Danny Kruger MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Oct 2025 · Knife Crime · Hansard source

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  I agree with every single word the hon. Lady said, except the implication—actually, I will just leave it in agreement. I respect what has happened in Scotland, and I welcome the reductions they have seen there, but my concern about the public health model is that it might mean we have an excuse not to think about the essential moral challenge of individuals understanding the difference between right and wrong, and the role of stable families in preventing crime. We would then have abused the valuable concept of a public health model.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Knife Crime · Hansard source

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  We had a little dispute earlier about the statistics on knife crime. The fact is that we clearly do see from the evidence that knife crime is a serious problem, and it is rising in pockets. We have a clear problem in London. The stats are disputed, but the fact is that any knife crime is unacceptable, and the crimes that lead to death are utter tragedies.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Knife Crime · Hansard source

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  I am sorry, but I do not think we should spend the whole time disputing the statistics. I can cite statistics suggesting there has been a 60% increase in knife crime in the last year. Let us not trade stats, but by all means let us take this offline, if the hon. Lady would like to trade citations. The fact is that significant studies demonstrate there is a real problem—an increasing problem—with knife crime in some areas. As I said, any knife crime is unacceptable, and the tragedies that lead to death are to be enormously regretted. For the last 20 years, I have run a charity working with people in prisons and with ex-offenders—many of them involved in knife crime and violence—to try to reduce reoffending in London. I know from first-hand experience, and indeed from encounters I have had this week, how much our justice system is disrespected in our communities. So I absolutely agree with the central point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson): we need to increase the deterrent effect of the justice system, and that means having clearer and sterner punishments for the crime of carrying weapons. We need swifter justice, to ensure that the time between the committal of an offence and punishment is as short as possible. We also need—this is the work I do—to focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, because the cycle of crime is the cause, the real heart, of these terrible statistics. It is not the number of first-time offenders, which is always terrible; it is the number of people who stay in a life of crime. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield for referencing the families of the victims. Ultimately, those are the people we should bear in mind when we consider these tragedies. But I also pay tribute to him for mentioning the families of the attackers, whose lives are also ruined when their son—it is usually the son—goes to jail for many years as a consequence of knife crime. As my hon. Friend said, they suffer shame and trauma. I want to mention family—this is really my only real contribution to the debate—because I do not think we have heard the word “family” mentioned yet, and it is rare that we do. All my experience of working with offenders is that in almost every case—it is almost absurd how standard it is—the father is absent from the young man’s life; it is not always the case, and of course there are exceptions. I therefore pay tribute to the amazing women who try to bring these boys up in very tough circumstances and who overwhelmingly do their best to ensure that their boys stay on the straight and narrow. But in the absence of a father, how are those boys to understand what it is to be a man, to respect authority, to respect women and to collaborate constructively with their peers? Those lessons are so much harder to learn for boys growing up without a positive male role model in their lives. I want to make a simple point in response to a remark the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) made earlier about the public health approach to crime. I respect that concept; if we are talking about knife crime as an epidemic comparable to a contagious disease, that is a very apt analogy. I also respect the principle that we should have a whole-community approach to knife crime. My concern is that the concept of a public health approach is really code for a statutory response that says that the reason we have knife crime is that the wider community—which really means what the Government are doing—is inadequate and needs to step forward in some way. As I said, a lot of my life has been committed to the principle that community needs to step forward. However, the role of the state is fundamentally to enforce justice; the job of the Government is to ensure that people are safe in their streets and that the law is respected. The real source of the knife crime epidemic, and the resolution to it, does not lie with the state, nor with the nebulous community; it lies with the individual themselves, who needs to grow up learning and knowing what it is to do right and wrong, and it lies with the family. If Government can do anything apart from enforce justice—which of course is their primary function —they should be instilling the principles of right and wrong in our young people through the education system. More importantly than anything else, they should be supporting stable families, because that is the context in which young boys will grow up much less likely to go off the rails.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Knife Crime · Hansard source

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  I am happy to give way to my constituency neighbour.

