Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2019
I, too, commend the committee’s work on this really important subject.
When I was growing up and learning about economics, I always thought that there was a correlation between employment rates and poverty and that giving more people better jobs would lift people out of poverty. However, over the past 10 to 20 years, we have seen the spectre of in-work poverty rise. It is insidious; it belies the fact that employment statistics cannot be a barometer for a nation’s poverty or its affluence any more.
I will say a word in support of this Government’s work. I have said many times that the Liberal Democrats’ approach to the issue is very much in step with the Government’s approach, and I thank it again for its conciliatory and consensual approach to social security issues. I also offer the support of the Liberal Democrats with regard to the committee’s conclusions on the need to immediately end the four-year benefits freeze, the need to recast how universal credit is administered and is still being rolled out, and the need for a reversal of the Westminster cuts since 2015.
My party’s approach to social security has always been about poverty reduction, social mobility and making work pay. A lot has been said about my party’s role in coalition Government, but there are two things from that time of which I am very proud. The first is the lifting of the income tax threshold, which, according to The Guardian, at a stroke, did more to address poverty than had been done in the previous 14 years. The second is how my party acted as a sea anchor against the Tory cuts. That fact immediately became manifest when we left the coalition in 2015, and it was picked up by the committee in its report, which recognised what happened to in-work allowance cuts in 2015 when the Liberal Democrats left Government. We visit that reality in all of our surgeries and case work every day of the week when we are back in our constituencies. It is up to us to address in-work poverty.
We need a three-fold approach that involves providing an adequate safety net for when people are out of work, fostering social mobility and making work pay. The imperatives have been laid out in many excellent speeches in the debate already: supporting the 240,000 children in this country who are still in poverty; ensuring that the safety net is adequate when people are out of work or need a work supplement; and tackling the inexorable link between financial worries and mental ill health. In that regard, I point out that 86 per cent of people with mental health issues cite financial concerns as a principal part of their anxiety and distress and indeed, that rates of suicide in Scotland are three times higher in deprived communities than they are in other communities.
As I said, my views and those of my party are largely in step with the approach of the Government in terms of where it wants social security to be deployed in Scotland, and in relation to the need to redress and recast the roll-out of universal credit. That roll-out took place in my constituency—as it did in many members’ constituencies—in November 2018, just before Christmas. Indeed, the consequences of what in many cases was a five-week minimum wait for people to transfer over to universal credit affected them right around Christmas time. That manifested in a huge uptick in the need for food banks in my constituency and in the case work that came through my door and that of Christine Jardine, our local MP.
Such was the range of legacy benefits and so rapid the changeover, that many were left confused, stranded and unsure of their recourse. That is reflected in the committee’s recommendations and conclusions, which recognise that there is still no adequate online or telephone support for people who are struggling with the vagaries of the bureaucracy surrounding the roll-out of universal credit. That includes the digital-by-default phenomenon in which most people are being bounced into the transfer through digital platforms, when one third of benefit recipients are unlikely to have adequate connection to the internet at home or through a place that is accessible to them.
Several times in this chamber, we have rightly raised the issue of the link between universal credit and domestic abuse, which is an unforeseen consequence of the roll-out of UC. We learned about that in discussions around the issue of payment to a single claimant in households in which spousal abuse might be an issue. The committee also raised the issues perfectly in its comments around transitional protections, where, once again, abusive relationships have clearly not been factored into the permutations and the considerations of the roll-out of universal credit by the Westminster Government.
My party and I agree wholeheartedly that we must end the freeze on benefits immediately. We must completely reverse the cuts to in-work benefits that were made in 2015, following our departure from the coalition Government, and we must drive up the take-up of entitlements, because people are still unaware of the benefits to which they are entitled. We also need to dramatically change the way in which we are giving people the money, because the five-week waiting time is leading to irreparable damage, evictions and destitution.
If universal credit was originally designed to make work pay and to make the benefit strata more simple, then it has wholly failed in that regard, and there is an obligation on the Government, and every party in the chamber to address that.