Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2019
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak today about in-work poverty, an issue that is of particular importance to many of our constituents, and also about the findings of the social security committee, of which I am a member, on the impact of universal credit on in-work poverty.
Like many members, I have met many constituents whose migration across to universal credit has been fraught with difficulties and has resulted in significant and extreme hardship. People have been left with prolonged rent arrears, they have fallen behind on bills and they have been unable to clothe their children. I have dealt with so many such cases that, some months ago, I held a summit on the impact of the roll-out of universal credit in my area. It is unfortunate that neither of the two Tory MPs in my area was able to come along to the summit. They would have heard absolutely harrowing tales of the impact on people of universal credit’s roll-out.
The committee has collated, in one damning document, experiences of people who are suffering under that toxic Tory policy and testimonies of organisations that are struggling to support claimants. Although the points that it makes about the impact on families and children are very true, I understand that the impacts are even worse in England and Wales, where mitigating policies that I will mention later are not available.
The report makes for grim reading, and I am not at all surprised that the Tories do not want to agree with it. Members on the Tory benches can usually be expected to stand up and attempt to defend universal credit and its roll-out, sometimes with the caveat, “despite universal credit’s many flaws”. So far, Tory members have not even offered that caveat. It appears that Scottish Tories are even more blindly loyal to flawed Tory policies than their counterparts south of the border.