• 15 Oct 2025 · Knife Crime · Hansard source

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  I agree, although most youth clubs are not statutory institutions—they might be publicly funded but they belong to civil society, and I honour and welcome them. I pay tribute to the youth club that supported the hon. Gentleman, and indeed the armed forces, which I suspect he would also say played an important role in his being the fine, upstanding citizen that he is today. Nevertheless, we will never compensate for the epidemic of family breakdown in this country with youth clubs. Youth clubs are vital, the armed forces are vital and all the other institutions of society that come around individuals play an essential role, but if the family is broken in our communities, we will continue to have the tragedies that we have been discussing today.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  This ceasefire is tremendous news, and I sincerely congratulate everybody who was involved in bringing it about, whoever they were, including the British Government. I was in Israel last week, and on the day that the ceasefire was announced, I visited the Nova festival site and spoke to civilians and soldiers on the Gaza border. The Israelis I spoke to were deeply dismayed that the British Government had decided to recognise the state of Palestine before Hamas had released their hostages, let alone disarmed. Does the Prime Minister understand why Israel cannot tolerate the idea of a state on its border that poses a security risk to its citizens, and will he undertake not to move forward to support the establishment of a Palestinian state until there is more than a promise—there is actually the reality of security for Israel?

• 2 Sept 2025 · Eating Disorders: Prevention of Deaths · Hansard source

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  I will be quick, in that case. I express my appreciation to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) for a very important speech; I am grateful to him. I particularly welcome the points made by him and the hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) about the need for better understanding and collaboration in the system, and I echo his call for the national register of deaths to reflect deaths from eating disorders. I pay tribute to the Cotswold House unit, run by the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust in Marlborough in my constituency, which is a really important in-patient and out-patient unit working with adults. I echo the points, which I think are shared across the Chamber, about the value of NHS units as opposed to operations run by private equity companies, whose work I have real concerns about. I want to add a couple of points to those made by hon. Members about the very legitimate campaigns of the organisations to which we are all indebted for their work. First, the point about early intervention has been made and I will not repeat it, but we clearly need to invest in more understanding both at GP level and among communities and families, and support people while they are still at home. Secondly, we must ensure we have a better and more adequate transition from children’s to adult services, which is a real issue I have come across in casework. My final point is about the importance of step-down provision. It is not enough just to get people back to a healthy weight and then leave them to themselves; they need proper support for many months—

• 1 Sept 2025 · Health and Disability Benefits: Spending Estimate · Hansard source

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  It is good to see the Minister back after the break, but I am sorry to hear that there are still no plans to reduce spending on personal independence payments. He has said that he is collaborating with people who would not be working with him on his review if there were to be any reductions in the levels of benefit or eligibility. Given that veto on cuts to PIP, I implore him again to consider the benefits to which PIP is a gateway, such as Motability, disability premiums, council tax discounts and blue badges. Will he promise at least that those entitlements could come down?

• 1 Sept 2025 · Health and Disability Benefits: Spending Estimate · Hansard source

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  But with no possibility of any of those entitlements coming down or any of the spending being reduced? We have 1.25 million foreign nationals claiming universal credit, most of whom are not in employment. I hope that the Minister does not plan to co-produce his plans with foreign nationals—although, knowing Labour lawyers, I expect they will say that the European convention on human rights demands that they do just that. Does he think that subsidising more and more foreign nationals is what the British social security system is for? If not, will he restrict sickness benefits to British nationals only, as we have argued for?

