It was a great Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who once said that it would be “quite intolerable” for a modern economy and a compassionate society not to have at their heart social security and a welfare state. Quintessentially a one-nation Conservative, he was right. Sadly, the modern Conservative party is very different. We have a Chancellor who seeks to divide our nation between shirkers and strivers—now doers—and is often engaged in a grotesque demonisation of anyone on benefits in a system that can be cruel in its application and is not fit for purpose.
It is cruel in application on the one hand, as can be seen in the case of Bobby Busby in my constituency. His legs and pelvis were crushed in his youth, and he was on sticks, but he was passed fit for work, and his benefits were cut off. He fell into despair and could not stop crying. He went looking for his father, even though his father had died many years earlier. He retreated to his home and died of a heart attack. The benefits system is not fit for purpose on the other hand, as in the case of one Erdington family. Fiona was diagnosed with cancer of the spine last October, and applied for personal independence payment in November. Only now, four months later and as a consequence of my intervention, will she get a home assessment carried out by Capita. That is one of many cases that demonstrate a shambolic system.
I come from an upstanding working-class background where people believe that if you can work, you should work. It is also absolutely right that we should seek to reduce the benefits bill, but it is how we do it and what kind of society we want to live in that matters. Ours is therefore a very different approach. It involves building homes, because it is crazy that we spend 95p in every £1 that goes into homes as subsidy as opposed to bricks
and mortar. The housing benefit bill is rising to £25 billion because of the biggest housing crisis in a generation and soaring rents. That is why Labour would build 200,000 badly needed homes a year to buy and rent.
Labour would get young people into work, paid for by the bankers’ bonus tax. One in four in my constituency is out of work. We must connect the two things, because I want to see many more young apprentices, such as those I saw at Carillion and Willmott Dixon: young men and women building the homes needed for the future. We would introduce free child care for three and four-year-olds so that families can balance work and home; and we would tackle in-work poverty, as we are seeking to do in Birmingham, by driving the agenda for the living wage. We want to see dignity at work, and more time for people to spend with their family, because they do not have to spend every hour of the day and night at work. That is better for employers and, crucially, it brings down the benefits bill.
Ours is a progressive approach that builds a stronger economy in a better society, tackling the price of failure. Ours is an approach that builds a sustainable recovery and one that works for working people. The Government boast of recovery—any progress is welcome, but this is the slowest recovery in 100 years. The Government are borrowing £190 billion more than they planned; there have been 24 tax increases; and working people are £1,600 a year worse off. A building worker I recently met in Kingstanding has had his wages cut by £80 over the past three years. It is little wonder therefore that when I was at the school gates at St Barnabas last Friday, a working mum came up to me and said, “I heard all week about recovery. Jack, what planet do they live on?”
It is not just falling wages; it is also growing insecurity in the world of work. The Bannions in my constituency are an excellent family with a disabled son. The dad has been made redundant three times in the past three years—each new job was on lower pay and was more insecure—and sadly, there are millions like him who live in a twilight world of zero-hours contracts and agency work.
In conclusion, this is a Government who are simply out of touch, and the Tory chairman’s patronising poster said it all. I used to play bingo when I was a young man. I drank too much beer and my waistline suffered as a consequence. We have excellent bingo halls and pubs throughout Erdington, but beer and bingo are not the summit of working people’s ambitions.
Erdington has the 14th highest unemployment level of any constituency in the United Kingdom. It is a constituency of high need, with pockets of severe deprivation, but it is rich in talent. There is Angela Maher, the mother of two disabled kids, who sings in a local choir; Linda Hines, who has built 200 homes in Witton Lodge; and Maurice Weston, a former industrial worker, now a volunteer at Slade school who has written an excellent history of Slade school. There are working-class scientists and working-class engineers from Erdington working in Jaguar Land Rover. There is an airline pilot and outstanding artists such as Jim Allmark and a collective of artists with whom he works. There is our very own Billy Elliot, Amanda Cutler, the chair of the Castle Vale pool user group. She is a mum of two, living on the Vale, who danced with the Royal Ballet in “Swan Lake”.
This is a Government who are out of touch, oblivious to the consequences of their actions, divorced from the reality of ordinary people’s lives and who simply do not get it. We want to see a stronger, fairer, better economy that works for all, but that will not happen under this Government. That great task will fall to the next Labour Government.
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