Danny Kruger
MP for East Wiltshire · Reform UK · United Kingdom
“There is what might be an important innovation in the text of this year’s sovereign grant annual report and accounts, which the Bill refers to and which the Minister is describing. Usually, the description of the sovereign’s role includes the term “defender of the faith”, but that term does not appear in this year’s report and accounts.”
“Research from the Department for Education confirms that children who move schools frequently often suffer poor outcomes, particularly children with special educational needs. That is why a number of armed forces families—people on average incomes—choose independent education to minimise the disruption that results from their postings.”
“Resilience is obviously the crucial question for the country, and the Government are right to be focusing on the need to strengthen the centre of Government to achieve that. My concern is about the legislation that has been trailed.”
“The Bill contains a lot of useful tightening of electoral law, and we are having a very important debate this afternoon. It is important that we think about how we police donations from abroad and from home. I pay tribute to the remarks made by the hon.”
“No, I am not going to give way. It is their right to support a political cause in their own country, where they are registered to vote and of which they are citizens. It is absolutely wrong to traduce them in that way.”
“That is what the populist revolt is doing, demonstrating the effectiveness and vibrancy of our democracy. Let me turn to the amendments that I support, because we do have a real threat to our democracy, and let me make these points as seriously and soberly as I can.”
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“But with no possibility of any of those entitlements coming down or any of the spending being reduced? We have 1.25 million foreign nationals claiming universal credit, most of whom are not in employment. I hope that the Minister does not plan to co-produce his plans with foreign nationals—although, knowing Labour lawyers, I expect they will say that the European convention on human rights demands that they do just that. Does he think that subsidising more and more foreign nationals is what the British social security system is for? If not, will he restrict sickness benefits to British nationals only, as we have argued for?”
“Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into.”
“Throughout the long years from the time of Alfred to the time of Victoria, it was assumed that a nation was a community of common worship and that our community —this country—worshipped the Christian God. Then, in the 20th century, another idea arose: that it was possible for a country to be neutral about God; that the public square was empty of any metaphysics; and that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason—“no hell below us, above us only sky”. That idea was wrong. The horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the west, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale.”
“The western model was forged and refined in England over a thousand years from the 9th to the 19th centuries. What is that model? It is simply this: that power should arrange itself for the benefit of all the people under it, and specifically for the poorest and weakest; that the law is there to protect the ordinary person against the abuse of power; and that every individual has equal dignity and freedom, including, crucially, the freedom of conscience, religion and belief, which makes space for other religions under the Christian shield—a secular space. Indeed, the idea of a secular space is a Christian concept that is meaningful only in a Christian world. These are ideas that only make sense if one accepts that we have some intrinsic value—a value that is given to us and is not of our own making or invention.”
“There is a great hunger in society for a better way of living, and I want to use this opportunity to explain what that better way is and why we here in England have the means to follow it. The Jewish and Christian God is a God of nations. He is interested in people as individuals, but also as groups—as communities not only of kinship but of common worship, with a common God. Uniquely among the nations of the world, this nation—England, from which the United Kingdom grew—was founded and created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people. In that sense, England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the west. The story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people to make the institutions and culture that have been uniquely stable and successful.”
“It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally. Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in those stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin. If, standing here, I have any power to repent on behalf of this House, I hereby repent of what we did. In the reaction to these votes, and all around us in reaction to the state of the country and the world, something else is happening.”
“When I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect; I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution—older than the monarchy, and much older than Parliament—which made this country. It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within.”
“We in this place have the responsibility to approve or disapprove the doctrine and the rules of the Church, and that is as it should be, because the Church of England is not some private club or just another eccentric denomination. The Church is a chaplain to the nation, and through the parish system, in which every square inch of England has its local church and its local priest, we are all members—we all belong. Even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, and even if you do not believe in its teachings, it is your church and you are its member.”
“It is an honour to stand here in this empty Chamber to speak about the original purpose of this space, when it was a chapel in the Church of England. The old Chamber of the House of Commons, on which this space was modelled after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen’s Chapel—formerly a royal church. It was given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating Chamber. Madam Deputy Speaker, your Chair stands on the altar steps. The Table with the Dispatch Boxes is where the lectern stood. I mention that because the link between this place and the Church of England is not merely ceremonial. The Prayers we say here at the start of every day are not just a nod to tradition. Our democracy is founded on Christian faith. This Parliament remains the law-giving power of the Church of England.”
“A new restoration is needed now, with a revival of the faith, a recovery of a Christian politics and a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England all those centuries ago. This is a mission for the Church under its next leader, whoever that is; it is a mission for this place—the old chapel that became the wellspring of western democracy—and for us, its Members; and it is a mission for our whole country. It is the route to a prosperous modernity founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.”
