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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“If this were the only recent example of such incompetence by a Government Department, we might look on it more sympathetically, but all of us clearly remember the west coast main line debacle that cost taxpayers so much money and all of us remember that the Department for Transport responded by appointing an independent reviewer to get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong and how so much public money was put at risk. That is the response we must see now from the DWP. There must be an independent inquiry into how the Department got this so badly wrong.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am afraid that no other conclusion can be drawn from that intervention. The Secretary of State said to us in the House a couple of weeks ago: “That advice came to us; it was checked and it said that the regulations were fine.” —[ Official Report , 11 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 19.] Well, either the lawyers are bad or the Secretary of State made the wrong judgment. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there are a huge number of questions that the Secretary of State must now answer.”
“It was a principle the Lords set down in their report on criminal evidence legislation in 2008, which said: “Legislation to make lawful an action that was done without legal authority…needs to be scrutinised carefully.” My concern is that this timetable does not deliver that. At the heart of this debate is the question whether the programmes the Government have in place, which rest on the power the Secretary of State is seeking from us, are in any way effective.”
“There is a need to maintain clear, transparent parliamentary scrutiny, and to maintain “good law”. The right of interested parties to put forward views must be observed. There is a need to ensure that legislation is a proportionate, justified and appropriate response, and is set out so that fundamental constitutional rights are not jeopardised. Crucially, the policy-making process within Government should be transparent. I look forward to hearing how any one of those principles is honoured by the process before us. The test is all the sharper, in that the Secretary of State is in this pickle because he rushed the legislation, against the recommendation of his advisers. The test for fast-tracked retrospective legislation is the toughest of all.”
“Right—so a Member of a Government who have just put at risk £130 million of public money says that we would not be safe custodians of public money. The Secretary of State was given the judgment by the Court of Appeal on 12 February. Weeks later, there was the request for urgent legislation, please. That is highly unsatisfactory. Tests for retrospective legislation have been repeatedly set out in this House and the other place. Tomorrow, the Lords’ Constitution Committee will opine on this Bill. I suspect it will have harsh things to say about its rushed nature which, because it is retrospective and set to a fast timetable, represents the worst of all worlds. The Secretary of State will be aware, like me, of the principles set down by the Constitution Committee in its 15th report, where it opines on fast-track legislation.”
“However, nor do I believe they should be in the ether—in the hands of Ministers who have no obligation to put in place genuine back-to-work programmes that are better than doing nothing, unlike today’s Work programme.”
“The hon. Lady raises an extremely important point, and that is why we have sought to ensure that the Bill includes our safeguards, which preserve the right to appeal with good cause, and the 13-month appeal window during which people can lodge objections to the sanctions regime. To answer the hon. Lady directly, I do believe that the DWP should be equipped with the power to issue sanctions. That general foundation has been in the hands of Ministers for more than a century. The new deal programmes and the future jobs fund that Labour put in place had sanctions attached to them—indeed, they were tightened by the Welfare Reform Act 2009—and I do not believe that those powers should be empty ones.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right to flag that up. He will know that the DWP’s own guidance says that “good cause” for appealing against a sanction decision includes bereavement where the claimant was arranging or attending a funeral of a close relative or friend. That is why it is vital that we seek to protect these appeal rights in the Bill. The ultimate test of whether a back-to-work programme is working is perhaps the one the Secretary of State set out when he spoke in Easterhouse all those years ago. He said that “we need a jobs revolution. Every working-age adult capable of earning a decent living for themselves and their dependants must be helped to have the opportunity to do so”. Since he took office, unemployment has increased in three quarters of the estates with the worst unemployment levels in Britain.”
“Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out with some power. We also need a different plan at the DWP. It is now Labour authorities and the Labour party nationally that are setting out the way forward for this Government. We have said that it would be wise to put a tax on bankers’ bonuses because we know we could use that money to get more than 100,000 young people back into work quickly. That is decisive action, which we hope to see from the Chancellor tomorrow. If anybody rejects an offer of a real job with real wages and real training, sure, perhaps they should face sanctions. But let us be clear: young people today deserve a real choice of a real job with real wages, but that is being denied them by this Government.”
