two weeks, we evacuated around 8,000 British nationals, around 5,000 Afghans under the ARAP scheme, and around 500 Afghan special cases, including judges, Chevening scholars, journalists and women’s rights activists. That is in addition to the 1,978 Afghans evacuated through the ARAP scheme between April, when we started the scheme, and the end of August.
In her statement on Monday, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), said: “Family members of British citizens or” Afghans settled in the UK “who do not qualify for the ACRS”— the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme— “can apply to come to the UK”—[Official Report, 13 September 2021; Vol. 700, c. 685.] under existing “family routes”. The majority of our cases, I suspect, are those family reunion cases. What priority will be given to those? She also said that “we will not be able, therefore, to respond to colleagues with specific updates on individuals.” Does that mean that the 160 letters that I am waiting for a reply to will not get any reply at all?
I will come on to how we intend to inform Members about cases that they have raised with us. If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will address that We also repatriated an estimated 500 British nationals who left Afghanistan in accordance with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office travel advice when that was changed. In total, from April this year to August, we helped over 17,000 people get to safety. I pay tribute to the troops and civilian staff who helped to make that possible, and I pay tribute once again to all those who served in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, whether in the armed forces or in other roles In this next phase, we are working to secure safe passage for those British nationals and eligible Afghans who remain in the country. My right hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), the then Foreign Secretary, visited Qatar two weeks ago to discuss efforts to re-establish flights from Kabul airport and the wider international approach to the Taliban. International flights have now started. We secured places for 13 British nationals on the first Qatari flight from Kabul on 9 September, and 21 British nationals were on the second flight the following day. We will continue this work to help evacuate British nationals via that route.
I have two quick questions. First, how many British nationals does the Minister think are still in Afghanistan? Secondly, if other people—Afghan nationals—are going to be helped out, some of them will still need consular support because they will need visas or permits to travel. How do we intend that that support be given? Are we doing that through another nation state? Are we going to be able to do that from out of country? What is the plan?
The hon. Gentleman asks about the number of people in Afghanistan. He will understand that the British Government do not demand British nationals overseas register with us. We do not demand that when they cross borders, so it is incredibly difficult—this is one of the challenges we are facing—to put a precise figure on the number of British nationals in Afghanistan, particularly, as I say, because there is no requirement necessarily for people to register with us when they cross borders.
I am conscious that there is huge interest in this debate and I really do want to make some progress We are working closely with Afghanistan’s neighbours to ensure safe passage through those countries. My right hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton, the then Foreign Secretary, visited Pakistan after Qatar and saw for himself the situation at Torkham on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He also had discussions with the Foreign Ministers of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Iran Our diplomacy is paying off. Over the weekend, we helped to secure safe passage for Afghan nationals, including the staff of the Nowzad animal welfare charity, which I know is of huge interest both to hon. Members and the British people more widely, after they made their way to the border. We also dispatched a rapid deployment team comprising 23 staff to the region last week to support our embassies in processing those cases, which goes to the point raised by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) about where they would be processed. Those cases will be processed wherever is most appropriate, although the main ambassadorial team which served in Afghanistan is currently based in Doha. We are sending further rapid deployment teams to bolster those efforts, with additional staff being sent to Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Members on both sides of the House are fighting the corner for deserving Afghans whom we want to save. The Minister has just said that the Nowzad animal charity staff, who were not ARAP people and not British citizens, have been given safe passage, having got to the border. Does that mean that the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme is now up and running, because we have all got good cases that qualify just as much as those worthy people do for immediate help and rescue?
I will address that point shortly In addition to that deployment of staff, we are providing £30 million to Afghanistan’s neighbours to provide lifesaving support for refugees. Meanwhile—this touches on the point my right hon. Friend mentions—the Home Office is currently in the process of fully launching the resettlement programme, providing a safe and legal route to the UK for up to 20,000 Afghans in the region.
I really do have to make some progress. There are a lot of points that I wish to cover. I am sure Members will be able to bring that up in the forthcoming debate The FCDO team in London and internationally continue to work around the clock to support processing and responding to the correspondence that has been sent by Members of this House. During the evacuation operation alone, the FCDO received, as I have said previously at the Dispatch Box, over 200,000 emails. Approximately 30,000 of these emails were from MPs. That volume reflects the concern and passion of the House, and we completely understand that. However, working through that volume of emails has been a Herculean task.
On that point, will the Minister give way?
I am going to make progress Hundreds of civil servants are being assigned to work through that case load each day, working in multiple shifts through the day, seven days a week. The FCDO aimed to complete the triage of cases to the Ministry of Defence or the Home Office, and notify hon. Members by tomorrow. It has become increasingly clear, as we work through cases, that both the volume and their complexity mean that we will have to take longer than we had originally hoped What we have learnt is that some individual pieces of correspondence contain very large numbers of highly complex cases, which means that it is not always obvious which Government Department is the most appropriate recipient for the email and makes predicting how long this work will take very difficult. However, I can tell the House that, by tomorrow, the FCDO will have contacted more than half the hon. Members who have written to us to, letting them know which Department their cases have been sent to. We will endeavour to complete that process for all but the small minority of MPs with the most complex cases by the timelines previously communicated to Members.
I thank the Minister for giving way and particularly for his update on his discussions with other countries, including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which are a very important part of the puzzle. I want to make two specific points. First, there is a new form on the Foreign Office website for British nationals in Afghanistan to register, but when I asked the Foreign Secretary about whether that form needed to be completed again by British nationals who have already notified the Foreign Office that they are still there, he said he did not know and suggested I ask the Minister. So I would be grateful if the Minister could update the House on whether British nationals still in Afghanistan—this is a very important point—have to fill out another form to be on the Foreign Office’s register Secondly, I want to ask about Afghan nationals who are at risk. A particular example is someone who worked as a BBC journalist who is in hiding at the moment with her children. What advice should I be giving her right now? She is a relative of a constituent and at serious risk at this moment.
I completely understand the hon. Lady’s desire to get information to at-risk Afghans. It is not possible for me to give credible advice based just on the information that she has sent through. She makes the point about the website. While it is not necessarily the duty of Members of the House to understand the machinery of government, it is worth while them understanding that, when the Foreign Office has received emails, sometimes with the details of hundreds of individual cases, it is very difficult at times even to double-check to see whether those details have already been passed to us. Even in the case of British nationals, we have received cases that have been a mix of British nationals, potential ARAP scheme Afghans and other Afghans who are likely to come through in the Home Office scheme that has been announced. Working through them—triaging and distributing them—is an incredibly time-consuming and complex process, which we have to do with care.
It is obviously right that we crack through this casework as soon as possible, particularly in relation to UK nationals and those who come under the scope of the ARAP scheme. That is a UK responsibility and we will be faced with a refugee crisis—of that there is no question. We will therefore need a much bigger programme to take as many people as is reasonable, with our partners. The expert in this matter is the United Nations, which has of course provided triage, relatively recently and contemporaneously, in the Syrian resettlement programme, so what discussion has the Minister had with the UN about how to manage this situation, particularly in relation to those who have now fled Afghanistan?
I thank my right hon. Friend and I will come on to that point shortly As we work through this process, those MPs who have particularly complex cases will ultimately be contacted directly by the ministerial team—they will be phoned by a member of the ministerial team—to update them on the progress of those cases and, where necessary, to establish further information to allow us to process them A crisis of this magnitude demands a wider strategic response from the international community, as my right hon. Friend said. The UK is very much leading in that response. We are galvanising actions around four key priorities: first, preventing Afghanistan from ever again becoming a haven for global terrorism; secondly, preventing humanitarian disaster and supporting refugees; thirdly, preserving wider regional stability; and fourthly, holding the Taliban to account for their conduct, including their record on human rights. We will be at the UN General Assembly next week to take forward those priorities with our international partners. Working with the international community, we must set credible tests to hold the Taliban to the undertakings that they have made Turning to the motion before the House, I note that there is already a comprehensive range of scrutiny of the Government on the issue. The Select Committees on Foreign Affairs and on Defence have already launched inquiries on Afghanistan; further scrutiny will no doubt come from the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations and Defence, and possibly from other Committees of this House or the other place. It is not clear what additional value a Joint Committee of both Houses would add The motion states that the proposed Joint Committee would “consider…Government policy on Afghanistan from…February 2020 to…August 2021” In fact, the Government’s policy on Afghanistan during that period has been clear and there have been many opportunities to question Ministers and the Government on their approach.
Will the Minister give way?
No, I will conclude, because otherwise I would steal time from hon. Members who wished to contribute to the debate The motion proposes that the new Committee “consider…intelligence assessments made of the…situation in Afghanistan”. The Intelligence and Security Committee already has statutory responsibility for oversight in that area; it is the proper vehicle for such scrutiny The motion then stipulates that the Joint Committee would scrutinise eligibility for the ARAP scheme, but the eligibility criteria have been known to every Member of this House for months and there is no need for a Joint Committee to debate them now or in future. Of course, the overriding challenge that we have faced has not been eligibility per se, but the difficulty of implementing a scheme in the rapidly changing and deteriorating security situation that we have observed in Afghanistan Thanks to our brave servicemen and women, no terrorist attack has been successfully launched from Afghanistan against this country in the past 20 years; I am grateful that the hon. Member for Wigan recognised that point. It is painful to watch what has gone on in Afghanistan, but we should remember that 10 million more children have been educated and 8 million landmines have been cleared because of our intervention. In the new reality that we face in Afghanistan today, it will be challenging to preserve those gains—of course it will—but we must do all we can with a concerted new international approach The Labour party supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. As yet, we have not seen the Opposition putting forward a credible alternative set of policies or strategic approach to this incredibly challenging issue As I said, the relevant Select Committees are already looking into the recent events in Afghanistan and providing scrutiny, as they should. The motion would therefore create an unnecessary process and would inevitably duplicate the work of those Committees and divert the Government’s resources from what should be our priority: addressing the needs of those people currently in Afghanistan whom we need to help. I therefore urge hon. Members on both sides of the House to reject the motion.