“We are in the age of the machine, and a great choice confronts us: whether to make machines in the image of fallen man, bent on exploitation and domination with mankind in its sights, or to make them what they properly are, the servants of mankind able to help us make a better world. To conclude, a wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand, but we have been here before. The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, the Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge—from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about—and they each in their generation restored this country to itself.”
“This God is a jealous god—it is him or nothing—and we have to own our Christian story, or repudiate it. Not to own it is to repudiate it, and to repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but to cut off the source of all the things we value now and that we need in the future, such as freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights. Without the Christian God, in whose teaching these things have their source, these are inventions—mere non-existent aspirations. To worship human rights is to worship fairies, but if we own our story and remember the real sources of our civilisation, we can have these things and make them real—real freedom and tolerance and dignity, a culture of love and, crucially, a culture of humanity.”
“It is explicitly and most passionately hostile to Christianity as the wellspring of the west. That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life—from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services. It needs to be sent back to the fringes of eccentricity, like the modern druids who invest Stonehenge in my constituency with a theology that is seen as mad but harmless because its followers are so few and no one serious takes them seriously. We can no longer pretend, as people did in the 20th century, that we can be neutral or indifferent to God or to the public square being a godless desert. The fact is that the strong gods are back, and we have to choose which god to worship. I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ.”
“In a debate yesterday, I said how much I find myself in agreement with Muslim colleagues in Parliament on moral and social matters. But as I have been saying, this is a Christian country—if it is a country at all—and I cannot be indifferent to the extent of the growth of Islam in recent decades. It is the other religion that worries me even more. This other religion is a hybrid of old and new ideas, and it does not have a proper name. I do not think that “woke” does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations.”
“My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do agree with him. He makes the point very well, and I absolutely acknowledge it. The paradox of our constitution is that under a monarchy, we have a system with the most developed political freedom in the world, and that under an established Church, we have a tradition of freedom of conscience and belief in which all religions can be accommodated. It is because the cross is at the centre, and I notice that the cross is above your Chair too, Madam Deputy Speaker. As I was saying, in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, and one is Islam.”
“Even in those disadvantaged places, and certainly across the country—the project is working in Wigan and elsewhere now—we see tremendous institutions that can support children and young people. The challenge is to do so in a co-ordinated way. There is a huge opportunity not just to look to the state, schools, local authorities or health—even though bringing all those agencies together around children is important—but to think about the real resource we have, which is in our communities. We should put in place real support and resource for those foundations, whether faith groups, professional bodies of all sorts or community organisations.”
“The mission of the project is to identify in schools—with the help of teachers and, crucially, by using the data available on attainment and attendance—those children who are likely to struggle later. Then it is about ensuring that they get the support that they need, and very much on a personalised basis. That support should come not just from the statutory system around the school—because that will never be adequate for the range of needs and different challenges that a population of children will have—but draw on the resources of the community. We started in west London, which obviously has lots of pockets of wealth but significant pockets of disadvantage as well.”
“We did it on a slightly different model from Harlem’s, which is a monolithic, single entity that provides all services for children and young people. The model we introduced in West London and is now being expanded across the country under the banner of AllChild. I pay tribute to the AllChild team, including Louisa Mitchell, who I got in early to deliver the project, because I would not have been very good at actually running it. Louisa has been a genius, and she is still running it now. This goes to the point I am trying to make: what Louisa did was recognise that in our communities there is an enormous array of really amazing resources in the form of local projects—large and small, formal and informal—that can help with the great task of bringing up a child as a village should.”
“The charity began life as the West London Zone, which supports children and young people and which I started back in the early 2010s, having visited the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York with the then Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a tremendously successful project aiming at much of the agenda that we are debating this afternoon, including early identification of children at risk, the provision of intensive support for those children and their families on a community basis, and a place-based model for support for children and families in disadvantage. We set up the West London Zone with the help of significant philanthropy from Paul Marshall, noted philanthropist and founder of the Ark school chain, who said that we should start one here.”
“I implore the Government to think very seriously in preparing their strategy to support the conditions for success in childhood, which is about not simply the public sector professionals, agencies and institutions that are available but the strength of the informal social institutions that children and young people grow up in. I welcome the Minister’s mention of the importance of social investment, philanthropy and civil society in providing support for children and young people. This is a big boast, but I can claim some credit for the announcement that the Chancellor made on Monday. She happened to be at a charity called AllChild in Wigan, which I claim credit for having founded—although that was not on the press release, I note.”