“The hon. Gentleman would do well to pay attention to the DWP’s own statistics and to the judgment of the Public Accounts Committee. They are categorical; they do not hem and haw or hedge their words; they make it clear that the Work programme today is worse than doing nothing. On the estates where unemployment is worst, the situation has got worse, not better since the Secretary of State took office. By any measure, that must be a failure. That is why we say there has to be a different macro-economic policy. Unemployment is high because there are not enough jobs to go round. My constituency has the highest youth unemployment of any constituency in the country. There are 30 people chasing every single job. There are not enough jobs to go round, and we need a different plan for growth and jobs—an argument that my right hon.”
“That is cold comfort to a constituency with the highest youth unemployment in Britain. Does the hon. Gentleman know what people at my local jobcentre say when I visit it? Can he guess? They say, “I wish this Government would bring back the future jobs fund because it was the best programme we ever ran.” What a shame his party cancelled it, and that is why we propose its restoration.”
“In Wales, they are making the same kind of commitment. In Birmingham, the Labour council—my own authority—has brought together a coalition of the willing to make progress on youth unemployment. In Liverpool, there is now an apprenticeship training agency, set up by the council and a local college. In Sandwell, Newham and Cardiff, Labour councils, local colleges and business communities have set up job brokerages. That is the kind of decisive action the Secretary of State can learn from. Perhaps he will give a commitment to go and look at what I have seen first hand and incorporate it into his policy.”
“I will in a moment, if the Secretary of State will allow me. When we look around the country, we now see Labour councils leading the charge to get young people back into work. In Sheffield, they are looking at how to intervene better in schools to help prevent young people from becoming unemployed. In Wakefield, they are bringing together colleges and businesses in a new way to get people back to work. In Leeds, there are new programmes to help get young people back into work. In Manchester, there is now a UCAS-style clearing house to get people back into apprenticeships. In Bradford, there are now industrial centres of excellence that bring the council, colleges and young people together. In Glasgow, the Labour council is guaranteeing a job for any young person out of work for too long.”
“No. The Secretary of State should set out the detailed individual circumstances of every piece of legislation that he has referred to. He knows as well as I do what underpinned them. The point, as well he knows, is that he is making retrospective, fast-track legislation that touches on rights of appeal and property rights, all because of the mistake that he and his Ministers made in 2011 in bodging the regulations so badly that the Court of Appeal has struck them down. To conclude, the assurances that we have heard from the Minister this afternoon are extremely important. The safeguards for appeal rights that have been set out are vital to ensure that people who are hit by sanctions have a wide-ranging set of good causes that can trigger an appeal.”
“In a moment. First, ensuring that the appeal window of 13 months is preserved is crucial for people who are hit by sanctions. Secondly, as has been referred to by my hon. Friends, it is vital that there is an independent review of the sanctions regime. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) will set out the questions that we believe need to be answered. I have heard the Minister’s assurances this afternoon that there is no series of targets and that there are no league tables. We will hear further evidence on that point over the course of the debates in this House. I hope that the assurances that we have heard this afternoon withstand those tests.”
“We need those answers to come before this House so that we can come to a judgment about whether he is still fit to be Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.”
“It was the Labour party that opposed the bedroom tax when the Welfare Reform Bill went through this House, it is the Labour party that has consistently voted in opposition to the bedroom tax, and it is the Labour party that has forced the concessions out of the Government to protect foster parents and armed forces families. In conclusion, it beggars belief that the Secretary of State has had to come before the House to fast-track retrospective legislation to fix a problem that he created when he got things wrong all those months and years ago. That is why it is so important that there is an independent Laidlaw-style review to get to the bottom of what went wrong. We need answers on how the Secretary of State has landed himself in this position.”
“We will stand up for vulnerable people and for the things they need, and we will stand against the attacks now being perpetrated against them by this Government.”
“Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said, the system is clearly failing. We will continue to argue that the review should be put in place, and when it is up and running, we will be leading the evidence gathering to ensure that the House is fully aware of what is going on. We will ensure that there is a clear and loud argument that the back to work programmes in this country should be better and properly financed, and that those who have the latitude to take part in them should be asked to contribute. We want to ensure that more people get back into jobs; that is why we are in the Labour party. That is the argument that we will take to the Government over the course of the next few days. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington said, we will not stand by and watch the demonisation of the poor in this country.”