The Scottish National party supports the motion. I am very glad that the Opposition tabled it, because there is a great deal to learn from the debacle, the failure, the ignominious defeat that we have seen in Afghanistan. We have expressed a preference for an independent judge-led inquiry and we are still very open to that option, but let us consider the motion that stands before us I would quibble slightly with the scope of paragraph (1)(a)(i), which would start the timetable from the Doha agreement; we think that previous events need to be properly considered in the round. I would also quibble with paragraph (1)(a)(ii), because I think that there would be quite a lot of overlap with the Intelligence and Security Committee, a point that has been dealt with already. Nevertheless, we support the motion. While taking due cognisance of the Committee inquiries already under way, we think, as Labour does, that the matter is of such significance and magnitude that it must be properly ventilated There is a lot to learn from the past few months. One thing that has struck me personally is that, in all our discussions and urgent questions on Afghanistan during and since the emergency recall, not a single person—on either side of the House, actually—has said sorry. Four hundred and fifty-six service personnel lost their lives. We have not said sorry to the veterans and their families. We have not said sorry to the Afghans who believed our promises and whom we collectively—all of us—failed. We have not said sorry either to our taxpayers, who funded this to the tune of many billions of pounds. There is a real need for more collective humility on all of this. I myself am sorry, because I think we have all let the people of Afghanistan down, and I think we need to learn the lessons from that I have to say, even to the Minister, that while I pay tribute to the intelligence personnel, the defence personnel and everyone else involved in Operation Pitting—and to everyone who has spent time in Afghanistan keeping the people of the country safe—to present Operation Pitting and recent events as some sort of herculean triumph is out of tune with the reality of the situation. I pay tribute to all those who have achieved so much over recent months, but we must learn the lessons of this collective huge failure. I would counsel a little more humility from the Government Benches and a little less hubris when we are discussing this issue There are also lessons for the conduct of the House’s business, because the responses that Members received from the Government were not as they should have been. We are reasonable people. We understand that things were stretched, we understand that things were unprecedented, and we understand that things were moving very fast. We would have taken all that in the round, but it was particularly galling to have a breezy assurance from the Prime Minister and former Foreign Secretary that everything would be dealt with, and that everyone would receive a response “by close of play” There is a world of difference between a response and an answer, and the inquiries of many Members, on all sides of the House, were not properly dealt with and still have not been. That is something of which the House should take due cognisance. I think that the distinction between those words was cynically abused by the Prime Minister himself—not by this Minister, who is far more credible on the issue. I think that there has been a collective failure of government. It was suggested earlier that the duty of the House is not necessarily to understand the administration of government. I thought that that was precisely the function of the House. We fear that there has been a failure of collective responsibility in this regard.
When the Minister was on his feet, I hoped to ask him this question. I myself have tried to obtain a copy of the call logs for each Minister for each day during the month of August, so that we can map what Ministers were doing as the Taliban were advancing across Afghanistan. The Department refuses to publish that information, which it holds. Does my hon. Friend agree that, if the Department will not even do that, it explains why we in the House believe that greater transparency, not less, in government and ministerial actions is what is needed?
My hon. Friend has made a very sensible point. I would add gently to the Government that perhaps there would not be a call for a specific inquiry if we felt that the inquiries had been dealt with properly thus far. What we need to do, as a priority—all of us—while learning lessons is get people out and make people safe. I pay tribute to the work that has been done on that, but we need more. The House needs to scrutinise the ARAP scheme itself, but we also urgently need the details of the new scheme so that our constituents can be informed. We in the SNP already think that it needs to be expanded. We do not think that 20,000 is remotely sufficient for the scale of the trouble ahead We would also like clarity on the actual timescale. If, as we have heard, “in the coming years” means more people coming in, does that mean that, if 20,000 people apply in the first few months of next year, the scheme will close—in which case it is wholly insufficient—or does it mean that there is a quota for how many people can actually get in? These are basic questions that are as yet unanswered, so we need more details urgently.
We have another issue, and that is family reunion. The family reunion visa will not be suitable for the situation that we face. There is currently a 12-year-old girl in my constituency who was separated from her parents in the chaos at Kabul airport, and we cannot get the parents out. Surely we need to look very carefully at how we are going to operate family reunion in cases such as that.
I strongly agree; in fact, that was going to be the next line of my remarks. Indeed, a number of Members across the House have been pressing for details on family reunion. There is also the question of funding for local authorities to keep people safe. I have met three families from Afghanistan who have already been settled in Stirling in the last couple of weeks, and they were particularly concerned about friends and family who were still in the country and still very much in harm’s way. I pay tribute to Stirling Council and to Forth Valley Welcome, who have done so much to make these refugees feel safe and secure in the Forth Valley. I say, in a genuine and constructive offer to the Government, that we can do more: the Forth Valley can do more and Scotland can do more. We need the details of the scheme and particularly of the funding, because we are not going to make promises that we cannot keep, but we are willing to play our part constructively There are wider and longer-term implications to the Afghanistan situation. It is not just about Afghanistan. Where is your global Britain now? After Afghanistan, it is clear that the UK cannot operate significant independent engagement and that it has precious little influence on US engagement. This was a collective failure of the US, the UK and others; many countries have failed in this. The world is less secure than it was, and the bad guys are now feeling more confident than they should be. That is something we should all be deeply concerned about Domestically, the integrated review is out of date within six months of its publication. We also see that the UK’s Indo-Pacific tilt looks even less credible than it did—and frankly that was not much, from our perspective. Global Britain is not the SNP’s project. That stands to reason, as we have a different world view. We believe that Scotland’s best future is as an independent state within the European Union, but we do not wish global Britain harm. The UK is always going to be our closest neighbour and our closest friend. The SNP submitted constructive suggestions to the integrated defence and foreign affairs review, and they are even more relevant now than they were. We will continue to work constructively, from our perspective, to help our nearest friend and neighbour to learn the lessons of the last few months, but that needs to be done on the basis of humility and reality. Learning lessons would go a long way to support the motion put forward by Labour today, which we are very pleased to support.
Order. We are going to try to get everybody in, but I am afraid that the time limit forthwith is four minutes.
It is a great pleasure to follow several hon. and right hon. Friends. I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with the Opposition and agreeing with those on the Government Benches, which, as many Members will know, has a touch of novelty for me. I think I have been doing my best to hold this Government to account on matters of foreign affairs, but Members might feel that I have not been quite as rigorous on this matter as I should have been today. Could I ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to check whether the phone signal is working properly in the Chamber? My phone seems remarkably unable to ring.
I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman would share his contact list with me, because he seems to be able to contact the Home Secretary directly while many of us cannot. We have similar cases to his, and I congratulate him on having success with his case, but it might be helpful if he could do that.
I would be absolutely delighted to. As many Members of the House will know, I share any Member’s phone number with other Members once I have got their permission to do so, and if the hon. Lady would like to ask me, I would be very happy to do exactly that I share much of the criticism that I have heard from various Members about how the relief and evacuation operations have been handled. I have been pretty critical of the ways in which questions have been answered and co-ordination has been conducted. I think I have also been pretty robust in expressing how that should be improved.
On the matter of responses, I wrote to the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues in the Government about a friend of mine and a group who were trapped in Afghanistan. The friend of mine, who I worked with 10 years ago at the US Department of State, was an adviser to the Afghan Government. Not only had he fled Afghanistan with his family and gone to Turkey because he saw the writing on the wall, unlike our security services, but he had key expertise to offer. Yet I was not even able to get a response from the Government to acknowledge the name of my friend and the group of human rights defenders. I got a standard response. Luckily my friend has been given passage to the US, but is it not a disgrace that the hon. Gentleman’s Government will not even acknowledge the individual cases and lives that we are raising with them?
The hon. Lady will know that, in all manner of ways, I support this Government, but on this single issue of foreign affairs it is my job to criticise and attack the Government where I feel they are lacking, and I have done so. I will not add to her comments. She has made her point extremely powerfully I was pretty clear with the last Foreign Secretary that this is a problem that needs addressing, and needs addressing now. The Foreign Affairs Committee has been pretty robust. The hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) does not know this yet, but I have just written to the new Foreign Secretary asking for a list of all phone calls. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), will be giving us the information for which we ask. We have asked for the contacts between the Government and other people, and for any number of documents, in order to conduct the inquiry. The hon. Member for Glasgow South will be sitting on the Committee and scrutinising those documents The Foreign Affairs Committee appreciates the urgency of which the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) speaks. We appreciate the troubles that many people around the world are facing by not having contact with family and not being able to get family out of Afghanistan. We appreciate the real challenges due to the abject failure and defeat we have seen in Afghanistan. That is why, bizarrely, I find myself on the other side of this argument. The Foreign Affairs Committee is literally doing the job that the Opposition are asking us to do. We started even before Parliament returned with a hearing with the then Foreign Secretary, who I do not think felt that it was a particularly easy ride. I certainly do not think the hon. Member for Glasgow South gave him a particularly easy ride. The Committee has been working as one to interrogate the Department very robustly, which is exactly what Select Committees need to do The truth is that the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) has a point. Not unusually, she has got the core of the matter right, which is that we need a much more strategic approach to foreign policy. We need an all-encompassing approach to how we scrutinise it, and we need a much more integrated approach to how Britain approaches the world I would like to see the new Foreign Secretary taking on the mantle of overseeing Britain’s foreign strategy in a global sense. I would like to see her speaking about not just foreign policy but also trade policy, defence policy, education policy and justice policy as they affect Britain abroad. Unless there is a Department bringing together Britain’s foreign policy, and unless there is a strategic approach to the kind of integration and interaction we are going to have with other countries, we will find ourselves constantly salami-sliced I would like to see that, and obviously I would like to see a supercharged Foreign Affairs Committee scrutinising it, but what I would really like right now is for us not to mess around with the structures of the House but to get on with allowing the Committees that have already started the work to deliver as quickly as possible. Then, if we cannot get the answers, we need to look at a judge-led inquiry, not just another super Committee.
Never has the old saying been more true: a failure to plan is a plan to fail. This Government failed to plan and these Ministers are now failing. They are failing people in Afghanistan and their loved ones here in this country I put on record my heartfelt thanks to those who went in to serve, to help and to aid those in need, and I put on record my thanks to all our caseworkers and staff, my own included. My staff are now supporting 1,400 people in Afghanistan, the loved ones and family members of people in Birmingham, Hodge Hill constituency. The stories they have heard have been heartbreaking, yet the Government cannot and will not even give us the courtesy of updates on that trauma. Worst have been the cases where family members here in Birmingham have had to listen to their loved ones screaming in terror down the phone and having nothing to do, nothing to say, no update, no comfort to give. One constituent said: “I literally am on the phone...hearing them scream and cry and beg for help. I have no other choice but to listen and cry dreading if they will be found by the Taliban…they have already executed his brother. I’ve tried calling various immigration numbers, but still of no help.” Another constituent talked of the cold fear that comes as the Taliban go door to door, hunting those who worked with the fallen regime. One told us how their father was a high-ranking colonel and former Afghan national army instructor, and their sisters were helping women to become literate and learn their rights. We were told: “This threat is directly facing all my family” Another let us know that they had already received a warning letter from the Taliban and they were now in fear of going out to find food. A constituent said to me, “How is that family going to feed their children when they dare not venture into the street to get food?” She said to us that their siblings “can’t even go outside to provide food for their kids because…Taliban is after my whole family” All of us in Birmingham are extremely proud of the way in which our city has stepped up—we are a city of sanctuary and we are very proud of it. Some 1,600 refugees are currently being supported in our city, and I want to put on record my thanks to Councillor John Cotton and his team for their extraordinary work. I have to say that that is in contrast to the council in the constituency of the Minister with responsibility for Afghan resettlement, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who was in her place a moment ago. I am told that that local authority has supported just one asylum seeker since 2016. Can that really be true We have no details of the new scheme. We have no updates on the 1,400 cases we have filed for. We have no clarity on the resources that our city needs to provide help. We have no leadership to pull together councils in this country to provide proper support. We have no notice of the so-called “contingency hotels” that are popping up at very short notice. We have no answers to the challenges we put to Serco. We have no strategy, no updates, no clarity, no leadership and nothing to say to our constituents, citizens of this country about to lose the people they love most. These Ministers are not only risking the lives of those abroad; they are breaking the hearts of their family members here at home. The good people of Afghanistan stood with us and it is about time we stood with them.
