Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“The price of failure is being paid by families and the 2.5 million people denied the chance to work. That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling). As we heard in the powerful speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), very many families are contending with falling wages and rising living costs because there is simply not enough work to go round. Perhaps worst of all for the long term is the price being paid through rising levels of child poverty, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow spoke eloquently. We lifted 1 million children out of poverty during our time in office, and now most commentators agree that all that progress will be wiped out by the decisions of this Government.”
“Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick), we need more apprenticeships, not least because in many parts of our country right now—in Yorkshire, the north-east and the north-west—employers are saying that they cannot get skilled workers at a time when unemployment is higher than it was at the last election. That shows that the system put in place by this Government is not working. We need to do more for the long-term unemployed. We also need to do more to support women back into work. In a brilliant speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) argued powerfully that women are not being supported into work at the rate we would like. The shambles that we saw in the House yesterday on child care policy did not give us much confidence that things are going to change.”
“I am going to move on quickly because I need to refer to some contributions to the debate. The price that is being paid by our constituents, including our young people, has been well set out. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) spoke eloquently, with force and power, about the price being paid by young people and the long-term damage that is being confronted. Some of my colleagues, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), face very high levels of youth unemployment in their constituencies. To echo the substance of the argument made by my hon.”
“That is how we rebuilt our country after the second world war and how we rebuilt public services in 1997. Those are the ideas that we needed in the Queen’s Speech. Instead, we have a Government who are out of ideas. The day is fast approaching when we will run them out of office.”
“It is the 70th anniversary of the White Paper on employment policy, which accepted for the first time that the Government had a responsibility to ensure that everybody who wanted to work and could work had a job. Once upon a time, the Conservative party agreed with that principle. When Rab Butler spoke to the 1953 Conservative party conference he said that anyone who believes in “creating pools of unemployment should be thrown into them and made to swim”. It is 40 years since the Conservative party backed away from those principles, starting with Sir Keith Joseph’s speech in Preston. We could pay down our national debt faster if we got our country back to work. That is why the one idea that should have been at the heart of this Queen’s Speech was a plan for jobs and full employment.”
“I am going to spare my time for the Secretary of State, I am afraid. Those were the kinds of measures that we should have seen in this Queen’s Speech. They are simple, costable and easily affordable, and they would have helped to get our country back to work. To conclude, the struggle for jobs has always been at the heart of the struggle of our movement. When Keir Hardie rose on the Benches behind me to make the first speech of a Labour MP in this House, he insisted on the principle of work or maintenance. In our first election address, “Useful Work for the Unemployed” was our rallying cry. Next year marks an important anniversary in that long struggle for jobs.”
“A payment-by-results system does not cost much money if there are no results. If the Secretary of State is so proud of the 8% figure, why did his Department not use it when it published the results?”
“The Secretary of State is being characteristically generous in giving way so early in his speech. The previous Chancellor’s Budget would have halved the deficit over the course of four years, but this Budget confirms that borrowing is now set to grow by £254 billion more than first forecast. How can the Secretary of State judge that to be a success?”
“The truth is that the Secretary of State is in this hole because the recovery that we left this Government has been knocked out. Growth has now stalled and, as a result, tax revenues are coming in at £5 billion lower than forecast. That is why we needed a Budget that would get back growth and jobs. On capital spending, is the Secretary of State saying that he now agrees with the Deputy Prime Minister, who said earlier this year: “If I’m going to be sort of self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into the Coalition Government”?”
“The Secretary of State knows as well as I do that annual housing starts totalled just 98,000 in 2012. That is 11% down on the previous year, and half the number of homes that it is estimated are needed in this country. That is why Labour is saying clearly that we should spend the proceeds of the 4G licence sale, and half the money from a bank bonus, on building homes. This week’s figures show a 65,000 fall in the number of people working in the construction sector. This country needs investment in building homes, not a spare homes subsidy for the very rich.”
“Will the Secretary of State tell the House what representations he has made to the Chancellor on whether it is right that universal credit should be calculated on post-tax income? The Secretary of State will know that the effect of that is to claw back three quarters of the increase in the personal allowance from Britain’s poorest families.”