• 17 Jul 2025 · Future of the Church of England · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I do agree with him. He makes the point very well, and I absolutely acknowledge it. The paradox of our constitution is that under a monarchy, we have a system with the most developed political freedom in the world, and that under an established Church, we have a tradition of freedom of conscience and belief in which all religions can be accommodated. It is because the cross is at the centre, and I notice that the cross is above your Chair too, Madam Deputy Speaker. As I was saying, in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected, and one is Islam. In a debate yesterday, I said how much I find myself in agreement with Muslim colleagues in Parliament on moral and social matters. But as I have been saying, this is a Christian country—if it is a country at all—and I cannot be indifferent to the extent of the growth of Islam in recent decades. It is the other religion that worries me even more. This other religion is a hybrid of old and new ideas, and it does not have a proper name. I do not think that “woke” does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations. It is explicitly and most passionately hostile to Christianity as the wellspring of the west. That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life—from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services. It needs to be sent back to the fringes of eccentricity, like the modern druids who invest Stonehenge in my constituency with a theology that is seen as mad but harmless because its followers are so few and no one serious takes them seriously. We can no longer pretend, as people did in the 20th century, that we can be neutral or indifferent to God or to the public square being a godless desert. The fact is that the strong gods are back, and we have to choose which god to worship. I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ. This God is a jealous god—it is him or nothing—and we have to own our Christian story, or repudiate it. Not to own it is to repudiate it, and to repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but to cut off the source of all the things we value now and that we need in the future, such as freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights. Without the Christian God, in whose teaching these things have their source, these are inventions—mere non-existent aspirations. To worship human rights is to worship fairies, but if we own our story and remember the real sources of our civilisation, we can have these things and make them real—real freedom and tolerance and dignity, a culture of love and, crucially, a culture of humanity. We are in the age of the machine, and a great choice confronts us: whether to make machines in the image of fallen man, bent on exploitation and domination with mankind in its sights, or to make them what they properly are, the servants of mankind able to help us make a better world. To conclude, a wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand, but we have been here before. The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, the Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge—from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about—and they each in their generation restored this country to itself. A new restoration is needed now, with a revival of the faith, a recovery of a Christian politics and a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England all those centuries ago. This is a mission for the Church under its next leader, whoever that is; it is a mission for this place—the old chapel that became the wellspring of western democracy—and for us, its Members; and it is a mission for our whole country. It is the route to a prosperous modernity founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.

• 17 Jul 2025 · Future of the Church of England · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to stand here in this empty Chamber to speak about the original purpose of this space, when it was a chapel in the Church of England. The old Chamber of the House of Commons, on which this space was modelled after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen’s Chapel—formerly a royal church. It was given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating Chamber. Madam Deputy Speaker, your Chair stands on the altar steps. The Table with the Dispatch Boxes is where the lectern stood. I mention that because the link between this place and the Church of England is not merely ceremonial. The Prayers we say here at the start of every day are not just a nod to tradition. Our democracy is founded on Christian faith. This Parliament remains the law-giving power of the Church of England. We in this place have the responsibility to approve or disapprove the doctrine and the rules of the Church, and that is as it should be, because the Church of England is not some private club or just another eccentric denomination. The Church is a chaplain to the nation, and through the parish system, in which every square inch of England has its local church and its local priest, we are all members—we all belong. Even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, and even if you do not believe in its teachings, it is your church and you are its member. When I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect; I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution—older than the monarchy, and much older than Parliament—which made this country. It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally. Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in those stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin. If, standing here, I have any power to repent on behalf of this House, I hereby repent of what we did. In the reaction to these votes, and all around us in reaction to the state of the country and the world, something else is happening. There is a great hunger in society for a better way of living, and I want to use this opportunity to explain what that better way is and why we here in England have the means to follow it. The Jewish and Christian God is a God of nations. He is interested in people as individuals, but also as groups—as communities not only of kinship but of common worship, with a common God. Uniquely among the nations of the world, this nation—England, from which the United Kingdom grew—was founded and created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people. In that sense, England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the west. The story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people to make the institutions and culture that have been uniquely stable and successful. The western model was forged and refined in England over a thousand years from the 9th to the 19th centuries. What is that model? It is simply this: that power should arrange itself for the benefit of all the people under it, and specifically for the poorest and weakest; that the law is there to protect the ordinary person against the abuse of power; and that every individual has equal dignity and freedom, including, crucially, the freedom of conscience, religion and belief, which makes space for other religions under the Christian shield—a secular space. Indeed, the idea of a secular space is a Christian concept that is meaningful only in a Christian world. These are ideas that only make sense if one accepts that we have some intrinsic value—a value that is given to us and is not of our own making or invention. Throughout the long years from the time of Alfred to the time of Victoria, it was assumed that a nation was a community of common worship and that our community —this country—worshipped the Christian God. Then, in the 20th century, another idea arose: that it was possible for a country to be neutral about God; that the public square was empty of any metaphysics; and that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason—“no hell below us, above us only sky”. That idea was wrong. The horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the west, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale. Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into.