That harrowing account by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) puts me in mind of what happened to my family in Nazi-occupied Poland for 20 months during the second world war, when they could come out from a bunker under a barn only at night, to be fed by the Polish family who risked their lives to save them. This debate ought to be about what the Scottish National party spokesman, the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), rightly summarised when he said, “Get people out and keep people safe.” That is why I am a little disappointed that I do not feel that I can concentrate on cases such as the ones I have raised before, those of the 16 academics being supported by the Council for At-Risk Academics. These people have places—visiting fellowships and research studentships—in British universities. A dozen of them are still in Afghanistan, three of them have made it to Pakistan and one has even made it to the Netherlands, preparatory to coming here. I do not feel that I can concentrate on that because, unfortunately, the Opposition motion is framed in terms of setting up a: “Joint Committee to Investigate Withdrawal from Afghanistan” I am reading from the Annunciator there With the greatest respect to the Opposition, may I say that that was a mistake? Late last month, it was announced on the website of the Intelligence and Security Committee—that is the hat I now have to wear—that we had “requested from the Government any intelligence assessments which covered the outlook for the regime with regards to the final withdrawal of US and coalition forces from Afghanistan” When such assessments are received, we shall consider them carefully and then determine any future action to take. Until that has happened, the ISC will not be commenting on what such intelligence may contain, as it is not our role to prejudge the situation on the basis of media speculation and in the absence of primary factual material In recent months, the official Opposition have been very supportive of the right of the ISC to fulfil its role, set out in statute and in an associated memorandum of understanding, as the only Committee of parliamentarians cleared and equipped properly to deal with highly-classified intelligence material. If other Committees seek to do this, they will, for a start, require secure premises and specially vetted staff comparable to our own. There are very good reasons for safeguarding the role of the ISC against such interference, and they were spelled out in detail and strongly supported by the Opposition parties during the lively debates in both Houses on the National Security and Investment Bill. Colleagues will be relieved to know that I do not propose to reiterate those arguments today, but the argument for letting the ISC get on with its work steadily and objectively, without being undercut by other bodies not equipped to do it, is as irrefutable now as it was when it was deployed in the context of that Bill earlier this year. It is entirely up to Select Committee Chairmen to decide whether they want to mount a joint inquiry or join a Joint Committee, but what cannot be part of any such joint inquiry is the adoption by another Committee of the ISC’s raison d’être: namely, scrutiny of the activities of the intelligence community and the classified material on which those activities were based.
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his contribution and for the advice he has given me about cases. On intelligence and security, one of my constituent’s relatives is in Afghanistan. He worked for the intelligence services and has information on intelligence and the armed forces here, but he has not been supported to leave Afghanistan and is now being sought by the Taliban because of what and who he knows. What is the right hon. Gentleman’s view on how we should handle that situation from the point of view of our own security?
I would have thought that it should come within the compass of the existing Government schemes to classify someone, providing the Government can satisfy themselves that what that person says he has to offer is genuine, and to activate a plan to take advantage of any real intelligence material that someone in that position might be able to offer. Unfortunately, of course, as a result of the chaotic departure that has been forced on America’s allies by successive American Presidents, the wherewithal to secure the safety of anybody inside Afghanistan, and particularly someone whom the Taliban are actively hunting, will be very difficult through any overt scheme. It would have to be done by some form of covert means, on which I hope the Government are working but on which I would not expect them to comment publicly To conclude, the position is perfectly clear, according to law, and we shall continue, gently but firmly, to hold the Government and the intelligence agencies properly to account.
The relatives of my constituents who are trapped in Afghanistan are precisely those people who for the past 20 years have organised their lives around the future that we promised them: a future of a democratic, rights-based Afghanistan where education and equality were to be entrenched. It is for that reason that they became teachers, lawyers, police officers, judges and doctors. They believed that it was possible to build a new Afghanistan where women, religious minorities like the Shi’as, ethnic minorities like Hazaras, and LGBTQ people were all treated with equal dignity. They did not abandon that promise; we did. Now it is my constituents’ relatives who have been left vulnerable to reprisal. They are in hiding. They are being hunted. They are being executed, and women are being captured and given out as a prize of war When Kabul fell a month ago, Members of Parliament and their staff worked round the clock to assist British citizens and their Afghan partners and children, and tried to get them safe passage back to the UK, but everything had started too late and the American deadline governed everything. We need to assess the utter failure of intelligence that had insisted that the Afghan Government would hold Kabul for a further three months. We need an inquiry into why, after 20 years of occupation, our military had not prepared a plan B for an emergency evacuation My case against the Government today is that, for many weeks, they engaged Members of Parliament on a fool’s errand. They gave us telephone numbers and email addresses where we should send all the details of our constituents’ loved ones. We were asked to point out how they might be particularly vulnerable because of the work they had done or the religion they professed. This, we were told, was necessary so that they could be “prioritised” and provided a “route to safety”. And we did just that. We took the Government at their word and our staff gave their all, day and night and through weekends, to provide just that information. Now we are told that all that documentation of thousands of desperate lives has gone into a black hole The Minister responsible for Afghan resettlement, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), wrote to us to say: “We cannot provide to MPs assessments or updates on those individuals who remain in Afghanistan and whose cases they have raised.” In what must count as the ministerial understatement of the year, she said: “We appreciate this is difficult news to deliver to constituents who are desperately worried about family members and friends.” She concluded: “With great regret, we will not be able, therefore, to respond to colleagues with specific updates on individuals.” This is an extraordinary abrogation of responsibility for those to whom our country owed a debt of honour.
I apologise for interrupting and for giving the hon. Gentleman an extra minute. If he feels so strongly about this, why is the Opposition motion to have an inquiry? Why is the Opposition motion not to ask for more resources to be put forward to help in this situation?
I do not think that anybody can be under any illusion about the fact that all of us who have been dealing with this would want more resources put into the situation We were engaged with these people for 20 years in a common endeavour—one that we said reflected our values. Well, where is the value of loyalty? Where is the value of commitment and trust? What we have projected to the world is that we do not care about the lives that are left in ruins or the vicious reprisals that will now be taken against our former friends One of my constituents has two brothers. They were in hiding, but were found by the Taliban. One of them was taken out and executed on the spot, the other beaten to a pulp and left for dead, but the Government will not be able to respond to me “with specific updates about his situation” The fact is that, despite what the Minister says, the Government are not “prioritising” these people on the at-risk scheme. They cannot give them priority when they do not know where they are, when there is not even an application form that can be filled out to secure them a place on the resettlement scheme, and when they do not tell these people the most vital information: namely, that they have been prioritised. The Minister’s letter is full of language that is designed to conceal the fact that nothing is being done for these people. All of this is objectionable, but nothing more so than the unspeakable arrogance of the Minister’s request that MPs should cease to present their constituents’ cases to her Department. It is so very far beyond extraordinary that a Minister of the Crown should actually request that MPs do not stand up for their constituents that I feel I must quote the letter: “Please signpost individuals to gov.uk to check for the latest information...rather than seek to pursue cases on their behalf.” The Minister should be absolutely certain that I will not obey any such instruction to stop advocating for my constituents. The Government may choose not to respond, but I will continue to do my duty as a constituency MP.
This is an interesting motion to have to speak against, because I work with a number of Opposition Members on a range of foreign affairs and development issues. To find myself on the polar opposite side from them on an issue that I care deeply about is somewhat frustrating. As has already been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, if there is the ability for Select Committees to take the decision unilaterally to carry out an investigation or an inquiry into Afghanistan, then that opportunity is already there. I meant no disrespect to the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) by intervening and suggesting that point, nor am I giving advice to the Labour party, but the suggestion in the motion seems at odds with what we really want to do. Members across the House have raised their legitimate concerns and spoken about what they want to do to help constituents and their families who may be in Afghanistan. I want to concentrate on that As the Minister said in his opening remarks, we have to focus on the diplomatic levers at our disposal in the form of the G7, NATO or the UN. Failing that, we should look to see how we can co-operate with others in the region or others who may have a vested interest in helping out in these circumstances—a D10+, perhaps. That is what we should be looking at and focusing on, because inquiries will not help the people of Afghanistan now, when we most desperately need to do so I was surprised that the shadow Foreign Secretary, who makes incredibly powerful speeches, did not pay more attention to the support that we can give to NGOs, the only western organisations that are still on the ground—[Interruption.] If the hon. Lady wants to intervene, she is more than welcome to.
I have written to the Foreign Secretary three times on that very point and not received a response. Perhaps the Minister, who has heard this exchange, will respond to that point today.
I very much hope so. I was making that point about the hon. Lady’s speech this afternoon, not about private letters that I would not have seen. I have had conversations with the Minister, including last night, about what extra support we can give to the NGOs. The House needs to think very carefully about how we integrate and operate with, and support, the NGOs, because it is in the Taliban’s interest that those organisations stay there My second point is one that I have made before in this Chamber, regarding the reopening of our embassy. A set of parameters will clearly have to be met to allow us to reopen the British embassy, but doing so will allow us to have a diplomatic network and a presence in Afghanistan again. I hasten to add that we have the most extensive diplomatic network in the world, which most of our allies rely on, including in places such as North Korea. These are the things that we need to think about so that we can help the people of Afghanistan—not through inquiries, but through delegated action and the achievement of helping to bring people back to and over to the UK My last point is about preventing sexual violence in conflict, as I chair the all-party parliamentary group on the preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative. The hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) raised the point about women in Afghanistan, and rightly so. We have to think about how an initiative such as that can be emboldened to help those who are most likely to be at risk under one of the most despotic regimes in the world Concentrating on those suggestions would do far more than calling for inquiries, which will give no hope or peace of mind to the people of Afghanistan.
I wish to speak in support of this motion to establish a Joint Committee to investigate the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is essential that we learn as much as we can. As the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said in her opening remarks, if we do not learn from our mistakes, we will repeat our mistakes. I do, however, wish to make some comments on the proposed narrow remit of the committee and on its ability to get to the truth First, let me turn to the proposed Committee’s remit. It is obvious—from the questions asked during the debate when Parliament was recalled, the questions to the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary last week, and the questions to the Minister responsible for Afghan Resettlement this week—that Members are concerned not simply about a backward-looking review, but about what is happening in the here and now, and how we move forward. However, I recognise that an open-ended inquiry would be difficult, and I am content that working on a timeline up to the completion of the evacuation makes sense at this time. I am also sure that if this Committee is established, many of the practical issues that Members are concerned about can be addressed under an examination of the policy towards civilian resettlement I have concerns, though, as does my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), that if the Committee is established to explore UK Government policy on Afghanistan only from the time of the Doha agreement in February 2020, the timeline may be too restrictive. In particular, it is difficult to see how a Committee could fully analyse whether UK Government policy was consistent with the reality unfolding on the ground—based on political and military events in Afghanistan, intelligence assessment, or the actions and comments of our allies leading up to the Doha talks—or, indeed, whether Government planning, including contingency and crisis management planning, was really informed by the actuality of the situation in the country, particularly in relation to the weakness of the Afghan Government and the strength of the Taliban Let me explain why I think that is important. The resurgence of the Taliban did not start on the conclusion of the Doha agreement. As early as 2009, President Obama had to send 17,000 more troops to counter that resurgence. The frailty of the Afghan Government did not only become apparent on the conclusion of the Doha agreement; they were described by the US Justice Department in 2018 as “largely lawless, weak, and dysfunctional” Notwithstanding the bravery of many Afghan soldiers and police, the failures of leadership were apparent and documented for years prior to the conclusion of the Doha talks. I am therefore not sure it would be possible, if the starting point is as late as February 2020, to fully judge the effectiveness of UK Government planning when many of the problems that plans must have sought to overcome had their genesis long before that It is also the case, as the Chair of the ISC said, that much of the information that the proposed Committee members would find most useful is intelligence assessment. Notwithstanding the proposal that he may be on the new Joint Committee, it simply would not be possible for that committee to receive secret intelligence or assessments. However, there is a great deal of good open-source material and other expert opinion regarding the situation on the ground over the period. The fact that the proposed Committee would have the power to compel Ministers to attend means, on balance, that it would be possible to have detailed consideration of UK Government policy on Afghanistan by the proposed deadline of March 2022.