“Contrary to what the Secretary of State says, the OBR says that our market share is deteriorating not because the growth of our trading partners is slowing, but because our exporters have become less competitive. The Chancellor was right to say on Wednesday that we are in a global race. The problem is that we are set to lose it by setting sail for a low growth, low pay, low skill economy, and there was nothing in the Budget to change that course.”
“According to Wednesday’s figures, the national debt will not be falling until 2017-18. I am glad that the Secretary of State raised the idea of the global race. The House will have seen from the OBR’s figures on Wednesday that the fabled rebalancing that we were promised is simply not happening. Our exchange rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. Exports have grown by 1%. Once upon a time, in its early days, the OBR said that the export boost to GDP was set to be 1.2%. It now admits that net trade is dragging down our economy by 0.8%. What a contrast that is to 20 years ago, when sterling depreciated by 18% and exports grew by more than a third.”
“As if we needed it, Wednesday’s Budget was the final, definitive, categorical proof that plan A has failed. Growth has halved; it will be lower this year and next year than was forecast. The deficit is not falling; it is static. The IFS said yesterday that the only way for the Chancellor to bring the deficit down this year and ensure that it is lower than last year would be to pay this year’s bills next year. Paul Johnson of the IFS concluded: “The truth is that borrowing is the same this year as it was last year. And it will be the same next year as this year.” Total debt is not down; it is going through the roof because the Government’s fiscal plans are in tatters. Borrowing is set to be £245 billion higher than was forecast. We were promised that the books would be balanced by 2015. That is a promise broken.”
“There could not have been a worse curtain-raiser to Budget day on Wednesday than the unemployment figures that we saw at 9.30 am. Halfway through this Parliament, unemployment is higher than it was at the general election—and it is not going down, it is going up. [ Interruption. ] I do not know where Government Members were on Wednesday. Unemployment rose on Wednesday. Youth unemployment went up by 50,000 on Wednesday. Unemployment among women went up, not down, on Wednesday. Government Members would do well to live in the real world for once.”
“The chief economist to the IMF has been clear that a different fiscal strategy is needed. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills hinted that what was needed at the moment was a whacking great boost in capital spending, and the Deputy Prime Minister has admitted that the Government cut capital spending far too fast. That is why we have set out clear, costed plans to increase capital spending and change course. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister bear responsibility for that catastrophic failure and the failure of their fiscal plans, but, let us be honest, they have been aided and abetted by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who has proved incapable of translating his fabled welfare revolution into practice.”
“I can confirm that, and I will also say to the House that families are now paying an extraordinary price. They are doing anything and everything to get work. On average, people have taken a £1,250 pay cut since the election, and that is why it is such a bad idea to cut tax credits and give a tax cut to millionaires in two weeks’ time.”
“The words of the chief economist Olivier Blanchard are clear: the Government are on the wrong fiscal path, and we know that the Business Secretary agrees with us.”
“The OBR has weighed up the efforts of the Secretary of State and the Chancellor and it has concluded that what is in hand is going so well that unemployment will not go down next year, but up—and that is against the projections set out in the 2010 Budget. Next year the International Labour Organisation measure of unemployment is expected to rise from 7.9% to 8%, and the claimant count is set to rise by another 50,000. What is even worse is that the OBR says that the welfare bill will not go down either—it will go up, including for housing benefit. Spending on social security benefits will now be £21 billion higher than the Chancellor first planned.”
“We have unemployment rising and debt that is £245 billion higher than forecast. The hon. Gentleman should be ashamed of that record. We needed a Budget to get unemployment down and we did not get one. I hoped to see a Budget that delivered for those who are out of work, but what did we get instead? The conclusion of the OBR was clear that the impact of the Budget on growth would be so significant that it would amount to precisely zero. That is what the Secretary of State has managed to negotiate from the Chancellor. He has been turned over, stitched up and done like a kipper yet again. Any sensible Secretary of State, faced with a collapsing Work programme and rising unemployment, would surely ask for more help today, not tomorrow. People out of work need help today, not in the years to come. What did we see instead?”