• 16 Jul 2025 · Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life · Hansard source

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  It is funny: I often find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is great, and not what I expected when he was elected to this place. I was about to come to my final point: the importance of family life. I do not know to what extent that really is on the Government’s agenda when it comes to the child poverty strategy. There will obviously be lots of talk of families, maternal health and so on, but the crucial determinant of success for children is the quality of the relationships they grow up in. We know that from all the research done into children’s brain development. Human beings are unique among mammals in that we emerge very unformed: our brains are really blank as we emerge from the womb. The strength and health of our brains and our futures are laid down in those early years by the quality of the relationships we grow up with and experience. I know the Government recognise that because of their emphasis on early years, but the quality of the relationship in the home matters so much. I really hope that the Government will be brave enough to recognise the value of stability in the home and the value of two-parent families as a source of real strength. They are a protective factor and a predictor of success for children and young people. We should, of course, do all we can to support single-parent families—they are crucial and necessary and do amazing work, and we should give them all our support—but to tackle child poverty we must do more to support family formation and family stability. That means recognising the household as a unit. We are way too individualistic in our approach to public policy. We need to think about family health and family strength, and that means supporting couples. I welcome what the Government are trying to do, and I hope that there will be recognition of the importance of community and family life in the child poverty strategy.

• 16 Jul 2025 · Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams); it has been a while since I have heard the words “Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke”, which used to be bellowed out by our former hon. Friend and his predecessor Jonathan Gullis, who was a great schools Minister—briefly—in a previous Government. I pay tribute to him and his memory—much lamented. I also pay tribute to David Johnston, another former Member, who was children’s Minister in the last Government and was responsible for many of the important reforms that my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) mentioned. I welcome this debate on what I think is a cross-party agenda. I recognise much of what the Minister said about the importance of early years and the sorts of interventions that the Government are talking about. I welcome the impending child poverty strategy, which is an important step forward for us. I want to make a simple and straightforward point. I have heard a lot in this afternoon’s debate about the importance of investment and support for the different professionals who support children and families. That is all absolutely right, and I agree that that is important. Nevertheless, surely the most important resource available to us to support children and young people is their families and the communities that they grow up in. I implore the Government to think very seriously in preparing their strategy to support the conditions for success in childhood, which is about not simply the public sector professionals, agencies and institutions that are available but the strength of the informal social institutions that children and young people grow up in. I welcome the Minister’s mention of the importance of social investment, philanthropy and civil society in providing support for children and young people. This is a big boast, but I can claim some credit for the announcement that the Chancellor made on Monday. She happened to be at a charity called AllChild in Wigan, which I claim credit for having founded—although that was not on the press release, I note. The charity began life as the West London Zone, which supports children and young people and which I started back in the early 2010s, having visited the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York with the then Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Harlem Children’s Zone is a tremendously successful project aiming at much of the agenda that we are debating this afternoon, including early identification of children at risk, the provision of intensive support for those children and their families on a community basis, and a place-based model for support for children and families in disadvantage. We set up the West London Zone with the help of significant philanthropy from Paul Marshall, noted philanthropist and founder of the Ark school chain, who said that we should start one here. We did it on a slightly different model from Harlem’s, which is a monolithic, single entity that provides all services for children and young people. The model we introduced in West London and is now being expanded across the country under the banner of AllChild. I pay tribute to the AllChild team, including Louisa Mitchell, who I got in early to deliver the project, because I would not have been very good at actually running it. Louisa has been a genius, and she is still running it now. This goes to the point I am trying to make: what Louisa did was recognise that in our communities there is an enormous array of really amazing resources in the form of local projects—large and small, formal and informal—that can help with the great task of bringing up a child as a village should. The mission of the project is to identify in schools—with the help of teachers and, crucially, by using the data available on attainment and attendance—those children who are likely to struggle later. Then it is about ensuring that they get the support that they need, and very much on a personalised basis. That support should come not just from the statutory system around the school—because that will never be adequate for the range of needs and different challenges that a population of children will have—but draw on the resources of the community. We started in west London, which obviously has lots of pockets of wealth but significant pockets of disadvantage as well. Even in those disadvantaged places, and certainly across the country—the project is working in Wigan and elsewhere now—we see tremendous institutions that can support children and young people. The challenge is to do so in a co-ordinated way. There is a huge opportunity not just to look to the state, schools, local authorities or health—even though bringing all those agencies together around children is important—but to think about the real resource we have, which is in our communities. We should put in place real support and resource for those foundations, whether faith groups, professional bodies of all sorts or community organisations.