I pay tribute to the members of our armed forces and diplomatic staff who have worked tirelessly over the past months in Afghanistan. The shambles lies with Ministers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said. We have to scrutinise this and ensure that lessons are learned. We have some very difficult and unpalatable choices to face in Afghanistan, and some people to speak to whom we do not want to speak to, but those choices will have to be made if we are going to avoid any humanitarian crisis and rescue the people who have been left behind The lessons do need to be learned and Ministers need to be scrutinised, but I have a problem with this motion. As outlined by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Intelligence and Security Committee is the only Committee of this House that can have access to the highest grade of top secret information. The motion covers intelligence, but it would be very difficult for the Committee to have access to that. Its members would have to get the highest level of security clearance, and staff would also have to meet those requirements. There would have to be new accommodation to ensure that that information could be discussed. The ISC has its own dedicated accommodation. Computer systems would have to be put in place that could deal with that intelligence. That would simply not be possible, and that is a good reason why the Committee should not be set up in this way The Intelligence and Security Committee was set up under the Intelligence Services Act 1994 and its powers extended under the Justice and Security Act 2013. We have already asked to see the intelligence that informed Government decision making. Once we have seen that intelligence, we will then wait to see the next steps. It would be wrong to prejudge that. Not only would it be impractical to set up this Committee and take forward some of the things in the motion, but it would undermine the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We are already having a battle with the Government on trying to get access to information in areas that intelligence has now seeped into—for example, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund.
The right hon. Gentleman is talking about the very difficult practicalities around setting up an inquiry and the intelligence that has to go with it. There is also a limitation on how much intelligence we are able to get out of Afghanistan because there is no network there. Does he agree that there has to be a period of time before any substantial inquiry could ever be looked at?
No, I do not agree, because the intelligence will be there—the Joint Intelligence Committee report and others—and we will be able to see that. We have not publicly announced that we are going to hold an inquiry, because that would be wrong before we have seen the intelligence. The Minister has assured us today that the Committee will get that information, which will be important before we make those decisions. I understand the good intentions with the proposed Committee, but the motion has been fatally drafted by the inclusion of the intelligence element As a long supporter of the Select Committee system in this House, I share some of the concerns of the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat). I sit on the Defence Committee, which has already instigated an inquiry looking at the military’s involvement in that short period This is a mess, and it is right that the Government are held to account. I share the anger that many Members from all parts of the House feel at having been ignored in trying to do their job representing their constituents and trying to get people out of very desperate situations. The Minister’s blasé approach does not help. We are elected to represent our constituents here. This situation has created a huge amount of pressure on many Members of Parliament who have large numbers of individuals involved, as well as on our staff. The Foreign Office has to learn lessons. One of the biggest mistakes was dividing the issue between three Departments. Those lessons need to be learned, and Members of Parliament have to be listened to. Our emails and letters cannot just be ignored and treated as other representations to the Foreign Office If those things are done, that will improve the situation, but the lessons have to be learned, and the actions and the scrutiny have to be done. In terms of intelligence, the only Committee that can do that is the ISC. We will wait to see what the intelligence assessment says, and then we will take those decisions. That is why I feel I cannot support this motion tonight.
It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I start by paying tribute to all those who served in Operation Pitting: the armed forces personnel who served so bravely and the civilians who were also present in country doing such an excellent job in very trying circumstances. I also pay tribute to all those who gave their lives during the whole Afghanistan campaign. My thoughts are with the families of those people and with those who returned with life-changing injuries I would like to speak in favour of this motion. I think we can all agree that the past few weeks have been dreadful, with the chaos around the fall of Kabul, the lack of planning, the effects on people who have served this country, the effects that we have seen with people applying for help through our offices and the chaos of the Government response. I mentioned earlier that we have more than 100 people with links to Reading East in need of help. Just one of those individuals has been evacuated from Afghanistan. That is clearly not good enough. I fully appreciate the difficult circumstances, but I hope that Ministers can reflect so that we can learn urgently the lessons of this dreadful period A wide range of evidence is already emerging, and it clearly makes the case for a proper and immediate inquiry, carried out in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) set out. First, however effective it was on the ground, the lack of planning and support from senior leaders in the Departments involved was apparent in the response. There is the fact that Ministers were sadly away on holiday, and the permanent secretary was away at the same time, and did not return urgently to respond There was a range of other factors. There was the lack of anticipation of the need to get people across the land borders at an earlier stage, when other countries had started to make preparations for that. As far as I understand it, both Germany and the United States took much more urgent action at an earlier stage in the crisis to secure safe passage at land borders for people leaving Afghanistan. There is the fact that internal assessments also indicated, from what we understand from the Chair of the Select Committee, that there were serious problems at a much earlier stage than Ministers admitted. All those things point to the need for an urgent and serious inquiry The effects domestically in the UK may also be subject matter for that inquiry. As Ministers may know themselves, many of the facilities that those arriving to the UK from Afghanistan are put in appear to be substandard or poor quality. That is a serious issue. We need to provide better support for Afghans arriving in the UK who have so nobly served the UK Moving forward, we must also consider a range of other points urgently, such as the effect of the refugee crisis on neighbouring countries—my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan made sensible points about the effects on Pakistan and other countries in the region—and the need for covid support and testing as well as logistical support. As several hon. Members said, we must also think about the wider effects on UK foreign policy, our relationship with the Indo-Pacific region and our relationship with our closest allies. All those are highly pertinent and important areas for discussion and investigation by the type of process that my hon. Friend proposes In conclusion, I pay tribute once again to the forces and civilians who helped with Operation Pitting and the wider Afghan campaign. However, it is quite clear to those of us who have followed the issue in detail that Ministers have shown a lack of leadership and that, crucially, there was a lack of planning. There is an urgent need for a serious and thorough investigation.
At a juncture such as this, we are forced to think about what could have been done better and whether such a large-scale intervention could ever have resulted in the establishment of a functioning polyarchy in the rocky soil of Afghanistan. If we want to get into such a question, we have to follow the money We have all seen news reports of the massive sums that the United States, the UK and other western allies invested in Afghanistan—eye-watering amounts that no doubt could have been put to better use in many ways. Many Members will have seen various images of Taliban fighters entering the gaudy palaces of former Afghan Government officials, generals or businessmen—some appeared to be all three at once—in which they are playing on gym equipment, marvelling at the décor or sitting in vast empty banqueting halls. Such venal officials make an easy target for scorn, but while they must share their part of the blame for the plunder of Afghanistan, we, too, must ask how they were able to get away with it for so long While it is easy to put the worst excesses of coalition control in Afghanistan down to an inherently corrupt culture—an accusation that we know to be orientalist, discriminatory, racist and ultimately wrong, regardless of how many times it is levelled inside or outside this House—we need to consider the fact that corrupt officials needed ways to get their money out of Afghanistan and into bank accounts or assets abroad. So too did the Taliban: they needed need a way to finance their campaign, converting the money they made from opium production or donations into liquid cash that could evade the clutches of security officials in third countries. In the case of both the Taliban and Afghan Government officials, Dubai seems to have been where the alchemy took place. Money came in, money went out; our armed forces were killed, and schools and hospitals went unbuilt The questions we need to be asking in this place, however, are about how many financial institutions with links to, or even head offices in, the City of London played a part in the merry-go-round of corruption. Quite frankly, I do not care whether that is looked at by a Joint Committee of the House, the individual Select Committees or—more importantly—a judge-led committee. Whether we like it or not, while much of it took place elsewhere, it could well have been in London—[Interruption.] With due respect, the Minister might listen to what I am saying than have a discussion with my colleagues. London remains the centre of networks that facilitate corruption and graft on a large scale. London property prices remain inflated by investments—large and small—by global elites looking for a safe haven for all their ill-gotten gains, something most memorably demonstrated by the anti-corruption expert Oliver Bullough in his book “Moneyland”. No matter how many times my SNP colleagues or I raise the issue of corruption, we must understand that we need to tackle it, no matter what. I say as a member of the Defence Committee and as someone whose brother served twice in Afghanistan—the Minister for Defence People and Veterans, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), was his commanding officer—that our armed forces’ will never be applied adequately as long as we allow corruption to flourish at home and abroad.
I will be brief because I have no choice in the matter This has been the “greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez” in 1956. They are the words of the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who has left the Chamber, hopefully to change his mind, but he was accurate when he said it. It sounds slightly clichéd, but in this case it is accurate. This is the biggest disaster since 1956 The motion directly calls for a Joint Committee investigation because we need to know who said what to whom, who made the decisions and what conversations have taken place over the past few weeks. For example, we do not even know if any representations—any representations—were made by British Ministers or civil servants to their American counterparts on the speed and timetable of the withdrawal. That question has not yet been answered I personally, like many of us, have dealt with in excess of 200 cases, or 200 individuals rather—not so many cases, but over 200 individuals, many of them British nationals. We have been able to get some of them out of Kabul, where they were concentrated, but many are still stuck there. I have had many reports of rapes, abductions, murders and attacks on Hazaras; many of the cases I have happen to be Hazaras. There are stories of young men and boys threatened with “Either you join the Taliban or we’ll shoot you”, and of girls and young women—we have heard these stories before—forced into sexual slavery or forced into marriage against their will. Journalists and academics, with absolutely no connection with the American and British forces—no connection—are still being threatened into silence and threatened with death and torture I am sometimes slightly hesitant about calling for inquiries, because we gets calls in this place and outside for inquiries almost weekly, on a variety of issues, but of all the problems, catastrophes and crises that have occurred since 1956, this case requires a full, public, judge-led inquiry more than any other. Just as importantly, we ought to make it clear, as my hon. Friends have made it clear, that whatever the strictures of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Members of this House have a duty to represent their constituents and make their cases. We have that duty, regardless of what we are told, particularly when we are told to be quiet by a Government Department, which is effectively what the FCDO has done.