“We have had a Work programme that has been literally worse than doing nothing: just 2.3% of people referred on to the programme have found sustained jobs. The Public Accounts Committee had this to say: “Actual performance was even below the Department’s assessment of the non-intervention rate—the number of people that would have found sustained work had the Work Programme not been running.” Will the Secretary of State now tell us what on earth is going wrong and what he got from the Chancellor to fix it?”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that point. Not only did we see youth unemployment rise on Wednesday, but the claimant count for long-term unemployment went up again. That is why I say to the Secretary of State that we needed action in the Budget to bring unemployment down. The organisation of back-to-work schemes under this Secretary of State is now in a state of complete chaos. This is what he had to say about the Work programme in November 2010: “The difference between this Government and the previous Government will be that the Work programme—the most comprehensive, integrated work programme in existence, certainly, since the war”. —[ Official Report , 22 November 2010; Vol. 519, c. 18.] What have we had instead?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for that bold assertion to the House. Would he like to intervene again and tell me that the targets for employment and support allowance will be hit by Work programme contractors when the data are published in May?”
“So tough is the pressure on staff that they are threatened with disciplinary action by their superiors if they fail to deliver for Ministers. They are even given a dictionary of which phrases to spot so that they can catch out jobseekers who have turned up to jobcentres for help. The leaked e-mails tell staff to look out for phrases such as, “I pick up the kids”, “I look after my neighbour’s children” and “I didn’t come in yesterday because my husband was ill”. It beggars belief that Ministers told the House on Monday that no such targets or league tables existed, yet we see from these e-mails that it is deep within the DWP’s culture.”
“I will take that as a no. The only measure in the Budget that might remotely help jobs is the employment allowance—a welcome idea that we support and for which we have argued before—but it will not kick in until halfway through 2014 and will not be fully up and running until 2015-16, when the GDP growth is forecast to be 2.4%, which is three times the growth forecast this year. We need action on jobs now, not in the first year of the next Parliament. If we require any proof of the need for a big plan for jobs, we have only to look at the story by Mr Patrick Wintour in today’s Guardian. Here we learn some of the terrible ways in which front-line jobcentre staff are now being asked to reduce the unemployment figures—targets for sanctions and league tables for jobcentres.”
“872.] I am glad that we have secured an independent review of the sanctioning regime in the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill. It was clear that we were right to demand it, and it is now clear that the sanctioning regime is running out of control, so I hope that the Secretary of State will guarantee that the independent review will get to the bottom of every case in which sanctions have been used. If he does not, we will bring forward such amendments in the other place.”
“I will give way to the Secretary of State in a moment, because I am going to invite him to apologise to the House. How on earth could Ministers not have known? How on earth could the House have been given information earlier in the week that was the opposite of the truth? I know that the Secretary of State will apologise, because he is a decent man. On Tuesday, the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), said: “There are no league tables in place. We do not set targets for sanctions”. —[ Official Report , 19 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 828.] The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey), said: “There are no targets whatsoever.” —[ Official Report , 19 March 2013; Vol. 560, c.”
“I have until 15 February, along with other area managers, to show an improvement, and then it is a performance improvement plan for me.” He continues: “Obviously if I am on a PIP…to improve my team’s Stricter Benefit Regime referral rate I will not have a choice but to consider implementing PIPs for those individuals who are clearly not delivering SBR within the team.” That is why it is important that we have assurances that the independent review, set out in the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill, will get to the bottom of every sanction issued.”
“My admiration for jobcentre staff working under this regime is unbounded. They are good people trapped in bad systems, with a Secretary of State who, I fear, is out of touch. I have a copy of the e-mail that Mr Wintour reports today, and this is its concluding paragraph: “Guys, we really need to up the game here”— on the issuing of sanctions— “The 5% target is one thing—the fact that we are seeing over 300 people a week and only submitting six of them for possible doubts is simply not quite credible.” The e-mail says, “So the bottom line.”
“I will in a moment. I assure the Secretary of State that I will give him time to answer. The e-mail in question starts by stating that Walthamstow is 95th in the league table out of only 109. This is incredibly serious, not least because in response to repeated questioning the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Fareham, and the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Wirral West, assured the House earlier in the week that this was not happening, yet it clearly is.”
“Yesterday in Great Yarmouth, together with Lara Norris, I met a woman called Sandra who had cerebral palsy. She has brought up five children, but for reasons of her disability she sleeps separately from her partner, who is her carer. She will be hit by this bedroom tax in a couple of weeks. She now has to take decisions about switching off the heating for half the week because she can no longer afford to heat her home. She has to go to bed and snuggle up in an electric blanket in order to stay warm. That is what is happening in our country, yet these cuts will start on the same day as Britain’s richest citizens are given a tax cut. It is wrong and we should have had action in the Budget to reverse it.”
