Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Attorney-General – in the House of Commons at 5:39 pm on 8 January 2013.

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Photo of Lisa Nandy Lisa Nandy Labour, Wigan 5:39, 8 January 2013

I do not have time to do justice to the appalling, grinding impact of this miserable piece of legislation on the 3,500 people I represent who are seeking work, including a number of people who until last year used to work for Remploy, when they were casually forced out of work by Ministers. I do not have enough time to do justice either to its impact on the 8,500 working families who will lose out as a result of the Bill, or the 40% of children across Greater Manchester who already go to school hungry. There was not one single reference to them in the autumn statement, and we have heard very little about them from Government Members today.

It is bad enough that, as food banks spring up across the country, the impact of the Bill will be felt by the children I represent. It is worse that the Government believe it is appropriate to label them and their families as shirkers and scroungers—to play the politics of division while at the same time failing to explain how jobseeker’s allowance claimants gaining 72p per week and millionaires gaining more than £2,000 per week could possibly be fair in anyone’s book.

In the past few days, it has become absolutely clear that the case for the Bill is based on a series of what I can only politely describe as false premises: that it is on the side of people in work, when, as the Resolution Foundation pointed out, two-thirds of the people who will be hit are in work; and that there is a culture of worklessness, which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation roundly disproved in its recent research.