“That would go a long way to delivering the kinds of changes that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark spoke about. It is important that on the foundations with which we equip the DWP we build good, strong back to work programmes that get young people and the long-term unemployed back to work. We have heard today from my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark and other of my hon. Friends, including in interventions from my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), about the clear evidence that the sanctioning regime is malfunctioning. That is why the commitment to an independent review of the regime is so important. As the right hon.”
“Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark that the programmes now in place, not least the mandatory work activity, are seriously flawed, are malfunctioning and are not getting people back to work, especially in those communities where unemployment is at its worst. We will continue to argue that the Government’s back to work programmes need to be improved. Young people should not simply be confronted with the option of mandatory work activity and very little else. We do not believe that the Work programme is delivering. We believe that a better choice would be a jobs guarantee for young people and the long-term unemployed, and that the country could afford it if the Government had the bottle to introduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses and change the pension perks for the very richest.”
“They have bodged their regulations so badly that they have been struck down by the Court of Appeal, yet not once this afternoon have we heard a word of apology from the Minister for bringing forward retrospective legislation of this type on a timetable so fast that proper scrutiny is constrained. As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington said, not once have we heard even a word of contrition for the position they have put the House in. Today’s debate has clarified one important point. The core of the Bill concerns the long-standing foundational power of the Department to issue sanctions. We think that the Department should, indeed, be equipped with such a power, but that is not to say for a moment that we subscribe to, or agree with, the programmes that it has built on those foundations. We heard from the right hon.”
“With the leave of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker, I shall respond to the debate. We have heard powerful speeches this afternoon from my hon. Friends the Members for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown), for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and good speeches from the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). This is a day of acute embarrassment for the Government.”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you have had any indication from the Government on whether they plan to make an oral statement on the subject of the bedroom tax. Yesterday, in questions to the Department for Work and Pensions, Ministers assured us that the scheme was running smoothly, yet this afternoon we have another rushed U-turn that offers no money and no protection for disabled children. Right hon. and hon. Members would have welcomed the opportunity to put those points directly to the Secretary of State, and expose today’s announcement for the shallow nonsense that it is.”
“May I start by thanking the Secretary of State for briefing me and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) on his plans for urgent legislation, about which his Department has commented in The Daily Telegraph this morning? Both he and I believe that sanctions are vital to give back-to-work programmes their bite. However, when he signed off the 2011 regulations that created sanctions for the Work programme, why did he not check that they were legally bullet proof?”
“I do not think that it is a technical challenge when three Court of Appeal judges unanimously quash the 2011 regulations because they are not in line with the law. That mistake puts in jeopardy about £100 million of sanctions that have been issued. I did not think that the Work programme could get any worse, but it has. We will support wise and sensible legislation that will fix the problem, but will the Secretary of State take personal responsibility and apologise for this mess, which may cost twice as much as the west coast main line fiasco?”
“The hon. Gentleman is right that we support this idea in principle, but we have grave and growing concerns about implementation. He will have seen reports in The Guardian that prompt questions about whether there are IT personnel or contractors at Accenture, Atos Origin, Oracle, Red Hat, CACI or IBM UK who have been stepped down, or in any way notified by the Department, that they are to “suspend work”. We hope the Minister will be able to return that in his remarks.”
“I was pleased to hear the Minister’s comments about fairness. I notice that the Conservative literature in Eastleigh says that the Liberal Democrats oppose further changes to benefits that would, they claim, make our welfare system fairer. Is he 100% sure that this measure will deliver the savings set out by the Chancellor? Yes or no.”
“I know that the Minister does not want to deliberately mislead the House, so I know that he will stand up now, correct the record and say that Labour introduced the local housing allowance and limits on housing benefit, and acknowledge that our manifesto set out plans for a cap on benefits, including housing benefit.”
“The Minister is being characteristically generous in giving way. Why does he not tell the House the whole story and admit that the DWP has lost its case in the Court of Appeal and that its policy of discriminating against disabled people and not giving them any kind of special treatment has been struck down by the courts? That is why his Department has applied to the Supreme Court to have it looked at again. Why is he taking that to appeal and why will he not come clean to the House about how his policy is suffering at the hands of the courts because it is wrong?”