“I recognise much of what the Minister said about the importance of early years and the sorts of interventions that the Government are talking about. I welcome the impending child poverty strategy, which is an important step forward for us. I want to make a simple and straightforward point. I have heard a lot in this afternoon’s debate about the importance of investment and support for the different professionals who support children and families. That is all absolutely right, and I agree that that is important. Nevertheless, surely the most important resource available to us to support children and young people is their families and the communities that they grow up in.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams); it has been a while since I have heard the words “Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke”, which used to be bellowed out by our former hon. Friend and his predecessor Jonathan Gullis, who was a great schools Minister—briefly—in a previous Government. I pay tribute to him and his memory—much lamented. I also pay tribute to David Johnston, another former Member, who was children’s Minister in the last Government and was responsible for many of the important reforms that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) mentioned. I welcome this debate on what I think is a cross-party agenda.”
“That means recognising the household as a unit. We are way too individualistic in our approach to public policy. We need to think about family health and family strength, and that means supporting couples. I welcome what the Government are trying to do, and I hope that there will be recognition of the importance of community and family life in the child poverty strategy.”
“The strength and health of our brains and our futures are laid down in those early years by the quality of the relationships we grow up with and experience. I know the Government recognise that because of their emphasis on early years, but the quality of the relationship in the home matters so much. I really hope that the Government will be brave enough to recognise the value of stability in the home and the value of two-parent families as a source of real strength. They are a protective factor and a predictor of success for children and young people. We should, of course, do all we can to support single-parent families—they are crucial and necessary and do amazing work, and we should give them all our support—but to tackle child poverty we must do more to support family formation and family stability.”
“It is funny: I often find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is great, and not what I expected when he was elected to this place. I was about to come to my final point: the importance of family life. I do not know to what extent that really is on the Government’s agenda when it comes to the child poverty strategy. There will obviously be lots of talk of families, maternal health and so on, but the crucial determinant of success for children is the quality of the relationships they grow up in. We know that from all the research done into children’s brain development. Human beings are unique among mammals in that we emerge very unformed: our brains are really blank as we emerge from the womb.”
“Add to that the £4.5 billion the Government have to find because they abandoned their welfare reforms and the £1.3 billion they lost when they U-turned on the winter fuel payment, and the Government will have to find £9.3 billion this autumn.”
“It has been a very good debate, and I am very grateful to all hon. Members across the House who have contributed. It is still no clearer to us what the Government think or intend to do about the two-child cap, but it has been very good to hear so many strong voices from the Opposition Benches for and against the two-child limit. Of course, we do not really know what the Prime Minister himself thinks. He campaigned for the Labour leadership on a promise to scrap the two-child limit; then, in order to win the general election, he campaigned to keep it. Now, under pressure from his Back Benchers—once again, I pay tribute to the real powers in the Labour party—he is hinting that he will scrap it after all at a cost of £3.5 billion.”
“I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his recitation, much of which was Conservative policy now rebranded by the Labour Government and the rest was further spending commitments. The Government are incapable of cutting spending, so we know where this is headed: tax rises in the autumn. There will also be tax rises on wealth. We know what wealth is: it is the product of economic success. It is what happens when people risk their capital and make things that people want. Wealth means more jobs, higher wages and more tax revenues. It means that we can reduce debt and invest in more businesses. And wealth taxes, which are coming, will mean less of all that. That is the Labour way—circling the drain and then going down to national bankruptcy.”
“We should thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for that. Mention was made of Wilberforce and Disraeli. One day they will add the name of Duncan Smith to that great record.”
“As the median income rises, more people come under it; that is how it works. If relative poverty goes down under this Government, it will be because they shrank the economy. That is highly likely, but it is not an achievement to boast about. Relative poverty is not a measure of anything except the operation of the law of averages. Therefore, what we need to look at is real poverty, absolute poverty. As we rescued the public finances and grew the economy, absolute poverty went down under the Conservatives. On children, the percentage of children in absolute poverty after housing costs fell between 2010 and 2024. We pulled 800,000 people out of absolute poverty and averted over a million more people falling into absolute poverty. We had more people in work, a higher employment rate, and fewer workless households than since records began.”
“I do quite like the Reform party and I agree with its Members on lots of things, but there is a problem: they would spend money like drunken sailors. I can see what is happening and I am very worried about it—they will end up in an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats with a joint ticket to protect welfare spending. I do not know how hon. Members feel about the anticipated alliance. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) and others, particularly Members on the Government Benches, have cited widening poverty rates over the past decade or more, and they repeatedly raised the issue of 4.5 million children, but they are talking about relative poverty. The fact is that relative poverty increased under the previous Government because, overall, the economy grew, as more people became more prosperous.”
