Social Security

We welcome this debate, and I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s proposals on the uprating of social security benefits and guaranteed minimum pensions. We shall not oppose the proposals in the Lobby today. We welcome the extra benefits, but we cannot be satisfied with a welfare system that is increasingly being driven by mass means-testing. There was little in the Minister’s statement today about the real need for reform. In his benefits uprating statement on 6 December last year, he said that the changes that he was announcing were in the context of"““the Government’s continued fight against poverty and our ambitious programme to renew the welfare and pensions systems.””—[Official Report, 6 December 2005; Vol. 440, c. 741.]" In October 1996, millions of people heard the Prime Minister famously say:"““By the end of a five-year term of a Labour Government: I vow that we will have reduced the proportion . . . that we spend on the welfare bills of social failure . . . This is my covenant with the British people. Judge me upon it. The buck stops with me.””" At least the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who is not in her place today, recently had the honesty to admit that the Government had done ““sweet nothing”” to tackle this problem until recently. The Conservative Opposition will make constructive proposals finally to get to grips with a social security system that is tragically wasting too much human potential and writing off too many people’s lives.