“As I said earlier in the week, the ultimate test for the Secretary of State is this: when he went to Easterhouse all those years ago, he talked about the need for a jobs revolution in this country, but if we now look at the 1% most-unemployed estates in our country, we see that unemployment has not fallen over the first half of the Parliament but gone up. It has gone up in three quarters of estates, and long-term unemployment, which we are so worried about, has risen on two thirds of those estates. This welfare revolution is falling apart, and we needed a Budget for jobs this week to fix it. The greatest tragedy is who will pay for this failure. We know that a host of cuts, not least the bedroom tax, that are arriving in a couple of weeks will hurt some of the most vulnerable people in our country.”
“Earlier in the week, we heard in the Financial Times that small businesses were so badly prepared by HMRC for the introduction of real-time information—the method by which payrolls will be updated to calculate universal credit—that the Government have had to U-turn again, only a few days before the change is being introduced. The RTI system for businesses employing fewer than 50 people—covering about 7 million—will be slipped back by six months. There are worries now, not just about the Work programme and the lack of action on bringing down unemployment, but on universal credit.”
“I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) will speak later and will provide the Secretary of State with a full answer on that. I repeat, however, that if the Government do not make refinements to the Bill, we will move the necessary amendments. I am glad that the independent review has been legally sanctioned in the Bill. We will ensure that it is used to get to the bottom of what is going on, and I am sure he will co-operate. Just as bad as the lack of action on the Work programme in the Budget were the new surprises about universal credit. The Secretary of State and others have given frequent assurances that the programme is on track, but that raises the question: what on earth is the track?”
“The housing benefit bill is going up by more than £1 billion, because policies such as the bedroom tax will cost more than they save. I cannot remember how many people will be hit by it in the hon. Lady’s constituency, but they will be interested to know that she voted for it. The truth, as she will know, is that those hit by the bedroom tax will have to move to the private rented sector or become homeless. Neither will cost the public purse less; they will cost it more. What we needed in the Budget was not a spare home subsidy; what we needed was action to reverse the hated bedroom tax.”
“What we need to bring down the housing benefit bill is to build more homes. That is why we have said that the 4G licences and half the bank bonus tax should be spent on building homes. The Deputy Prime Minister—the hon. Lady’s right hon. Friend—admits that capital spending was cut too fast. I look forward to hearing her justify to her constituents who will hit by the bedroom tax why they should pay £14 a week extra while millionaires get a £2,000 a week tax cut.”
“The Secretary of State’s level of delusion is now bettering his previous level. He knows that the policy costings—which he has clearly not read—published by his right hon. Friend the Chancellor show that the housing benefit bill is not going down over the next couple of years, but going up. The Secretary of State’s efforts have been so successful that he is bringing in a policy—the hated bedroom tax—that will cost more than it saves. We saw the proof on Wednesday—housing benefit up by more than £1 billion. That is a mark of his failure.”
“We got more of the same from the Chancellor on Wednesday and more of the same from the Secretary of State today. Once upon a time he liked to say that he cared about poverty. No more. One million children on his watch will be pushed into poverty. Tens of thousands of disabled people will follow. Families get less, while millionaires get more, all because this Chancellor has flatlined the economy and because the Secretary of State has asked for nothing, got nothing and delivered nothing to bring down unemployment.”
“The Library was able to tell me earlier in the week that the national health service, schools and the police will face a bill for £1.6 billion in higher national insurance contributions. We heard nothing about precisely where that money will come from. I hope the Minister will be able to set our minds at rest and say why this will not be another cut to the NHS in the next Parliament. The second mystery surrounds the unspecified cuts of £11.5 billion in the first years of the next Parliament. We know that things such as the strivers tax and other cuts to working tax credits will deliver up to £6 billion, but where will the other £5 billion come from? Can DWP Ministers tell us how they will resist another huge great cut to welfare in the June spending review?”