“I will come in a moment to the matter of child poverty, and I recognise the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. I was just referring to the fact that all the parties except ours—indeed, it is unclear what those on the Government Front Bench think—seem to support lifting the two-child cap. The Liberal Democrats cannot seem to see a spending opportunity without grabbing it with both hands. Their spokesman, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), spent £4.5 billion just in his speech earlier this afternoon. Then we have the SNP Government, who have presided over higher economic inactivity and lower employment than in England, have missed all their targets for child poverty, and still clamour for more money for welfare. Then there is the Reform party, which is sadly absent today.”
“I will conclude shortly, but I first say to those across the House who want to lift the child benefit cap to consider what they are asking. They are asking working people who pay more in tax than they receive in public services—and who themselves have had to take agonising decisions about whether or not they can afford to have another child given the taxes they pay—to fund the benefits for other people who receive more from the system than they pay in.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Member’s archaeology in finding my previous quotes. Many things did get worse over the last decade and a half—of course I recognise that. But much of it was as a consequence of the global financial meltdown that his party presided over. We spent many painful years fixing the deficit that Labour left us. I want to quickly cite the previous Government’s record on young people. Labour Members have boasted of the new Labour years, but in 1997 youth unemployment stood at 650,000, and by the time Blair and Brown had finished in 2010 it was up a third to 940,000. When we left office 14 years later, we had almost halved it down to 560,000—lower even than in 1997. That is the Conservative record.”
“Reciprocity matters, and when we are talking about money, it is right that people living on benefits face something of the same realities as people who pay for themselves. We still have too many families trapped in welfare. What we need is more families and, yes, larger families supporting themselves through well-paid work. We need a tax system like that in Europe, America and across the world, which recognises families. The previous Government made an important step with the changes to the high-income child benefit charge, which was scrapped by Labour. The best thing we can do for families is to get the tax system and, crucially, the wider economy right, so that we have good growth, good jobs, higher wages, flexible childcare and strong communities.”
“The difference is that child benefit is paid to everybody. Child benefit is a universal entitlement. We need to ensure that we are not adding to the incentives in the system to live a life on benefits. I fully recognise the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. When I say that some people receive more from the system than they pay in, I am not trying to stigmatise those people. That point has been thrown at us, but it is not the case. I am not stigmatising people who receive more in benefits than they pay in tax. Life is not all about whether someone is a net fiscal contributor or not. I agree with points made by some Members that we should think more about social structures than fiscal transfers, but when it comes to fiscal policy there is a limit.”
“We need proper plans to fix the welfare system, not just to increase spending as the Government are now doing. I urge hon. Members across the House to support our motion. Let me be clear: every Member who does not is voting for welfare dependency and national bankruptcy. Only the Conservatives have a plan to fix this.”
“The story of the last 14 years is quite easily told. In 2010 there was a budget deficit of 9%, and we had almost fiscal bankruptcy. We spent 10 years very painfully restoring the public finances at great cost, and I totally understand that. Then we were back down to a balanced budget. Then covid hit, and we spent the last five years trying to recover from that. On welfare, we have a very proud record of reducing unemployment and making work pay. Since covid we now have this great problem of disability and sickness benefits. That is the challenge that we were undertaking to fix as we left office and that the Government have now completely failed to conclude. It is not too late. I am glad to see the Minister for Social Security and Disability in his place. His review should not wait until next autumn; we need it this autumn.”
“My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and I am grateful to him. Last week, I met a number of veterans of the Northern Ireland troubles in my constituency, and they made the exact point that he is making: they never went out to kill; they went out to defend British citizens. Is it not particularly outrageous that the proposal suggests some sort of equivalence between the killers and those who were appointed to protect? As he says, it will impose a terrible chilling effect on recruitment to our services.”
“So here we are. Labour has had 15 years, including 14 years spent complaining about welfare reform while the Conservative Government fixed the catastrophic mess of unemployment benefits that we inherited—the alphabetti spaghetti of welfare that we had in 2010, if any of their Members can remember it. We fixed all those benefit traps, introducing universal credit, making work pay and supporting people off welfare and into jobs. In the first decade of our time in government, 100,000 fewer people were economically inactive every single year of the 2010s. In 2019 we had the lowest number of workless households since records began. Then covid hit, and Labour were clamouring for more welfare throughout that period. After the covid incident, as we left office we were introducing reforms to fix the health and disability benefits system.”