Sometimes one name, one person can focus the mind tremendously. Linda Norgrove was born in Altnaharra in Sutherland, and she was an aid worker in Afghanistan, helping women and young girls. In 2010, she was kidnapped by the Taliban and killed. Her parents, John and Lorna Norgrove, very bravely set up an aid charity in Linda’s name. The Linda Norgrove Foundation was set up to fund education, health and childcare for women and children affected by the war in Afghanistan. It was desperate to get these people out of Afghanistan and that is why I became personally involved, but I am sad to say, like so many others, that the Government failed to facilitate these people being brought out. They are females and they are Hazara. Working for a foreign NGO, they are at a risk that is almost unbelievably high. I made a number of representations, but they did not come to fruition. So I think about the foundation in Linda Norgrove’s name and find that the fact that the Home Office does not seem to be able to help points to some kind of malaise. I am not one, as I think Members know in this place, to go about blithely and glibly calling for Ministers to be fired or to resign, but—and he has gone now—for the Foreign Secretary to continue in office was utterly unacceptable to me. So there has to be a lesson learned here. I hope it will be and I like to believe in the best of things I am going to keep my contribution short, but I will just return to Linda Norgrove. None of us can bring her back, but in a personal way and as a tribute to the braveness of her parents, she is now on the record, she is going to have her name in Hansard and it will be there for a very long time. But she is only one person; there are so many other people. That really is why, because I know the family, I have no hesitation whatsoever in supporting the motion. I do not glibly call for inquiries either—I think you know me well enough, Mr Deputy Speaker—but that is why I support the Labour motion today.
We have a large and thriving Afghan community in west London and I have been proud to get to know many of them in the past few decades as constituents and friends. Many came here because of persecution—because they are from the Hazara community—or because, frankly, they shared our values in terms of democracy and human rights, rather than the Taliban’s. I am afraid that the Government have let them down badly, from the intelligence failures that led to the rapid abandonment of Kabul, to the chaos—it was chaos—that ensued On the experience of MPs who have many Afghans in their constituencies, my young casework staff were working 24/7. They were traumatised because they were dealing with death—hearing about people being blown up and killed—or the real fear of death. All the time, all the work they were doing was going nowhere; it was going into a void, as we have heard. I can only say with any certainty that there were two families who got out of Kabul who would not have done so without our intervention, despite those hundreds of hours of effort. In one of those cases, four of us—I and three of my staff—were talking to different people at the same time to get the family on a plane. I was trying to get the FCDO to give them documentation. Somebody else was talking by WhatsApp. I absolutely praise what our armed forces did there, because they went out after the bomb to rescue people and bring them to the airport, only to find somebody from Border Force there telling them they could not get on the plane. It was completely surreal. That family got out. A member of that family and his brother have British citizenship because of the service they gave to us and the threat to their lives in Afghanistan. One of them got their family out and the other did not; they are still there. It was chaos, it was completely arbitrary and it was a disgrace, frankly Of the 162 cases I have had, I have had replies on four, one asking for more information and three saying “not eligible”. I have not even had answers to my earlier questions, one on the issue of family reunion—many of these are family reunion cases—and the other on whether we are going to get individual responses to those remaining inquiries, generic answers or nothing at all. I really want to know the answer to that Where we are now in this country? I found out—because no information was given to me—that 300 Afghans had been unceremoniously left at a quarantine hotel in Shepherd’s Bush and confined there after their quarantine period ended. Although some of them had legitimately put in homelessness applications, they were told by security staff, “Get on a coach and travel 300 miles to somewhere you’ve never heard of.” At the same time, another 100 Afghans were being put into a bridging hotel with no money and no assistance whatsoever. Were it not for the help of local charities such as West London Welcome and my council giving them emergency money, they would have no help whatsoever Something needs to be done, and done quickly, to sort this situation out. I am sick of listening to these statements from Ministers that tell us nothing and give us no further information, and no help or hope to the Afghans in our constituencies.
Since 14 August, I have looked with dismay and apprehension at the collapse of Afghanistan into the hands of the Taliban, and I am worried sick about the fate of so many people there Let us remember that, on 8 July, President Biden said that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” At the time, this Government did not seem to disagree with that analysis. It did not have to be like this if the UK and US Governments had considered worst-case rather than best-case scenarios. Our Government are in part responsible for the speed of the collapse of the Afghan Government. There is now a duty on our Government and the international community to offer support to the people of Afghanistan—those who have arrived here, those in third countries and those still trapped in Afghanistan who want to leave There will be time in this Chamber to further analyse the more than 40 years of strategic and tactical failures that led to this position, including the 2001 invasion. I opposed the 2001 offensive. Although the horrific destruction of the World Trade Centre was a gross act of terrorism, I did not feel that the war met the Aquinian principles of casus belli; we needed to use security and intelligence rather than a ground war to tackle al-Qaeda. But that was 20 years ago, and it must not hold up the efforts now for the Afghan people. We need to prioritise a human security approach. All NATO countries, including the UK, have a responsibility towards Afghan citizens I want to concentrate on two issues: the duty of care we have to Afghans who have arrived in the UK, and support for those still trying to reach us. Like everyone else’s, my office has been inundated by constituents concerned for the lives and wellbeing of their relatives trying to reach the UK. Around 250 are still trapped in Afghanistan. My office has lodged email after email with the Government and received just five auto-responses—that is it. Our most urgent cases were sent to the Secretary of State for Defence after he advised us to do so on a briefing call, but I have had no response of any kind to those emails Those cases include those of two Afghan MPs who are the brothers of a constituent, and people who worked for NGOs. We received one response in August stating that a British national stranded in Afghanistan would be contacted by the FCDO. He was not. One constituent, who is a British national, is in a hotel in London. He has serious mental health issues and no support. His wife is in Afghanistan, and he is desperate to go and get her via any route. I am concerned that he may vanish at any moment and try to go and get her. He has had no official advice or support With regard to Afghans who have arrived in the UK, I will keep my remarks to hotels, particularly those used for dispersal. Last week, I was put in touch with two Afghan MPs who were dispersed to a hotel in Yorkshire. I was informed of their presence there by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, with which the MPs had been in contact. I have been liaising with them and their family ever since, and what they have told me has been shocking. They were brought to the hotel by the Home Office, which did not tell the relevant local authorities. Basic necessities, such as nappies and sanitary towels, were not provided until we organised delivery, alongside the local authority. They still have not been assessed or registered for their health needs, and there are significant health needs at that hotel. Many have no access to finance, as the Taliban have cut off access to their bank accounts and the Home Office has not yet provided payment cards. They have no idea when they will be housed adequately, or where I was told the traumatic story of that family. They had been stopped at a roadblock by the Taliban, who took control of their car and drove them to the middle of nowhere, where they thought their lives would end. They only escaped as the Taliban drove away in their cars and they fled. They then had to wait for two days in a storm drain outside the airport in horrendous conditions, surrounded by human excrement and rotting detritus. They may be safe here, but I cannot in good conscience say that the Government have looked after them. That is why we need to hear their voices in an inquiry.
Mr Deputy Speaker, “It’s like the entire country is being held hostage.” That is how my constituent Abdul Bostani, the chief executive of Glasgow Afghan United, described the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. One of those trapped was his own brother, a UK citizen who had travelled back to visit his wife and children because the Tory Government’s arbitrary earning thresholds for visas meant that he had not been able to bring them to the UK for a family reunion. Thankfully, they were among the lucky ones who got out in the airlift, but they should have been here years ago Likewise, Abdul has friends who served as interpreters for the UK armed forces who are still in Afghanistan because they were employed by a security company and not directly by the British Army. There were told that they were therefore not eligible for schemes to resettle in the UK. The Minister for the Armed Forces offered to look into that earlier this week, but again, they should have been here years ago.
There is also a great deal of confusion over the treatment of British Council staff. It is still unclear why they were excluded from ARAP; they should certainly be here. It is unclear what will happen to those staff in the future, how many were special cases, and how many still remain in Afghanistan. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is another issue that really needs to be clarified?
My hon. Friend is right and the Minister should respond to that I fully support the Labour motion for a Committee of inquiry. The Government have pretty thin reasoning for opposing that. Technically, the establishment of a new Committee is a House matter, so there should be a free vote for their Back Benchers tonight Hundreds of my constituents have been in contact with me since the US withdrawal began, distressed at the scenes in Kabul and across Afghanistan, and demanding action from Governments in the UK and wanting to express their solidarity. I have spoken to constituents who are particularly concerned about the treatment of women, girls and minority groups, as we all are. Expat constituents from Afghanistan have emphasised that Afghanistan is not a lost cause. Resistance to the Taliban remains real and the UK Government need to be aware of that.
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that many constituents who have been here for years have not yet had any certainty about their status, including my constituent Ahmed who fled the Taliban as a child? He has been here for 13 years and still does not have any certainty about his status.
Absolutely. Again, I hope the Minister will respond to that Refugees are welcome in Glasgow. The city has shown time and again that we are ready and willing to welcome anyone from Afghanistan who needs support. No one who arrives from Afghanistan without documentation, or indeed from anywhere in the world fleeing persecution, should be criminalised under the new Nationality and Borders Bill. That legislation should be stopped in its tracks, or at the very least amended beyond recognition, so it provides a safe and welcoming environment rather than doubling down on the hostility that this Government have all too often shown That hostility and callousness is also evident in the decision to slash the UK aid budget. The consequences for countries like Afghanistan are now becoming abundantly clear. The Government must find a way to support those who remain in the country and try to preserve some of the progress that has been made, particularly with regard to support for women and girls. When the Government claim they are announcing additional aid, they must be clear whether that is genuinely additional to all the aid flows already committed, or whether they are still operating within their envelope of 0.5% of GNI, in which case whatever money is being diverted to Afghanistan is coming from other places that also badly need it This year was supposed to be about global leadership, with the UK chairing the G7 and COP26 coming to Glasgow. Instead, all we are seeing, once again, is that global Britain is so much hot air. With their actions in Afghanistan taking their lead, as always, from the United States, we see a little Britain diminishing in influence and setting examples nobody wants to follow. Constituents in Glasgow want to live in a Scotland that is better than that: where global citizenship is not just a slogan but a mindset, and where our nationalism is defined by our internationalism and our commitment to live up to global goals and aspire to the highest of values. The UK Government have to start doing the same.
Order. We will go now to three minutes and we will hopefully get everybody in.
Last month, when the House was recalled, I said that we needed to act. I am very grateful to the people who did act. I want to put on record my thanks to the noble Lord Ahmad in the other place and the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I also want to thank our staff, in particular my caseworker, Marzia, who is a former Afghan judge. Yesterday, when she was in the House visiting the Justice Committee, she received, in the space of just two hours, 1,000 messages from judges in Afghanistan. There are 250 judges still left and they are under immense threat We have not seen action. I am sorry, Minister, but it is still absolutely shambolic. We do not know how many British citizens are still there. We do not know how many Afghan nationals there are to whom we have an obligation. If there was a plan 18 months ago, as we were told there was, why did it fail so miserably? Personally, in addition to the motion, I would like weekly statements on how many people are left for whom we still have to find a route out. I would also like to know what our approach will be if and when there is another international conflict. How will we ensure the confidence of the nations we will need support from? In my few remaining moments, I would like to focus on women Afghan judges. One female judge who messaged me is the sole breadwinner for her family, with responsibility for over 10 dependants. That means we need to help, with our partners, not just the judge, but 10 additional people. The Taliban came looking for her at her house last week. Fortunately, she was not there, but what did they do? They dragged her brother out and beat him to a pulp. She says: “Just imagine if one person from my family would be left behind. Words can’t even describe what would happen to them because of me. If one person from my family is killed because of me I will never be able to forgive myself.” We cannot overestimate the absolute despair that people are feeling, including feeling suicidal I would be grateful if the Minister can say, in his closing remarks, what he will do to fulfil the requirement for better co-ordination of information. When anything goes into any of the Ministries, it is as though it has gone into a black hole. As I said, a weekly statement would be very helpful.