“I have here a list of offences which attracted a sentence of less than 12 months in 2011. It includes some 43 people who were convicted of threat or conspiracy to murder, who will be exempt. There are also 273 people convicted of sexual offences; they, too, will be exempt. Yet mothers of members of the armed forces who are currently out there serving, like Alison Huggan—the case raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop)—will be hit, and the Minister defended this policy this afternoon.”
“Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) who first warned that the people who will be hit by the Act have nowhere to hide and that they will just have to pay up, and it was my noble Friend Lord McKenzie who said in the other place that the discretionary housing fund would nowhere near cover the costs and consequences of this policy. I am afraid that everything we have heard this afternoon merely confirms what they have said. That is why through Divisions in the Chamber and in Committee here and in the other place we have tried to put in place safeguards which would have stopped the horror show that will begin in April. As the weeks have gone by, my colleagues have clearly set out the faults and flaws in glorious 3D Technicolor. First, we learned that someone who is handed a 12-month sentence will be exempt from this policy.”
“I think that most Opposition Members will have been pretty disappointed by what the Minister has said. A range of important arguments have been advanced this afternoon, but they have received no answers whatsoever. Let me begin by congratulating the Green party, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party on tabling the motion. We support it, and we will support it in the Division Lobby later today. Since the Welfare Reform Act 2012 first saw the light of day, we have warned of the flaws that have loomed large this afternoon. It was my right hon.”
“Well, I am sure the House will draw great comfort from the fact that people on remand for threats to murder, sexual offences, burglary, robbery and public disorder will—”
“I am very happy to give way, but let me tell the Secretary of State that the House will draw little comfort from the fact that people on remand for these offences will still be exempt from this policy.”
“He will, no doubt, have seen the National Housing Federation research that found that 200,000 people who will be hit by this bedroom tax are on disability living allowance. The NHF estimates that if we spent all the DHP money helping those people, it would help 73,000 people, so there would be 127,000 people in receipt of DLA who would get absolutely no help whatever. Of course, that would leave nothing for foster parents either. I am afraid that the Minister cannot simply plead that the DHP is of some help to foster parents, those who are disabled and people whose houses have been adapted. The truth is very different, and he has been found out this afternoon.”
“Again, we heard nothing from the Minister today about how foster parent families are going to be helped. [Interruption.] I listened very carefully to what the Minister said, and he said nothing today that countermands what he sent out in a recent circular, which says: “a household that has an extra room for a current or potential foster child will be treated as under-occupying.” Families in that position will be hit, therefore. [Interruption.] We then hear that under universal credit a couple where someone is a pensioner and someone is not will also be hit. [Interruption.] Over all this, of course, looms the truth that two-thirds of the people hit by this bedroom tax will be disabled. [Interruption.] The Minister has been pleading from a sedentary position that the discretionary housing payment will somehow help.”
“The Secretary of State cannot defend the fact that families of serving soldiers will be hit by this policy while those on remand and accused of the most serious offences we can imagine will not be hit by it. I do not think that the Secretary of State, of all people, will want to defend that. He should be speaking to his colleagues the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister, who I understand is the Chair of the Sub-Committee on the Armed Forces Covenant, and he should be bringing to this House safeguards for the families of armed personnel out on service, should he not? As he remains in his place, it is clear that he is not going to bring forward those safeguards for the families of people serving on the front line. The House will be disappointed to have observed that. Foster parents will also be hurt.”
“As the Secretary of State once cared about poverty, perhaps he would like to justify that fact?”
“That is how those savings will be delivered. This is not about bringing spare bedrooms on to the market; it is about hurting vulnerable people and asking them to pay extra. What is particularly troubling to many Opposition Members is the Minister’s refusal to acknowledge that in many parts of the country there will simply not be the smaller houses for people to move into. Again the NHF has been very clear about that. In large parts of the country there is simply not the housing stock for people hit by this tax to move into. The Government have removed any shelter where vulnerable people can take cover before opening fire. This is a policy of unique cruelty, therefore. The Government are not seeking to solve under-occupancy. Instead, they are simply seeking to make the poorest and most vulnerable even poorer.”