“In January 2020, there were 155,000 claims for anxiety and depressive disorders mixed; now there are 365,000. Autism was 60,000 and has gone up to 183,000. The hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake) mentioned ADHD, which has gone up from 29,000 to 115,000 over the last five years.”
“But, for the great majority of cases, we have got to get back to face-to-face assessments for the sake of claimants as well as the taxpayer. Secondly, I turn to amendment 50. We have 1,000 new PIP claims a day—that has doubled since covid—and more than half the increase is in mental health cases. For UC health claims, it is more like three quarters. Of course, distress is real in our society and it is rising—I do not disparage the reality of many of these claims—but as the Minister has said the incidence of disability in our society is rising by 17% while benefit claims are rising by 34%. For some of the less severe mental health claims, it is far worse. In January 2020, there were 7,000 claims for people with anxiety disorders; this year, there are 31,000.”
“That was a covid change— [ Interruption. ] That was absolutely a covid change that was not changed back in time; I totally agree. The fact is, the work-from-home culture really took off at the DWP and with its subcontractors, and that does need to change. I recognise that. Why are the Government not doing that? As a result, in the system we have, which is not being changed by the Bill, people are at the mercy of some distant, faceless assessor on the end of the phone. Of course, there will be people who cannot manage a face-to-face assessment, and we would authorise the Secretary of State to specify circumstances for that. It is also right not to call people back for repeat assessments. That was a change that the Conservatives were introducing, and I am glad that the Government are sticking with it.”
“That is why the Opposition wanted to support the Government when they set out their intentions, and we said that we would support the Bill if they reduced spending, got more people into work and pledged that there would be no new taxes, but they did none of that, so we do not support it. We do, however, have a further set of proposals. My friend, the hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky), challenged me to come up with some alternatives, and we have some amendments to that very effect. First, amendment 45 would improve the quality of assessments. There is a bigger piece of work to be done, and I welcome the Government looking closely at the assessments process, but right now we could make one clear and simple improvement. In 2019, 84% of PIP assessments were conducted face to face; last year, the figure was 5%.”
“Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) challenged him earlier to confirm that, and I think he has confirmed from the Dispatch Box that there will be no savings from his review. Meanwhile, the UK is haemorrhaging jobs thanks to the national insurance rise, and we have the Employment Rights Bill coming down the track. The OBR did not even include in its forecast the likely impact of the unemployment Bill that Labour is introducing. That is something we can look forward to in the autumn. We are in a deep fiscal hole, and of course we need welfare reform—in fact, we need welfare cuts.”
“The Government have also spent the money that they thought they were saving from the PIP changes before they did the U-turn. Even now they are on a wing and a prayer financially. The Office for Budget Responsibility, on which the tottering Chancellor has relied to hold up her sums, assumes that the on-flow to benefits will fall halfway back to their 2019 levels over this Parliament. If they do not, the Chancellor will have to find another £12 billion. Why should new claims reduce under this Government when there is still an incentive of £50 a week to get on to UC health, and there is no reform to PIP for at least another year? The Minister has also said that his famous eponymous review is not aimed at saving money anyway. The hon.”
“Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell)—the real Prime Minister sitting there on the real Front Bench. I respect and honour them all. As for the Government Front Bench, they are chopping the Bill’s title in half. It is now nothing to do with PIP, so we have no reform to welfare and certainly no savings. This is now a spending Bill, not a savings Bill. Looking at the impact assessment that has just been published—the third in the last three weeks, I think—if we add up the savings from cutting UC health for new claims, which is a little over £5 billion, and minus the cost of raising the standard allowance, which is a little over £5 billion, we get £120 million of extra costs over the next four years, plus the £1 billion of extra employment support. Labour’s idea of saving money on welfare is to spend more by the end of the Bill’s passage.”
“The fact is, in our time in government we increased the number of disabled people in work significantly. Two million more disabled people were in work at the end of our time in government than before. There is much to regret about the last years of our time in government, and I was a critic of them myself, but on welfare throughout our time in government we have a proud record of improving the broken system that we inherited. We are now a year into Labour’s time in government. They have had all this time to come up with a plan and we have absolutely nothing. Clause 5 did have some changes to the system, but they are going to scrap that today. I want to pay tribute to the rebels on the Labour Benches for finding their voice and showing what Parliament can do, and I particularly pay tribute to the hon.”
“I am not talking about explicit fraud. These awards are being given, and no doubt the assessment is judging them to be eligible. There is not necessarily a deliberate attempt to defraud the system. What we have done is create a system whereby one is incentivised to seek higher and more expensive claims.”
“Our amendments offer a path to a better system that is fair for claimants and fair for taxpayers, and I commend them to the Committee.”