Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:36 pm on 22 November 2005.

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Photo of Malcolm Rifkind Malcolm Rifkind Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions 4:36, 22 November 2005

Only the hon. Gentleman, or perhaps some of his colleagues, could claim that an increase of 120,000 is a downward trend—[Interruption.] He will be difficult to persuade because he uses a system of grammar that is not known to the rest of the human race. That is a matter on which we will have to agree to differ.

By the Government's own standards, they have failed over the past eight years. There has been a remarkable collapse. Each year, Ministers have to say the same thing. In 1997, they were saying that a million people needed to be found jobs and in 2004, after they had already been in office for seven years, there were still a million people who needed to be found jobs. Only last year, the Secretary of State's predecessor found yet another million people who still had to be found jobs, yet nothing has happened and that is typical of the Government's approach.