“Although we saw a little of how he will pay for it—he is going to fast-track the flat-rate pension—this is one of the great mysteries of this Budget, and we have not heard much about it yet. When the Minister winds up, I hope he will confirm at what rate the flat-rate pension will be introduced. The original White Paper set the figure at £144, which I notice is lower than £145, which is the combined total of pension credit and the state pension set out in the Budget book on Wednesday. As we know, the advance of the flat-rate pension offers the Treasury a huge national insurance windfall of about £5.5 billion in 2016-17 and 2017-18. What is interesting—we heard nothing about this—is that half of that windfall comes from public sector employers.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. What we needed in the Budget was determined action to build houses, not another subsidy for Britain’s richest citizens. Let me start to conclude by reminding the House what most families will now experience. We heard in the Secretary of State’s speech some words about the rise in the personal allowance. The truth is that, even despite the rise in the personal allowance, the cuts buried in the Budget will mean that by April 2014-15 the same family who will see the personal allowance increase to £10,000 will be worse off. They will lose £600 a year in cuts, and my fear is that worse is to come. The Chancellor gave away a lot of things in the first year of the next Parliament.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for offering me that opportunity. He will know that I also left a Budget, drafted with my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), who was Chancellor at the time, that would have halved the deficit over four years as opposed to putting the total debt burden of this country up by £245 billion, which is what his Government have secured.”
“A couple of years ago now, the Secretary of State gave an assurance to the House that individual jobcentres or jobcentre districts did not have targets for sanctioning jobseekers and that there were not any kind of league tables that ranked jobcentres or districts for sanctions. Will the Minister confirm that that is still his Department’s policy?”
“Will the Minister now confirm that the grounds of good cause in respect of appeals will remain undisturbed and will include the grounds covered in DWP guidance, which says that good cause can include an unsuitable course, full-time study, health and caring reasons, travel time that is inappropriately long, religious belief, bereavement, attending court and other emergencies? Will he also confirm that, ultimately, the timetable for lodging appeals will remain at 13 months?”
“This is a very dark day for the once-proud DWP, and it beggars belief that this once-proud Department has found itself in this position under the Secretary of State’s leadership. The organisation of back-to-work schemes is now in a state of total chaos. Once upon a time, back in 2010, the Secretary of State boasted that the Work programme would be the “most comprehensive, integrated work programme in existence, certainly, since the war”. —[ Official Report , 22 November 2010; Vol. 519, c. 17.] What do we have instead? We have a Work programme that is literally worse than doing nothing. Just 2.3% of people referred on to the programme have found sustained jobs. As has been said, the Public Accounts Committee stated—”
“The hon. Lady will want to reflect on this. The Public Accounts Committee said this about the Work programme: “Actual performance was even below the Department’s assessment of the non-intervention rate—the number of people that would have found sustained work had the Work programme not been running.” Maybe the hon. Lady can tell me whether she is proud of that.”
“The House of Commons Library cannot find an instance of DWP legislation being struck down in this fashion since 1996, under the last Conservative Government. If the Secretary of State had delusions of adequacy, they have been swept away by today’s proposed legislation.”
“The truth is that jobcentre staff have so little confidence in the Work programme that they are not referring people to Work programme contactors at anywhere near the rate the Department has estimated. That is the reality of how jobcentre staff feel. We have had universal credit now beginning its descent into universal chaos, and now we have the news that the regulations designed to encourage jobseekers to take work were so badly drafted that the Court of Appeal struck them down and the Department may as a result be on the hook to repay £130 million in sanctions. The judges could not have been more unequivocal. Here is what they had to say: “The 2011 Regulations must be quashed.” I therefore put it to the Secretary of State that this is a day of shame for his Department.”
“This is what the Social Security Advisory Committee said about the 2011 regulations: “SSAC ask why the Department did not opt to narrow the scope of the original regulations”, Indeed, it was, of course, their broad and unspecified content that the Court of Appeal objected to.”
“I will address that point directly, as the answer is very simple: because this Bill restores the general legal power of the DWP to issue sanctions. It is a broad sui generis power that has been in place since 1911. I will be interested to hear later the hon. Gentleman’s argument on why he thinks the power to issue sanctions, which has been in place since 1911, should now be struck down for the period in question. The worst aspect of all this is that the Secretary of State was warned that he was heading for a failure not simply in this House, not simply by commentators opposed to his plans, and not simply by people who had a profound disagreement with him, but by the very specialist Committee he set up to advise him on these questions.”