Social Security and Pensions — House of Commons, 2022-02-07
Topic: Social Welfare
Nigel John Mills (Conservative, Centre-right): I think the Minister will find that he has managed to unite the whole House and every speaker in this debate. Sadly for him, he will find that every speaker, including me, thinks that the rise we will vote through tonight is not sufficient for the situation we find ourselves in. We will all ask the Government to go away and try to find some more We should be aware of the logic behind what we are doing. We are trying to give the people on the least—those who are out of work, those who cannot work, and those who have retired and therefore no longer work—sufficient money to pay all their bills. Unless we believe that people’s benefits are way higher than what they need, if we do not give them an inflationary increase every year, by definition they cannot possibly pay next year for all the things they had last year In this pretty unique situation of the rising cost of living, we are asking those with the least to get themselves not only through this winter, but through all of next year and all of next winter, based on an inflation measure that was taken before this winter. What they have to pay their energy bills in March 2023 will be based on a calculation of what was needed in September 2021. That surely cannot be right or logical. When bills are rising as sharply as they are, I cannot see how it is physically possible for people to do that Sadly, it does not look likely that we will be sat here in a year’s time with it all having reversed and with the gas price back to where it was a year ago. It does not look like a temporary blip; it looks like some of these prices will be baked in for a long time. There is sufficient uncertainty out there that there could be further challenges to come. I urge the Government to have a long, hard look at whether we really ought to have this system and whether we cannot do better than using September inflation figure to set the benefits and pension rise six months later At the start of the pandemic, the Government rightly chose to introduce the £20 uplift in universal credit. We managed to get that done in a matter of days. Last November, at the Chancellor’s financial statement, the reduction in the taper rate was announced and the Government managed to get that into force in a matter of days—on 1 December. Yet now we are told that they have to use the September inflation figure and cannot use a later one, even though we had the December figure in the middle of January, about three weeks ago, and three whole months before the rise comes into force I accept that some of the older, clunkier benefits—those whose systems are based on steam-driven 1980s IT that seems to work by shoving KitKat wrappers into the fuse box to patch it—may take a bit longer to programme. However, I would hope that for universal credit and the state pension—the two largest ones and the ones that affect the most people—we could take a more up-to-date figure. That would not fix the situation and wholly resolve the fact that inflation will be at 6% or 7%, but at least people would have got a 4.8% rise based on the December CPI rate rather than 3.1%. That would have been of help.