“Of course there is. The Minister, unlike his party colleague the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), did not resile from his support for a whopping great tax cut for millionaires at the same time as Hayley Duncan and her children are being hit by this bedroom tax. This is a policy that is unique in its cruelty. It sets out to tackle the problem of under-occupancy, and the Minister made much of the 1 million spare bedrooms he wants somehow to bring on to the housing market. As he knows, however, the policy will only save the money chalked up in the Treasury scorecard if it fails. That is the reality. About £490 million is earmarked to be saved by this policy over the course of this year, but it will be saved only if 660,000 households are hit for £14 a week for 52 weeks a year.”
“This policy is not simply a cruel punishment; it is a cruel and unusual punishment, because it is not normal—it is not usual in a modern, advanced and civilised country—to reward the rich in quite the way this Government are proposing while punishing the poor. It beggars belief that next month—the month in which those on £1 million a year will get a £2,000-a-week tax cut—those with a spare bedroom will face a £14-a-week rent rise. In what world is that fair or normal and usual? It is only in a Tory world, defended by a Liberal Democrat.”
“I am answering the question. The Deputy Prime Minister said: “If I’m going to be sort of self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into the coalition government…But I think we’ve all realised that you actually need, in order to foster a recovery, to try and mobilise as much public and private capital into infrastructure as possible.” But what has happened in the past couple of years? What has happened even in the past year? For the last year for which records are available, the number of housing starts in this country has fallen by 11%. That is the reality of what this Government have delivered.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. Of course, the Labour party is proposing to have a tax on bankers’ bonuses in order to release £1.3 billion for new housing and to spend the 4G licence proceeds on building homes. That is in sharp contrast to the sob story from the Deputy Prime Minister lamenting the fact that the Government cut capital spending too far and too fast.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Secretary of State may truly believe that this policy will save his Department £490 million a year, but his Minister of State was rather less than forthcoming earlier on swearing that that would be the figure. The Secretary of State may genuinely believe that this policy will save £2 billion over the forecast period. If he does genuinely believe that it will save the money set out by the Treasury in Budgets gone by, he is deluding himself, because the evidence is staring him in the face: this policy will cost more than it saves.”
“House building did not collapse. In the final years of our Government we brought forward serious new investment for housing, and it is the Labour party that is proposing serious investment in social housing and new housing today. That position seems to be shared by the Deputy Prime Minister, but his Government are presiding over an 11% collapse in the number of houses being built.”
“My hon. Friend is right. We have the National Housing Federation to thank for estimates on the amount of arrears, which housing associations now say are going to grow. Some estimates I have seen show that housing associations face up to a quarter of a billion pounds-worth of arrears because of this policy and other changes the Secretary of State is making. At a time when the country’s debt rating has been downgraded, that will make things incredibly difficult for housing associations in delivering on future social housing builds. The bedroom tax will only make the situation worse.”
“Labour has always said that there has to be a mixture of growth and sensible public spending cuts—that is how to get the deficit down. What we should not be doing is having a £3 billion tax give-away for Britain’s richest citizens while asking 660,000 people to pay an extra £14 a week. How would she justify that to her constituents?”
“I am happy to do so. It will not have escaped the hon. Lady’s notice that today’s fiscal circumstances are somewhat different from those of the 13 years of the previous Labour Government. She supports —[Interruption.] I will answer her question just as soon as the Government Front Benchers simmer down slightly. The truth is that her Government have delivered a double-dip recession and perhaps worse; they have just presided over a downgrade in the nation’s debt rating; and growth has been flatlining for the past couple of years, which has made the deficit position far worse. This Government are going to borrow more in this Parliament than Labour did in 13 years, so the question now has to be: how is the pain of paying down the deficit to be shared?”
“He should find some spine and tell the Chancellor that it is about time we had a tax on bankers’ bonuses to build new homes and get people into work. If we said to people in this country that they could not spend more than two years on the dole and that at that stage they had to work, that would be a proper plan for welfare reform and for welfare to work. It would be a real alternative to this policy, which is a cruel and unusual punishment from a cruel and useless Government.”