Given that I have raised the Afghanistan security situation with the Government for months, I fully support this motion for a Joint Committee investigation into our chaotic and unplanned withdrawal, which has been an avoidable catastrophe—a self-inflicted humiliation, starting with the people of Afghanistan and ending with our national security interests. Unfortunately, there simply is not enough time to go into all the answers that I have received from Ministers, but even as late as 26 July, the Government were informing me in response to my written parliamentary questions: “There is no military route for the Taliban to achieve their goals” How wrong they were. Only 20 days before the fall of Kabul, Ministers were telling me: “Afghanistan now has a burgeoning civil society, with a free press and an education system”— and that “today women hold over a quarter of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament.” Where is that burgeoning civil society now, the education system and the free press? Afghanistan’s female MPs were fleeing for their lives while the now sacked Foreign Secretary was topping up his tan and what can be described only as conducting Dunkirk via WhatsApp. The situation has left Afghans who were counting on us to help build a better society feeling betrayed. We are already seeing an erosion of hard-fought rights for women, education and the freedom of faith.
I share the hon. Gentleman’s real concerns about female politicians. Like many of them, as a Muslim woman, I am keen to see democracy preserved but I simply do not trust the Taliban when it comes to protecting the rights of women. Does he share my concerns about the safety of female Afghan politicians?
I fully agree. Women’s rights are important and we need to preserve them. Many may not know that Afghanistan used to be home to around 500,000 Sikhs in the 1970s, but today, that figure will be closer to 700. A community whose historical ties and presence there date back to the 15th century was persecuted first by the mujaheddin. During the last Taliban rule, in something reminiscent of fascist regimes, Hindus and Sikhs were forced to wear yellow armbands for identification and hang yellow flags over their homes. I have been asked to help many Sikhs and Hindus who remain and are at risk under this Taliban regime—as are Christians, Hazara Muslims and other religious minorities, who have already been victims of deadly targeted attacks—and I have written to Ministers. How will the Government help them Some of my constituents have been coming to me in tears. Their family members, many of whom are British citizens, have been abandoned by the Government and are at risk. We are talking not about six or seven but 600 or 700, and we need to get them to safety. These include numerous police officers, prosecutors, Government officials, families of UK-based journalists and judges, female professors, people who have played a leading role in women’s rights organisations, British children—some only a few months old—and many others. In fact, my hard-working team has been asked to help around 110 UK nationals or Afghans in a priority group MPs received a letter on Monday from a Minister saying that the Government will not be pursuing Afghan cases in the usual ways and will only be logging cases for data purposes, and asking MPs to stop raising cases on behalf of constituents—what an absolute farce! “Abandoned” seems to be the right word. The Government must instead pull out all the stops to avert a humanitarian crisis, get my constituents and their families to safety, and work with the international community to ensure that there is refuge for those in danger, especially religious minorities, and those who bravely assisted our troops in the rebuilding process. To help to create this situation is bad enough, but for the Government not to do all they can to support those impacted is unconscionable and unforgivable.
Order. The wind-ups will begin at 6.48 pm.
I rise to speak in favour of the motion and to speak for those vulnerable people who have endured and are suffering the situation that we, as a major occupying force, have left behind. During the past few weeks, we have all been inundated with cases from constituents desperately seeking whatever help they can find for family members in Afghanistan. My office has been no exception Like other hon. Members, I would like to take the opportunity to thank my staff, and staff across the House, who have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Anyone who knows anything about this House knows that we are nothing without our staff; the past few weeks have been a testament to that. From British nationals trapped in Kabul to young children seeking to be reunited with their parents, siblings or grandparents, to former UK-contracted personnel stuck in hiding in fear for their lives, our offices have been presented with some of the most harrowing cases. Listening to them and reading them have profoundly affected people. While those who are carrying out Operation Pitting on the ground are to be commended, it is worth noting that the Government received intelligence about the worsening situation in Afghanistan in July. We knew for a year that the withdrawal was happening. Glaring mistakes with neglected case inboxes and sensitive documents are a reminder that this could all have been prevented and that all blame is to be laid right at the Government’s door. We may never know the true effect of all the mismanagement, but the suggestion that 9,000 eligible Afghans entitled to settle in the UK have been left behind does nothing to ease the worried minds of my constituents I was appalled to read the Home Office letter. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) has quoted from it, but it is worth quoting again: it says that “we cannot provide to MPs assessments or updates on those individuals who remain in Afghanistan and whose cases they have raised.” What exactly are we supposed to do with that? For weeks, our offices have done exactly as instructed when raising cases. We have endured the different email addresses, the briefings with few answers, the helpline numbers published wrong or with a digit missing, and all the failures in between. We did absolutely everything that we were asked to do by the Government—and now, nothing. To say that that is not good enough is a complete understatement. That is no way to run a Government, no way to treat colleagues, no way to treat our hard-working staff and certainly no way to treat vulnerable people who have been left in Afghanistan To add further insult to injury, the Government with their damaging legislative agenda seem hellbent on punishing people seeking refuge from war, violence and persecution. The hostile environment has meant that in the past decade the UK has deported more than 15,000 Afghan asylum seekers on the basis that Afghanistan was a safe place, yet we are meant to clap our hands for the Government saying they will repatriate 20,000 here over the next few years. There will inevitably be a rise in Afghan refugees, and the Nationality and Borders Bill, that disgraceful piece of legislation, will do nothing to alleviate it. I do not understand why the Government have not—
Order.
Last week, I held a special meeting in my constituency for my Afghan community. Dozens and dozens of worried and distressed residents came to meet me, all wanting help for their relatives in desperate situations; I wanted to share a few of their stories in this Chamber, especially as the Government were not responding to any emails and were not listening to our requests. To protect their identity, I will use their initials only. Because of time, I will read just a couple of the situations that were brought to my attention SE’s brother was a driver for a British translator and was therefore one step removed from direct employment with the British. I have not received any clarification of whether he is eligible for ARAP; I have received no answer from the FCDO. BS’s mother is a single woman whose husband was murdered by the Taliban for working as an interpreter for British troops. Again, I have received no answers to any inquiries My constituents who came to meet me cannot sleep. Many have anxiety problems. One person was highly suicidal. People are crying as they speak to me—the situation is devastating for them and their families. The Government need to get a grip on what families here are going through What about the families in Afghanistan? The Government have had 18 months to evacuate people from Afghanistan, but they keep on getting it wrong. Why? They got it wrong when they said that the Taliban would not take over, they got it wrong when they said that lives would not be at risk, and they got it wrong in not being able to manage a safe emergency evacuation. Delays have been putting lives at risk, and their ability not to say what the resettlement scheme really means is causing further frustration, anxiety and annoyance to people in this House, but more so to our communities and to people who are left in Afghanistan We need more from the Government, and we expect more from the Government. I ask the Minister, for the sake of my constituents, to help those who need protection from being raped, from being kidnapped, from experiencing barbaric treatments, from hunger, and, ultimately, from death. I support the motion.
I call Sarah Owen, to resume her seat no later than 6.48 pm, with no time limit.
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker There have been so many sobering scenes over the last few weeks: families separated, Taliban soldiers ripping through villages, people so desperate to flee that they clung to planes and died falling from the sky. Any situation in which we see a mother hand a baby over barbed wire to a soldier in the vain hope of escape is one that demands the attention of our country, as a responsible member of the international community At the last count, 69 people in Luton North had been in touch with me about relations in Afghanistan trying to escape war. We have had a handful back, but no response from the majority. People have called me in tears telling me about Taliban fighters going from door to door and killing their relatives’ neighbours. These cases will stay with me forever—particularly one involving the family in Luton North of an Afghan doctor who had been on the frontline of the former regime’s vaccination programme and women’s rights campaigns, and who is now stranded and terrified for her life. Ministers knew the details of her case, but she was turned away at Baron Hotel. I should be grateful for an update on her case Like all other Members, I have received vague stock responses. This simply is not good enough when people’s lives are in danger. The best advice that the Government could give our staff was to manage the expectations of people escaping a war zone, but it should not be left to our caseworkers to manage a response to a crisis of this scale. They needed leadership from the Government, and it never came. Leadership is about taking responsibility, and ultimately the buck stops with the Prime Minister. If he does not want to lead our country during a crisis, he can stand aside for someone who does The response from this Government shamefully abandoned British nationals. It abandoned our armed forces and civil servants, and abandoned the most vulnerable people in Afghanistan. Our standing in the world under this Government has already been defined by the decision to cut aid to the most vulnerable people in the world, and by the UK’s continued inaction over human rights atrocities in Russia, Xinjiang, Tigre, Kashmir, Palestine and now Afghanistan. We need a Government who stand proud on the world stage, and do not stand back from our responsibilities as a country.
Let me start by echoing the heartfelt sympathy expressed throughout the House for the thousands of Afghans who have been forced to flee tyranny and oppression As shadow Armed Forces Minister, I was pleased to hear well-deserved recognition of our armed forces, diplomats, civil servants and civil society organisations from a number of Members this evening. I also want to recognise the efforts of colleagues on both sides of the House, particularly my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), my hon. Friends the Members for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer), for Reading East (Matt Rodda), for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) and for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), and many, many others who have been working hard to assist those on the ground where they could The Government have woefully mismanaged the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan. Ministers had 18 months to prepare for the withdrawal from the country, but their complacency, mismanagement and diplomatic ineptitude intensified a crisis in just six short weeks. The world watched in horror as the gains of 20 years’ hard work and sacrifice from our armed forces and officials were rolled back, with tragic consequences for the people of Afghanistan—particularly those who do not conform to the Taliban’s barbaric, medieval world view The Government’s handling of this crisis has damaged our international reputation, weakened our national security, and jeopardised two decades of hard work and humanitarian progress. The Labour motion would establish a cross-party Joint Committee to investigate the withdrawal from Afghanistan, from the Doha agreement to the conclusion of Operation Pitting. The Government have systematically failed to anticipate and mitigate the biggest foreign crisis we have seen since Suez. It is vital that we understand what went wrong and why, so that we can not only learn lessons and be better prepared and protected in the future but keep the promises that we make to others, be they our service personnel, veterans and their families or the people of Afghanistan As the crisis began, Labour called for the Government to step up diplomatic efforts to stabilise the situation and for more resources for the ARAP scheme, to get as many people out as possible. Meanwhile, the now former Foreign Secretary was on his holidays. The Prime Minister said on 8 July that there was “no military path to victory for the Taliban.”—[Official Report, 8 July 2021; Vol. 698, c. 1107.] However, just 36 days later, the right hon. Gentleman and the Defence Secretary were forced into an emergency military deployment to secure the safety of British nationals and those who supported our operations. The country had fallen in less than two weeks. At best, the lack of preparation represents a systemic failure at the top of Government. At worst, it was ministerial indifference. That is why we need an open and transparent inquiry to understand what Ministers knew and when, what actions they took as a result and why the speed and scale of the country’s collapse took the Government by surprise Whatever we think about the political handling of this crisis, no one can doubt the extraordinary efforts of our service personnel during Operation Pitting. Our armed forces evacuated 15,000 people in just 14 days in the largest airlift since the second world war, and many right hon. and hon. Members were right to recognise that in the debate today. I look forward to the Minister’s response to Labour’s calls for their efforts to be recognised with a medal. But they were lions led by donkeys, sent to do damage control for a Government who were asleep at the wheel. Despite the heroics of our forces, it is painfully clear that the Government have left many behind. Meanwhile, hundreds of British nationals and ARAP-eligible Afghans remain on the ground The fundamental question for Ministers now is: what is the plan? Hundreds are now facing an impossible choice between living under oppression and attempting a dangerous border crossing. The flight from Kabul on 9 September carrying 13 UK citizens was obviously welcome, but it is not a substitute for a clear diplomatic plan with regional partners to keep land routes open and protect the gains of the last 20 years. And there is still precious little practical guidance for those ARAP-eligible Afghans. We made a promise to these people as British citizens and as brave Afghans who supported our forces, so why was the scheme so poorly resourced prior to Operation Pitting The Defence Secretary said that he knew that “the game is up” in July, but according to the Government’s own figures just 188 people were evacuated through ARAP that month. Between April and June, just 25 people got out through the scheme. Why were some who had been accepted to ARAP not called forward for flights, and why did some never receive any response at all? These questions need answers, and that is why we have tabled this motion today Finally, I want to turn briefly to those who were lucky enough to make it out. Members from across the House, including my hon. Friends the Members for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) and for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter), the hon. Members for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and for Stirling (Alyn Smith), the right hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie) and my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Mr Dhesi) and for Luton North (Sarah Owen) have made it clear that those people must be welcomed and supported. I could not agree more.
