Social Security — House of Commons, 2015-12-01
Topic: Social Welfare
Samuel Wilson (Democratic Unionist Party, Right): Of course, that £100 million-plus could have been used to deal with many of the pressing problems faced by my hon. Friend’s constituents and mine, and, indeed. the constituents of all of us in the House tonight. They could not benefit from hip operations, eye operations or special needs provision in schools because money had been drained from the Northern Ireland budget unnecessarily. Let us be clear about this. The responsibility for the legislation being brought here rests with those who took the view that they did, even after concessions had been made. I want to thank the Ministers on the Treasury Bench who listened to the special case in Northern Ireland, albeit that they made us pay for the changes ourselves. Nevertheless, they recognised that there were special conditions in Northern Ireland and they were prepared to be flexible. I suspect that caused some difficulty for them with their constituents, because the same arrangements were not available here on the mainland. Nevertheless, they were made available in Northern Ireland—although, as I said, the Northern Ireland Executive had to pay for the changes made. This was always going to be a difficult issue because of the parity principle. It is one of the reasons why at the very beginning when devolution was being set up we questioned whether welfare should ever be devolved; departure from the parity principle was always going to be very difficult. The arrangement was that, so long as Northern Ireland stayed in line with tax changes and benefit changes in the rest of the UK, through the annually managed expenditure, whatever the cost of welfare would be, it would be met by the Exchequer; it would not have to be found locally, but would be met by the Exchequer. It was perfectly legitimate to say, "We’re not going to allow you to go and do your own thing and then expect the Treasury to pick up the bill." We expect there to be that parity principle and, that being the case, the devolution of welfare to the Northern Ireland Assembly was always going to create difficulties if parties decided to dig their heels in and ask for radically different arrangements It has been mentioned that my party voted against some of the things contained in the Bill at Westminster. That is true, but there are many things we voted for. We supported the benefit cap. We supported the move to universal credit and the simplification of benefit arrangements. We supported the principle that benefits should be set at a level to make work pay, and not to penalise people who went out and worked. We supported all those things, but there were things we were not happy with. We voted against them here. In some cases we were able to negotiate differences in Northern Ireland, and in some cases we were not, but we faced up to the reality that once the legislation had passed through Westminster the Northern Ireland budget was not going to be able to bear the cost of not implementing it in Northern Ireland It is ironic, however, that the SDLP should say that Sinn Féin and the DUP rolled over to the Government on welfare reform. Let me give one example. When the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) was Minister for Social Development, she put through a lot of statutory instruments that simply reflected welfare changes here and were introduced in Northern Ireland, very often without any debate. Indeed, it was her successor who introduced in Northern Ireland the removal of the spare room subsidy for the private rented sector, and then railed against it when it was introduced for tenants in the public rented sector. There was not a word about it in the Northern Ireland Assembly when her colleague Mr Attwood introduced that. So we can see a certain amount of conflict between the anti-welfare rhetoric of the SDLP and its willingness on many occasions to introduce welfare changes through the Assembly.