I am grateful to my hon. Friend for putting that point on the record. He was my predecessor on the Select Committee and follows this work well. I will come to debt and deductions, because that is one of the big issues raised in the evidence that the Select Committee receives, certainly by the stakeholders that we meet. He is spot-on to draw attention to the £60 from each of our constituents that is paid back to the Government when it could be spent in our local economies.
New CPAG research finds that the digital aspects of universal credit routinely lead to wrong amounts being awarded to claimants—often those who are most vulnerable—and to breaches of rule of law principles. That is why I have repeatedly called on the Government to reverse their cuts to universal credit and working tax
credits. Let us not forget that this was the biggest overnight cut to welfare in 70 years, inflicting hardship on people who were already struggling. To have done that as we came out of the teeth of the pandemic was particularly cruel.
Rather than offering one-off payments to shore up struggling families’ incomes, the DWP should reverse the damaging policies that are impacting on the most vulnerable people. It should reinstate the UC uplift at £25 per week and, of course, extend it to legacy benefits. Let us not forget the 2.5 million disabled people, so ably advocated for by the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), who were cruelly left behind without that uplift during the pandemic. The Government also need to remove the benefit cap and the two-child limit with its associated rape clause. They also need to halt the punitive sanctions regime so that all households are lifted out of poverty now and in future.
I turn to the benefit cap. As the Poverty Alliance points out, the cap’s design means that those who require the highest level of support from the benefit system are the most likely to be affected. That is simply unjust. Based on the latest departmental figures, 114,000 UK households have had their benefit capped and 86% of those are families with children. The benefit cap disproportionately impacts lone-parent families, the majority of whom are women—a point made by the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) —as well as larger and ethnic minority families.
The same is true of the two-child limit. Thousands of families with children will be pushed into poverty because Ministers on the Treasury Bench refuse to scrap the two-child limit on child tax credits and universal credit. A new London School of Economics study found that the policy’s impoverishment of larger low-income households has helped few parents get a job. Instead, its main function has been to push families further into poverty and to damage their mental health.
I wonder why Ministers are so furled to the two-child limit. The vast majority of them are actually quite embarrassed by it, and that is before we get to the associated rape clause, or as the Government like to call it, the “non-consensual sex exemption”. When this Government go around lecturing people about the values of global Britain, I am pretty sure they do not tell folk that the state will only support the first two children in the family, but if someone can prove that their child was born as a result of rape, that is okay.