Five British nationals from my constituency were evacuated from Kabul along with their families. They have reported degrading treatment in quarantine hotels, with limited access to even basic supplies. Upon release, they faced homelessness and destitution because the Home Office and the local authorities could not decide who was going to house them. If it had not been for the food bank and the Lewisham donation hub, they would not even have nappies and other vital things such as baby milk. Does the shadow Minister agree that this is very far from Operation Warm Welcome?
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. That is why this motion is so important. Labour has brought together councils that stand ready to assist, yet we have already seen the first failure of the Government’s Operation Warm Welcome. The Times and The Guardian have both carried worrying reports that those who have arrived and cleared quarantine have not been allowed to leave their hotels for fresh air. The Government must set out a clear and consistent pathway of support if they are to keep their promises to the Afghan people It is clear that a cross-party joint investigation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan is now essential, but there are wider questions for the Government to answer about what this means for the people of Afghanistan and Britain’s place in the world. The Prime Minister’s poorly articulated concept of global Britain looks utterly hollow, and claims in the Government’s integrated review that the UK can turn the dial on international issues look embarrassing Members on both sides of the House have the opportunity to place on record their concerns by supporting Labour’s motion this evening. We owe it to our armed forces and veterans who bravely served in the bloodiest conflict of the past 50 years, and we owe it to the diplomats and officials who have worked so hard to secure the gains of the past 20 years. I urge hon. Members to vote for the motion this evening.
I am pleased to wind up this important debate. I thank the shadow Minister for his constructive remarks I start by putting on record our gratitude to all those who served in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. Our veteran community should know that it was worth it. It was worth it to go to Afghanistan in 2001 to get rid of al-Qaeda, it was worth it to spend the long years of hard sacrifice and service in Helmand province to expand education and security alongside our courageous interpreters, and it was worth it when the rising tide of geopolitics meant that we had to leave Afghanistan. It was worth it when Operation Pitting extracted, under huge pressure, 15,000 civilians in the largest humanitarian airlift in living memory. My message to veterans tonight is, “Be proud of what you did in Afghanistan and hold your heads high.” Operation Pitting has given way to Operation Warm Welcome, and we will energetically welcome the Afghan families who have come to this country. I am delighted that this cross-Government effort is led by the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who is sitting on the Front Bench this evening. We will bring a spirit of compassion, comradeship and community to the welcome we extend to those who helped us when we were in their country, and we will help them now they have arrived here. I was pleased to meet some of those families on their arrival in Birmingham, and I saw the relief on their faces. That joy is tempered by the fact that not everyone got out. Some 300 people who qualified for ARAP were left behind, which brings great sorrow, especially to those hon. Members who, through personal experience, have an understanding of the value that interpreters brought to our military operations It is clear to everyone that the case for the Opposition motion has not been made, but I will touch briefly on some of the comments that have been made. We are grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) for pointing out that his role as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee basically makes the motion pointless, and we very much welcome his scrutiny, which I hope will continue with his characteristic vigour The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) spoke movingly about the barbarism of the Taliban, and we share that concern. One of my constituents was among the fatalities on the Thursday of the last stage of Operation Pitting, so we have all been touched by that tragedy My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) spoke about the limitations of the motion with regard to the handling of intelligence, which was supported, in welcome fashion, by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East brings great knowledge to his position, and he touched on the central importance of Select Committees, which essentially make the Opposition motion entirely pointless. I am grateful to him for pointing that out I was pleased to hear the comments made by the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes). We do not agree on any policy at all, but he has a sustained interest in this field and he shares his brother’s good sense of humour Finally, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) raised the case of the Linda Norgrove Foundation, and he must keep trying. We would be pleased if he wanted to raise the case with Ministers personally after this debate, and that stands for all Members in the Chamber tonight I will conclude by saying—I am watching the clock and it is not a problem, Mr Deputy Speaker—that we must reject this motion tonight. We must express confidence in our ability to project power around the world, to fulfil our national security—
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36). Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put Question agreed to. Main Question accordingly put.
I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents in Arundel and South Downs, particularly those in Storrington, Sullington, Washington and West Chiltington. More than 580 people—nearly every resident in the Rock Road area—have signed. I present this petition on the proposed Heath Common development. The petition states: The petition of residents of Arundel and South Downs, Declares that the proposed site of Heath Common by Clarion Housing Group is inappropriate for the development of residential housing; further that this site was not designated in the democratically mandated Storrington and Sullington and Washington joint-neighbourhood plan; further that original permissions granted for the land were indicative only of tree-felling The petitioners therefore request the House of Commons to urge the Government to offer support to residents against the proposed development at Heath Common, Storrington, by Clarion Housing Group and formally acknowledge its inappropriateness for a residential development And the petitioners remain, etc [P002687]
In just a week, my constituent Alison Livesey has collected over 4,300 signatures on her online petition calling on the West Midlands ambulance service to abandon its proposals to remove the Rugby Community Ambulance Station. Such a large number of signatures in such a short space of time is a clear demonstration of the depth of local feeling over these proposals The petition states: The petition of residents of the constituency of Rugby, Declares that the last remaining Community Ambulance Station in the town of Rugby is essential for ensuring the safety of local residents; and further that West Midlands Ambulance Service’s intention to close it puts the health and welfare of Rugby residents at risk The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to work with the West Midlands Ambulance Service to abandon the proposals to close the Community Ambulance Station in Rugby and to ensure that the residents of the town continue to receive the level of emergency healthcare which they demand and deserve And the petitioners remain, etc [P002689]
The proposed demutualisation of Liverpool Victoria is the first proposed demutualisation of a major financial services business since the financial crash. If the demutualisation goes ahead, it will see controversial United States private equity giant Bain Capital given ownership of a British customer-owned business with considerable financial assets. The tidal wave of private equity money apparently available for purchases of British firms prompts the inevitable question of whether this proposed demutualisation is a one-off or whether it is the start of another wave of demutualisation The all-party parliamentary group for mutuals, which I am fortunate to chair, conducted an inquiry into the proposed demutualisation earlier this year. We interviewed Mark Hartigan, who is the current chief executive of Liverpool Victoria, as well as Matt Popoli of Bain Capital, the regulators, the Association of Financial Mutuals and representatives of other mutuals, and we received submissions from individual consumer-owners of Liverpool Victoria. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees), the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), the noble Lords Curry and Wrigglesworth, and Viscount Trenchard for their assistance and support. We have written subsequently to the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority, and I have also written to the Pensions Regulator We concluded that it was very difficult for an individual member of LV= to be able to assess whether the proposed demutualisation was in their interests, given the scarcity of information with which they had been provided. We agreed that, on the basis of the evidence available to us, the leadership of LV= had not been open and transparent with members about its intentions for their business. Indeed, we felt that there had been a notable disregard for the interests of members and a cavalier attitude towards the member governance of the business We concluded, too, that the plans would damage the diversity of financial services providers in the UK, and that there had been insufficient policy attention on mutuals in recent times, particularly on the need to be able to raise capital. Lastly, we concluded that regulators needed to have a fundamentally different approach to the threat of demutualisation. Indeed, we were staggered that no lessons had been learned from the pre-crash wave of building society demutualisations I believe now that Alan Cook, the chairman of Liverpool Victoria, has a series of questions to answer about the proposed demutualisation and sale to Bain Capital. Earlier this week I formally invited him to Parliament to enable him to do just that Since our report was published, and despite many invitations to do so, the leadership of Liverpool Victoria have thus far refused to provide a more open and transparent explanation of their motives and their intentions. First, there has never been a clear, easy-to-understand explanation as to why demutualisation is needed. The business is well capitalised—indeed, it recently sold its general insurance business for over £1 billion—and it has raised significant sums on the capital markets. Both the chairman and the chief executive were arguing that the business was in very good financial shape right up until their plans for putting Liverpool Victoria up for sale were leaked to the media So why, really, is this plan being pushed? Why can Liverpool Victoria not survive as a stand-alone business in its own right? Its members, I believe, have a right to know. If, for a moment, we take at face value the idea that the new chief executive spotted a major flaw in the business model of his predecessor, so great that significant investment was needed for Liverpool Victoria’s customers to continue to enjoy the fruits of their investment with LV=, then why did they not choose another mutual? Indeed, there are persistent rumours that a major mutual offered more money than Bain Capital offered. The consumer-owners of Liverpool Victoria have a right to know whether that is true and why, if so, it was turned down Secondly, it is difficult to see how the members or owners of Liverpool Victoria will benefit from the demutualisation. Previous demutualisations have always been driven by the chair, chief executive and board, who usually benefit from significantly enhanced remuneration packages. It is time for the board to be honest. For example, by how much more will the chairman and chief executive benefit if this deal goes ahead? Thirdly, the way in which Liverpool Victoria’s chairman and board have gone about the process of demutualising raises the question as to whether—I say this gently—they knowingly misled the regulator and their customer-owners about their plans The board of Liverpool Victoria successfully persuaded their members to approve Liverpool Victoria’s conversion from a friendly society to a company limited by guarantee. At the time, they proposed this to their members, the chairman, Mr Cook, explicitly assured members that this would mean no change to the mutual status of Liverpool Victoria. With that assurance, the consumer-owners of LV= approved the conversion to a company limited by guarantee in May 2019. The real significance of that change in legal governance only emerged much later. In LV=’s rulebook, to demutualise, it needs a 50% turnout of the membership in any such vote and 75% of those voting to vote in favour. In short, practically, it is impossible—deliberately so. It was a rule put there to protect future consumer-owners of LV= against the greed of carpetbaggers and directors Given the assurances of Mr Cook, the board and the chief executive, one might have assumed that LV=’s mutual future would continue, notwithstanding the change from a friendly society. Under the rules governing companies, however, boards can approach our courts to ask for a scheme of arrangement for permission to ignore a particular rule in their constitution. That is not currently within the friendly society rules. Assuming there is even a small majority voting in favour of demutualisation, this is what LV=’s leadership are now determined to do. Revealingly, in February this year, in a webinar for LV= customers, Mr Cook noted that his plan to demutualise and sell to Bain Capital would not have been possible if they had not converted to a company limited by guarantee. It appears—again, I say this advisedly—that Mr Cook, the chairman of LV=, has been determined to demutualise for some time and has not been straight with the consumer-members of LV= What has added to that sense is that the previous chief executive of LV, Richard Rowney, left the organisation in December 2019, and it is difficult not to think that he was fired for not wanting to demutualise. His replacement, Mark Hartigan, was announced just 10 days later, and within less than three months Liverpool Victoria was up for sale—this at a time when assurances of Liverpool Victoria’s continuity as a mutual were being given. Frankly, it is stretching credibility to believe that the decision to sell was the unexpected decision of a strategic review landed by an incoming chief executive with no experience of working for a mutual and after less than three months in the job. What is also remarkable is the decision of the Financial Conduct Authority not to investigate whether members of LV= were deceived into supporting the conversion to a company limited by guarantee.
