Welfare Reform Bill

The Bill will cost around £4 billion to implement, and save some £18 billion by taking from the poorest families. The Government's plans are incompetent, unfair and counter-productive. The fact is that the cuts are choking growth and VAT is stoking inflation, and both are pushing the deficit up, not down. In Germany the focus is on growth, not cuts, and growth continues apace. In Britain, of course, growth is negative—and it is not just the snow. Alongside the £4 billion cost of the Bill is the £4 billion cost of dismantling the health service and the £7 billion lost through the unemployment created by the job cuts, and so it goes on. What is the impact on people in Swansea? Some 40% of its workers are employed in the public sector. We face the second highest level of job cuts and very large benefit cuts. Some 65% of people employed in the public sector are women, and the combination of cuts in jobs and welfare payments will impact on families in particular as they pay their share of the £18 billion in savings that will be made. The Bill will hurt children, the disabled and enterprise. Let us consider a Swansea woman with children who works for the council and is made redundant. She has savings of £18,000 and, being an enterprising person, wants to start her own business. She will get no benefits, of course, because she has saved more than £16,000 in good faith. She will have no wage, but she will be assumed to be getting the minimum wage as she is starting a business. Her business will face various start-up costs, such as a computer, setting up a website and promotional literature. She will be penalised for being a worker, penalised for being a saver and penalised for being an entrepreneur. Let us assume for a moment that the woman is successful, despite those barriers. She will be threatened with the loss of her council house if she earns too much—hardly an incentive for people on council estates to start their own businesses. Let us say that she is in her second marriage and she and her husband have five children. Her husband was also employed by the council—they met working there—and both were made redundant. They have five children, so they have nearly £500 of personal benefits in addition to £200 in housing benefit, which means they get £700 in total. The £500 cap is imposed on them, so they are forced to split up. They now live in separate council houses, each drawing £200 in housing benefit, with one parent looking after three children and the other looking after the other two. This is a recipe not just for destroying jobs and crushing entrepreneurial activity, but for splitting up homes and increasing the cost to the Exchequer to £900 when it was £700. The Government's approach in Swansea and elsewhere in Britain will make people jobless, make them poorer, break up families, crush enterprise, punish saving and harm children and the disabled. This is a Bill born not out of fair-mindedness and enlightenment, but an unnecessary and unwise economic strategy of cutting too far too fast and punishing the poor for the reckless greed of the bankers. It should be opposed so that we can go back to the drawing board and think again.