Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-06-22
Topic: Social Welfare
Kirsty Ann Blackman (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to speak for the SNP on the Social Security (Additional Payments) Bill. The Chancellor announced this uprating a number of weeks ago, having dragged his feet for so long. He announced the energy loan at the Budget, after announcing it earlier in the year, with a "Ta-da! Look at this! This is wonderful. We are giving you all this." It was never sufficient. We called immediately for the energy loan to be a grant and for it to be increased The big announcement at the Budget was, "Hey, look, you can have cheaper solar panels!" That does not help my constituents, who are literally unable to buy food. We called for these changes then, and the Chancellor waited and waited until the end of May to make this announcement It has been a few weeks since the end of May, and we saw this Bill only last week. Parliamentarians have been able to scrutinise this Bill for only one week. The Government, or the Secretary of State, may say that this is because the Bill is so complicated, but they had weeks beforehand in which to decide what it would look like, and they have had weeks since the announcement in which to present it and give us an opportunity to see it. We should not be doing this in a single day. I appreciate that there is a tight timescale and that the Bill must be put through now in order for the payments to be made; what concerns me is the time during which we have not been able to scrutinise it effectively My other concern about process involves the money motion. It is drawn as tightly as possible. No doubt when we reach the Committee stage the Government will say what they say in every Finance Bill Committee: "All the amendments are about having reports. All the Opposition want are reports, rather than any actual changes to the Bill." However, such a tight money motion makes it impossible for us effectively to put forward the asks that we have and to make it clear that this is wholly insufficient and that there are massive changes that we want to introduce Nevertheless, I congratulate the House on the fact that we are actually debating spend. That is very exciting—it is wonderful—because we never debate spend. We get the estimates for five days a year, or is it three? For a handful of days a year, we are allowed to debate those. To be fair, we are now allowed to debate spend, but it does not happen. We have the Budget, and then we have the Finance Bill. The Finance Bill is entirely about taxation: it is not about spend. We do not get the opportunity to debate and scrutinise spend properly, so it is very nice to get the chance to do so today—albeit with a money motion that is so unbelievably restrictive that we cannot put forward any amendments that make any sense or assist our constituents in any way Before I proceed, I want to thank Chris Mullins-Silverstein and Linda Nagy, who have been incredibly helpful in putting stuff together very quickly to enable me to make a speech that makes sense—or, I hope, largely makes sense This is the situation in which we find ourselves. As we heard from the right hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), in October, energy bills will be up by £1,500 for the average household, which is far more than the amount that the Government propose to provide for people—and that is before we take into account the other increases that we are seeing. According to the Office for National Statistics, pasta is up by 50%, bread by 16% and rice by 15%. I pay tribute to Jack Monroe for the huge amount of work she has done on the "Vimes Boots" index, which allows inflation to be measured not just in the way in which it has historically been measured, but in a way that relates to how people shop—the people at the lowest end of the income spectrum, who count every single penny in the supermarket to work out whether they can possibly afford what they have put in their baskets. Inflation for those lowest-income families has increased by significantly more than inflation for the families who are earning more. It is even worse for disabled householders, who are seeing even more significant increases in energy bills, and the same goes for pensioners I was delighted to hear the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) suggest that things are very generous. He cannot have the same inbox as me. According to my inbox, things were dire before Brexit, dire before covid, and dire before the massive increase in inflation that we are seeing now, and they have only got worse. The fact is that the impact of Brexit has increased our food prices. Less migration means less money for the Government to spend, while net migration reduces net public sector debt and increases the amount that the Government have to spend. The former Chancellor George Osborne’s Red Books make that explicit. It is clear that he was seeking to crack down on migration, and that doing so would reduce the amount of money that the Government had to spend. It costs money for us to reduce migration. It means that we will have less to spend on people who stay here, who live here, who work here The announcement that this is a £37 billion package is genuinely a joke. In the Government’s calculation of the £37 billion, they have included the fuel duty changes. A significant number of my constituents, especially the poorest, do not drive. They are impacted by the price of supermarket vans having to drive around and small businesses’ costs increasing, but the fuel duty does not make a difference to their daily lives. They do not fill up their fuel tanks because they do not have fuel tanks. They cannot afford cars. So including the fuel duty rise in the £37 billion is ridiculous. Including the freeze on alcohol duty is one of the cheekiest things I have ever seen in this place, and I was here all the way through the Brexit debates. The Government cannot include an alcohol duty freeze and say that they are helping with the cost of living. "We are helping the poorest people to save money on their alcohol." People who cannot afford pasta are not helped by freezing alcohol duty These things that are being included in the £37 billion are listed on the factsheet on the Government’s website, by the way. The £37 billion also includes lots of already planned stuff. It includes what has happened with national insurance, and it includes things that were put in place when the Government thought that increasing benefits by 3.1% in April 2020 was sufficient. It includes a massive chunk of that. The Government cannot stand up and realistically say that this is a £37 billion package, because it is not. These are not the positive changes that my constituents and people across Scotland and the UK want to see I am pleased to hear that disabled people are getting an additional amount of money. That is a good move by the Government, but it does not take into account the increased costs that disabled people are seeing, including the massive increase in scarcity affecting gluten-free diets, for example. More disabled people have specialist diets than people who will not get the £150 increase. Disabled people spend more time at home, and it is the same for pensioners. The increases that are happening for those two groups are not sufficient to cover the increases they are facing in their energy costs, particularly, and in specialist diet costs.