argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): I join the Prime Minister in wishing the rugby league team all the very best in the competition. I hope they win it Last week, the House voted 299 to zero to pause the roll-out of universal credit. Will the Prime Minister respect the will of the House?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): I would have thought that if only 8% of the roll-out has taken place and 20% of the people in receipt of it are dissatisfied with it, that is a cause for thought and maybe a pause in the whole process. Last week, only one Conservative MP had the courage of their convictions to vote with us on suspending the universal credit roll-out. Then a Conservative Member of the Welsh Assembly, Angela Burns, said: "For the life of me I cannot understand why a 6 or 4 week gap is deemed acceptable." She called universal credit "callous at best and downright cruel at worst", and concluded by saying she is "ashamed" of her Government. Can the Prime Minister ease her colleague’s shame by pausing and fixing universal credit?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): Under Labour, 1 million children were lifted out of poverty. Under Labour, we introduced the principle of the national minimum wage—opposed by all Tories over there If the Prime Minister is not prepared to listen to Angela Burns, perhaps she could listen to the architect of universal credit, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who said: "One of the reasons I resigned from Government was I didn’t actually agree with the additional waiting days. This is something the government needs to look at" Does the Prime Minister agree with him?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): I thought that we had passed a threshold last week and that the Prime Minister was going to answer questions, but we obviously have not achieved that yet. Labour introduced working tax credits to help people on low pay out of poverty and it made a very big difference. The sad truth is that universal credit is in such a mess that councils are forced to pick up the Bill. Let me give an example. Croydon Council, which piloted the scheme, is now spending £3 million of its own budget to prevent tenants from being evicted due to rent arrears caused by universal credit. Does the Prime Minister think that it is right or fair that hard-pressed local authorities, having their budget cut by central Government, should have to dip into what little money they have left to prevent people from being evicted when they know full well that it is this Government and their system of universal credit that are causing the problem?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): I note that the Prime Minister could not say anything about people being evicted from the private rented sector because of universal credit problems. The costs in the benefit system are being driven by low pay and high rents. In 2015, the then Chancellor, her former friend, promised a £9 an hour living wage. However, in the March Budget it was sneaked out that the Government’s minimum wage would reach only £8.75. The welfare state was not created to subsidise low paying employers and overcharging landlords, so will the Budget in November put the onus back—[Interruption.]
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Labor
Questions: The Prime Minister will be aware of the vital role that supported housing plays for many vulnerable people in Torbay. What reassurances can she give me about the ongoing support that the Government will give to those vital services?
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn (Labour, Centre-left): The Government’s own Social Mobility Commission reported that low pay was endemic in the United Kingdom. One in four workers are permanently stuck in low-paid jobs. That is why Labour backed a real living wage of £10 per hour to make work pay. The Government do not really know whether they are coming or going. The Conservative party and the Government say they have full confidence in universal credit, but will not vote for it. They say they will end the NHS pay cap, but will not allocate any money to pay for it. The Communities Secretary backs £50 billion of borrowing for housing, but the Chancellor says it is not policy. The Brexit Secretary says they are planning for a no-deal Brexit. The Chancellor says they are not. Is it not the case that the Government are weak, incompetent, divided and unable to take a decision—[Interruption.]
Points of Order — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: International Affairs
Chuka Harrison Umunna (Labour, Centre-left): Yes, it was a Tuesday. Very well remembered The then Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union, the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), gave a commitment in this House that this House of Commons would have a vote on the arrangements for our withdrawal from the European Union before our exit. He said, "we intend that the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union. Furthermore, I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded."—[Official Report, 7 February 2017; Vol. 621, c. 264.] He went on to say: "It will be a meaningful vote. As I have said, it will be the choice between leaving the European Union with a negotiated deal or not."—[Official Report, 7 February 2017; Vol. 621, c. 273.] This morning the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union told the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union that the vote, which the then Minister committed to happening before we leave, could actually happen after we leave the European Union. As such, that is in clear breach of the commitment given by his own Minister that "it will be the choice between leaving the European Union with a negotiated deal or not." Obviously we will not have that choice if we have already left the European Union by the time of a vote. It seems to me that this House, on behalf of the people we represent, cannot take back control unless we have that vote Mr Speaker, can you advise on what we, as a House of Commons, can do about the, at best, contradiction or, at worst, false impression given to the House during the debate on 7 February?
