Tax Credits — House of Commons, 2015-10-29
Topic: Macroeconomics
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): I think that we have a similar number—6,500 families—in Ealing Central and Acton. It is the children whom we should be thinking about. They are not just columns on a spreadsheet, but real people There was great drama at PMQs yesterday. The leader of the Labour party asked the Prime Minister six times about these plans and whether working people would be worse off next year, and six times, the Prime Minister refused to answer. Even The Sun—not the most Labour friendly paper—referred to that exchange. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) said: "This is not a constitutional crisis; it is a crisis for 3 million families".—[Official Report, 28 October 2015; Vol. 601, c. 339.] We could go further, even further than this motion. The Chancellor could still perform a full U-turn, which I would welcome, as I did the rapid conversion to feminism in this place yesterday. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, if the Chancellor were to make a U-turn, we would welcome it on the Labour Benches. We would not taunt the Government if they were to do that. There is still time The Chancellor has a choice before him. He can continue hell-bent on his tax giveaways to big corporations and to the wealthiest in our country, or he could reverse those tax breaks to the few and go for a lower surplus target in 2019-20 while still sticking to his self-imposed charter. He would still be in a position not to hit those 3 million working families with these tax credit cuts. After all, this is a Government who claim to be on the side of working people. The ball is now firmly in the court of the Treasury Ministers My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) said that, often, the lifting of people out of taxation is used to justify these measures, but such a move is not as progressive as it initially appears to be. It helps dual earner households the most, but only those who earn enough. It makes no difference if the Government start taxing at £6,000 or £11,000, because there is little help for those on £5,000—the lowest paid on the distributional curve Studies have shown that the national living wage, which is not an actual living wage, will only affect a small minority of people and it will never help those under the age of 26. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) also pointed out that the childcare element is quite limited. In my own constituency, parents would be hard-pressed to find a nursery that could offer a place, because there is not the commensurate resource to match the policy People have been wondering, even before the mess of this week, how they can trust a Prime Minister who blatantly said one thing on TV as recently as 30 April and then quite a different thing just a couple of months later in July. He made a promise of no cuts to a voter on a phone-in programme. That was then followed up by David Dimbleby to check that what he said was clear. By July, that promise had gone. That must be the fastest U-turn in history. In PMQs yesterday, we heard some MPs say that they had claimed tax credits. I do not know whether that is true. Perhaps we can put that down to the theatre of PMQs.