I thank my hon. Friend for the excellent speech he is making. Benenden Health is a significant mutual in my constituency, and it has serious concerns about the ramifications of this demutualisation for the whole mutual sector and its reputation. How does he believe that regulation could be tightened to avoid this kind of situation occurring again?
My hon. Friend and Benenden are right to be concerned about whether there are wider implications and we will see other businesses demutualising. The current vice-chair of Yorkshire Building Society sits on the board of Liverpool Victoria and appears to have been actively involved in the demutualisation plans, prompting a rather obvious question about the future of Yorkshire Building Society The conversion to a company limited by guarantee and the decision to pursue demutualisation are both fundamental to the treatment of Liverpool Victoria’s consumers. The FCA is refusing to consider both decisions together and to investigate, as I have indicated, whether the chairman in particular and other members of the board knew much earlier than they have been willing to admit thus far that demutualisation was their desired end point. The failure to consider interlinked business decisions in a holistic way was a fundamental failing identified by Dame Elizabeth Gloster in her devastating report on the London Capital & Finance debacle. This appears to be a clear repeat of that mistake, albeit with a very different business There are other concerns about the performance of the regulators, the PRA and the FCA. Together, they have admitted that they have had nearly 60 meetings to discuss the demutualisation with the board of LV=, but not one with LV=’s consumers and owners. The FCA should at the very least require the so-called independent experts who have been appointed by LV=’s board, who have been briefed by LV= and who will be paid by LV=, to set up meetings to explain the background to what one presumes will be their inevitable decision to recommend to members a vote for demutualisation and sale to Bain. Will the Minister ask the FCA to make that happen?
My hon. Friend is being generous. I also want to ask about the impact the proposals will have on staffing levels. We know that staff are fearful that many could lose their jobs at this time. What guarantees have been given to staff that their jobs will be safe?
My hon. Friend will know that when we saw the last wave of building society demutualisations, there were large numbers of job losses. I gently warn those who work for Liverpool Victoria to be wary of any assurances they have been given about their jobs if the sale to Bain and the demutualisation go ahead After the financial crash, there was recognition across the House that the wave of demutualisations of building societies had been, at best, a dismal episode, that corporate diversity needed to be encouraged, and that financial mutuals in particular had a crucial role to play in maintaining competition and the interests of consumers. For the Government and this Minister in particular—I welcome him to his place, as I know he is diligent in his interest in the mutual sector—I hope that the demutualisation of Liverpool Victoria will be a further wake-up call to look more seriously at the needs of financial mutuals and specifically their ability to raise capital, and to put into law disincentives to demutualise. We need protections for legacy assets, and we need a review of how financial mutuals are regulated under the Financial Services Act 2012. Certainly representations we had from the Association of Financial Mutuals suggest an urgent review to modernise that Act is overdue I hope that the Minister will also ask the chief executive of the FCA to revisit the question of whether the owners of LV=—its consumers—were misled when the conversion to a company by guarantee took place This demutualisation is proof that we need again to celebrate and enhance the position of mutuals in our markets. After all—I say this gently and reluctantly—what is being proposed in the demutualisation of LV= is the looting of nearly two centuries of legacy assets. Of course, it is being dressed up as something different, but that is money built up from the working capital of the business over years of transactions, starting with small contributions from the working people who were the original members of the Liverpool Victoria Burial Society, who set the society up to avoid the Victorian scandal of a pauper’s funeral. Over time, those small contributions became a substantial sum, and they were augmented by the funds transferred into the friendly society from a series of mergers with other mutuals. In good faith, those other mutuals brought their assets to share with a broader membership for their common purpose Today, we have the spectacle of a demutualisation that looks to be driven by the simple desire to appropriate this money. None of the promoters of the demutualisation has made any contribution to the accumulation of the assets, yet they want to take advantage of them. It seems that the attraction of the assets means that the executives, the board members and the private equity players will do whatever is necessary to appropriate them. Token windfall payments to members in exchange for their vote will, just like in every other demutualisation, transfer the value from those who contributed and their descendants to those who did not. I gently suggest that that can never be fair, and it is wrong that, to date, our legislative and regulatory regime not only permits that to happen but actively facilitates it.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) on securing the debate. He is a strong and sincere supporter of the mutuals sector, and he has regularly raised issues with me in the, I think, 44 months that I have been in post. I very much value his knowledge and insights on these matters and welcome the opportunity to discuss his concerns During my time as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, I have seen the clear benefits of mutuals both for the economy and for society as a whole. In essence, these businesses focus on service, and their frequently innovative nature means that they provide a unique, distinct offer to both their customers and their communities as well as a much-valued degree of service. The Government recognise those benefits, which is why, over the years, we have shown ourselves to be a supporter of the mutuals sector That support has manifested itself in a wide variety of ways, including, first, in engagement. We think it is vital that we understand the sector’s needs, so two years ago the Treasury held a mutuals workshop dedicated to understanding the challenges facing the sector and how they can be overcome. We have tried to take on board the points raised in that workshop, and we continued the conversation. As a result, my officials have been working hard to raise awareness of the mutuals model across Government to ensure that other Departments are equally focused on supporting it Secondly, we are helping the sector to be ready for the future. That is why at the Budget we committed to amending the Credit Unions Act 1979 to allow credit unions to offer a wide range of products and services. Finally, we have ensured that mutuals have also received financial support throughout the covid crisis, recognising their vital contribution to communities up and down the country. Mutuals were able to benefit from the furlough scheme and other forms of Government financial help. In addition, the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 introduced new insolvency support mechanisms for businesses, including many in that sector I would now like to address the subject of this debate in more specific detail. The hon. Gentleman has set out in some detail a range of observations about what has happened over recent months. As he is aware, the sale of LV= to Bain Capital and the ultimate demutualisation of the firm is something that I have engaged with him on and discussed previously. I want to assure the House that this continues to be a priority for me. I am closely engaged on this matter, and I am in close communication with regulators and the firm itself However, while I am very focused and aware of the views that the hon. Gentleman holds and the concerns that he raises, I cannot intervene directly in the sale or the demutualisation of a firm. The sale’s approval is a matter for the financial services regulators and the courts, both of which are independent of Government. The hon. Gentleman has done a lot of work to trace the interactions between the firm and the regulators, and I know that they are very aware of his interest in the matter. I am sure that that is going to lead to a very rigorous process, which I think he understands and I know is under way. Therefore, I do not think it is appropriate for me at this point to comment on the substance of that ongoing independent process, but what I can say is this. The approval process involves safeguards designed to ensure that members and policyholders are kept informed and that their interests are protected. I recognise that we are not at the end of that process yet, and the hon. Gentleman is somewhat anxious and perhaps, I may suggest, sceptical about what the final outcome will look like. But I have been reassured that the regulators are undertaking rigorous processes, as evidenced by the number of meetings that they have had, to assess the viability of the transaction and the suitability of Bain to manage an insurance business. Importantly, the statutory objectives of the regulators put policyholders’ interests, as well as consideration of the impact of the transaction on the market, at the heart of their assessment. I greatly support the regulators in their roles, and trust that they will endeavour to secure the best outcome in the interests of members and policyholders I recognise the points that have been raised about further demutualisations by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell). As I mentioned earlier, I believe mutuals have a very special place in our economy, and I very much value that contribution, but ultimately any future sales, irrespective of whether the firm is a mutual, will and should be considered on a case-by-case basis, in line with the regulators’ and courts’ duties and requirements I recognise that, in the course of this debate this evening, some suggestions have been made about the sorts of interventions that may be appropriate to safeguard the sector. I would be very happy to meet the hon. Member for Harrow West and the hon. Member for York Central to discuss their views on this subject, but I am, as I demonstrated earlier, very much focused on helping the sector to thrive. That means continuing the conversation so we can identify how best to facilitate the growth of the sector and understand the concerns in more detail, recognising that, across the range of mutuals of different sizes and different roles in the economy, different concerns may exist Therefore, I hope the hon. Member for Harrow West will relay the message to the sector that my door continues to be open to it. I would like to thank both Members for their constructive comments.
I have two interlinked questions, if I may. First, the Financial Conduct Authority, in its letter to the all-party group of 5 August, made it clear that it had already decided it would not review the interlinkage, or not, of the decision by LV= to convert to a company limited by guarantee and the subsequent proposal to demutualise. I recognise that the Minister cannot intervene with the regulators directly, but he can, as I understand it, because he meets with the chief executive of the FCA, seek an explanation of that decision. Secondly, if the FCA will not engage with that question sufficiently to satisfy me, could he at least ask it to publish the details of the two independent experts appointed by the board of LV= so that customer-owners can begin to make contact with them to ask them questions about what exactly the plans of LV= are?
I am always ready to look at constructive suggestions and am happy to take this forward. I suspect there may be legal impediments to the publishing of some of that information, but I will certainly ask the questions and seek to relay to the hon. Gentleman the fullest answer that I am able to. I am frequently in my current role in between this place and independent regulators. It is right that our regulators are independent and I see the frustrations that exist within that, but I am happy to take forward a constructive dialogue as far as I can I do not think I can add much more at this point. I recognise the sincere commitment of hon. Members who have spoken to this issue, their frustration with what has happened, the apparent unnecessary nature of this transaction, given the history and the apparent change in the direction of travel with little warning, but I am clear that the regulators are very aware of their obligations to safeguard the interests of members and I look forward to the judgments coming forth in the coming weeks and months. I hope that that gives the hon. Gentleman some satisfaction on the matters he has raised this evening Question put and agreed to.