Points of Order — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: International Affairs
Patrick Bosco McFadden (Labour, Centre-left): Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not actually the former Europe Minister, but I am grateful to you for calling me. I was at the evidence session this morning and I listened carefully to what the Secretary of State said. He said that Parliament would not be likely to get a vote on the future arrangements with the European Union until after March 2019. That makes a material and significant difference to this House’s ability to have a meaningful input and a meaningful say on the content of those negotiations. So at the risk of repetition, following on from what my hon. Friends the Members for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) and for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) have said, I ask your advice on what this House can do to make sure it has a meaningful say and input on these most important of negotiations, rather than being used as an after-the-fact rubber stamp.
Points of Order — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Government Operations
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I wish to raise another issue of public policy: the contaminated blood scandal. What with "Sky News" today running a story about what appears to be a 1987 Cabinet cover-up related to the contaminated blood scandal, and with the consultation for the public inquiry having ended last week, have you, Sir, had any indication of when the Government are going to come to the House to make a statement about when that public inquiry will be set up? They promised that it would be done in a speedy manner.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): I beg to move, That this House notes the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to a funding proposal for social care which would have no cap on care costs and would include the value of homes in the means test for care at home; further notes that this proposal would leave people with a maximum of only £100,000 of assets; calls on the Government to confirm its intention not to proceed with this commitment; and further calls on the Government to remove the threat to withdraw social care funding from, and stop fines on, local authorities for Delayed Transfers of Care and to commit to the extra funding needed to close the social care funding gap for 2017 and the remaining years of the 2017 Parliament After the debacle of the dementia tax, there has been continuing concern that the current and future issues about the funding of social care are not being addressed. The worries stirred up by the Conservative party during the general election will not be resolved without a better idea about what the future now holds for social care One place where people were expecting to hear some discussion on this was at the party conferences in September, but if we thought that we would hear about it in the conference speeches of the Secretaries of State responsible for social care, we were sadly let down At the Labour party conference, I talked about the crisis in social care and how it was failing those who need care and their families, failing unpaid family carers and failing hundreds of thousands of care workers. People needing care and their carers face the greatest impact. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, there are 400,000 fewer people receiving publicly funded care and, sadly, more than 1.2 million people now living with unmet care needs, many of whom are isolated and lonely.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is raising a very important issue, which is leading to a lot of suffering among elderly people in particular. Will she make reference to the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the Elderly, which, almost two decades ago, recommended free long-term care for all? That is where we should be.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): I will talk about how the Labour party will take forward proposals on the future of social care. We wait to hear what the Government choose to do. My hon. Friend is right that there is a driving need now The number of people—1.2 million—living with unmet care needs will inevitably rise without an injection of new funding. A lack of publicly funded care means that the task of meeting care needs falls more heavily on unpaid family carers. Many carers have to give up work because of the demands of caring, which has a real impact on their finances and future career prospects. The case for listening to carers and giving them more support is overwhelming. We were expecting a new carers’ strategy this spring, or, at the latest, in the summer. Some 6,500 carers had taken the time over and above their caring responsibilities to respond to the Government’s consultation. However, the Care Minister told me that the responses will merely be taken forward into a new consultation on social care Katy Styles, a carer and a campaigner for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, contributed to that consultation and hoped that her voice would be heard, alongside 6,500 other carers. She told me: "Not publishing the National Carers Strategy has made me extremely angry. It sends a message that carers’ lives are unimportant. It sends a message that Government thinks we can carry on as we are. It sends a message that my own time is of little worth." That is a shabby way to treat carers—the people who provide more than 50% of the care in this country.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): I will come on later to discuss how we should proceed and whether we should proceed on a cross-party basis. The hon. Gentleman’s point about carers and family carers is important. The plain fact of the matter is that there was nothing for carers in his party’s manifesto. We had announced that we were going to lift carer’s allowance at least to the level of jobseeker’s allowance. That is the only improvement that was discussed during the general election. He should turn to his own Minister and his own party and ask them what they will do for carers.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): We will come on to that. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to get into the mess that his party made, the truth is that we legislated a number of years ago to lift the asset floor to £118,000. What his party did during the election was drop that to £100,000. At the weekend, we learned that there was an intention to make it only £50,000. He should be clear about what his Front-Bench colleagues were trying to do. Since then, all we have heard is a deafening silence. We need to focus on the crisis in social care now. We on the Labour Benches have raised many times just how fragile the care sector is after years of swingeing budget cuts by the Government. A survey by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services reported that more than two thirds of councils had reported closures of care providers in the first five months of the financial year. Nearly half those councils had had homecare providers handing back contracts.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): It is very important that we bear in mind that the 1.45 million workforce in care will have been local government employees and will have enjoyed local government terms and conditions. We have talked many times about the fact that they are not now paid the minimum wage or travel time. They are very badly paid, with no pensions in prospect.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Katherine Anne Green (Labour, Centre-left): As my hon. Friend knows, in my constituency, which neighbours hers, we have a real problem in recruiting and retaining care workers, many of whom tell me that they can get better paid work in the local Asda than by doing the job that they love. Does she not agree that that is in part due to the fact that private providers, who would like to pay their staff more, cannot do so because of the insufficiency of the value of the contracts that they receive from the local authority?
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): That is absolutely the case. In fact, in a recent meeting with Unison, I was told that, in our area in Greater Manchester, one person could be paid more for putting toppings on to pizzas at Morrisons than for providing care—often to people with dementia or to those who really need that help.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): No, I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is one of the reasons why his party’s dementia tax policy failed so badly. Suddenly to bring hundreds of thousands of people into means-testing using their homes was one of the biggest flaws in the policy that the Conservative party floated I will now make a little bit of progress on the state of care, because the fragility of the care sector is a key issue. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) about closures in his area, but councils cannot even influence these closures much any more because home care providers are handing back contracts. Indeed, one in five councils in the ADASS survey reported closures in all three services: home care, residential care and nursing home services. There are also serious issues of care quality in many areas of the country The survey reported that 70% of the councils surveyed had experienced quality issues across all three types of care services. ADASS estimates that 28,000 people have been affected by care-quality issues or by a change of service due to contracts being handed back. We know that it is a big issue for a person with dementia to have a continual change in the care staff visiting them. Those arguing in favour of cuts need to think about those 28,000 lives affected negatively by cuts to local authority budgets. Worryingly, the Care Quality Commission now reports that almost a quarter of care services are not meeting standards on safety, and nearly a fifth of services require improvement overall I said earlier that budget cuts mean that more than 400,000 fewer people are now getting publicly funded care. Of course, councillors, council leaders and social workers have had to make difficult decisions about cutting budgets and cutting support to local people. It is of great credit to councils and council leaders that so many still continue to prioritise adult social care in their budget setting, but the overall position is one of cuts. There will be a real-terms loss of £6.3 billion to adult social care by the end of this financial year, and we heard earlier from my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) about the level of cuts in the city of Manchester. The cuts have an impact on staff working in social care.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
John Eugene Joseph Dromey (Labour, Centre-left): At last, the Government and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have acknowledged that care workers who sleep in, giving loving care to those badly in need of care, are entitled to the national minimum wage. But, as a consequence, a crisis confronts the sector. Mencap says that it is the "final nail in the coffin for many providers", with jobs lost and the risk of bankruptcy for a number of people with personal care packages. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government who created this problem should solve this problem and not expect local authorities to pick up the bill?
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): I absolutely agree, and it was helpful of my hon. Friend to make that point. The sleep-ins issue has been a real cause of worry for many organisations over many months. It just goes to the heart of our assertion that people who work in care should be paid the minimum wage, including when they are working at night, which is what they are doing on sleep-ins. I have a constituent who looks after two households of people in adjoining properties, and she does not get normal sleep during the night as alarms can go off in any part of the properties. It is not right at all that those people were paid just fixed amounts, not the minimum wage. The Government must find the funding for that decision.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Barbara Mary Keeley (Labour, Centre-left): My local authority has the most advanced example of an integrated care organisation in the country—we have already transferred all our social care staff to work for Salford Royal. I have just quoted a situation that shows how the pressure being put on hospitals because of delayed transfers of care is causing them to treat people such as my constituent in the way I described. Conservative Members ought to listen to that, because it is their Government and their Ministers who are causing this pressure to be put on hospitals We know that demand on social care is increasing as more people live longer with more complex conditions. The number of people aged 75 and over is projected nearly to double by 2039. That ought to be something to celebrate, but instead the Government have created fear and uncertainty for older people by failing to address the health and care challenges raised by those demographic changes. Indeed, the Conservative party is spending less money on social care now than Labour was when it left office in 2010. The Government seem to have no plan to develop a sustainable solution to the funding of social care in the longer term; they have talked only of a consultation followed by a Green Paper Furthermore—and this is raising real fears—the focus has been entirely on the needs of older people, without consideration being given to the needs of the 280,000 working-age people with disabilities or learning disabilities in the social care system. That is profoundly short-sighted, because the financial pressures on local authorities due to the increasing care needs of younger adults with disabilities or mental health problems are now greater than those due to the need to support older people.
Social Care — House of Commons, 2017-10-25
Topic: Social Welfare
Katherine Anne Green (Labour, Centre-left): I am glad my hon. Friend has mentioned younger adults. Does she agree that investing in the care they need will facilitate the Government’s achievement of their ambition to have more disabled people who can work in paid employment? Relatively low levels of expenditure on care for those people would pay great dividends for the Government and the country.