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  It has been a very good debate, and I am very grateful to all hon. Members across the House who have contributed. It is still no clearer to us what the Government think or intend to do about the two-child cap, but it has been very good to hear so many strong voices from the Opposition Benches for and against the two-child limit. Of course, we do not really know what the Prime Minister himself thinks. He campaigned for the Labour leadership on a promise to scrap the two-child limit; then, in order to win the general election, he campaigned to keep it. Now, under pressure from his Back Benchers—once again, I pay tribute to the real powers in the Labour party—he is hinting that he will scrap it after all at a cost of £3.5 billion. Add to that the £4.5 billion the Government have to find because they abandoned their welfare reforms and the £1.3 billion they lost when they U-turned on the winter fuel payment, and the Government will have to find £9.3 billion this autumn.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  The difference is that child benefit is paid to everybody. Child benefit is a universal entitlement. We need to ensure that we are not adding to the incentives in the system to live a life on benefits. I fully recognise the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. When I say that some people receive more from the system than they pay in, I am not trying to stigmatise those people. That point has been thrown at us, but it is not the case. I am not stigmatising people who receive more in benefits than they pay in tax. Life is not all about whether someone is a net fiscal contributor or not. I agree with points made by some Members that we should think more about social structures than fiscal transfers, but when it comes to fiscal policy there is a limit. Reciprocity matters, and when we are talking about money, it is right that people living on benefits face something of the same realities as people who pay for themselves. We still have too many families trapped in welfare. What we need is more families and, yes, larger families supporting themselves through well-paid work. We need a tax system like that in Europe, America and across the world, which recognises families. The previous Government made an important step with the changes to the high-income child benefit charge, which was scrapped by Labour. The best thing we can do for families is to get the tax system and, crucially, the wider economy right, so that we have good growth, good jobs, higher wages, flexible childcare and strong communities.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  I will come in a moment to the matter of child poverty, and I recognise the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. I was just referring to the fact that all the parties except ours—indeed, it is unclear what those on the Government Front Bench think—seem to support lifting the two-child cap. The Liberal Democrats cannot seem to see a spending opportunity without grabbing it with both hands. Their spokesman, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), spent £4.5 billion just in his speech earlier this afternoon. Then we have the SNP Government, who have presided over higher economic inactivity and lower employment than in England, have missed all their targets for child poverty, and still clamour for more money for welfare. Then there is the Reform party, which is sadly absent today. I do quite like the Reform party and I agree with its Members on lots of things, but there is a problem: they would spend money like drunken sailors. I can see what is happening and I am very worried about it—they will end up in an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats with a joint ticket to protect welfare spending. I do not know how hon. Members feel about the anticipated alliance. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) and others, particularly Members on the Government Benches, have cited widening poverty rates over the past decade or more, and they repeatedly raised the issue of 4.5 million children, but they are talking about relative poverty. The fact is that relative poverty increased under the previous Government because, overall, the economy grew, as more people became more prosperous. As the median income rises, more people come under it; that is how it works. If relative poverty goes down under this Government, it will be because they shrank the economy. That is highly likely, but it is not an achievement to boast about. Relative poverty is not a measure of anything except the operation of the law of averages. Therefore, what we need to look at is real poverty, absolute poverty. As we rescued the public finances and grew the economy, absolute poverty went down under the Conservatives. On children, the percentage of children in absolute poverty after housing costs fell between 2010 and 2024. We pulled 800,000 people out of absolute poverty and averted over a million more people falling into absolute poverty. We had more people in work, a higher employment rate, and fewer workless households than since records began. We should thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for that. Mention was made of Wilberforce and Disraeli. One day they will add the name of Duncan Smith to that great record.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  The story of the last 14 years is quite easily told. In 2010 there was a budget deficit of 9%, and we had almost fiscal bankruptcy. We spent 10 years very painfully restoring the public finances at great cost, and I totally understand that. Then we were back down to a balanced budget. Then covid hit, and we spent the last five years trying to recover from that. On welfare, we have a very proud record of reducing unemployment and making work pay. Since covid we now have this great problem of disability and sickness benefits. That is the challenge that we were undertaking to fix as we left office and that the Government have now completely failed to conclude. It is not too late. I am glad to see the Minister for Social Security and Disability in his place. His review should not wait until next autumn; we need it this autumn. We need proper plans to fix the welfare system, not just to increase spending as the Government are now doing. I urge hon. Members across the House to support our motion. Let me be clear: every Member who does not is voting for welfare dependency and national bankruptcy. Only the Conservatives have a plan to fix this.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his recitation, much of which was Conservative policy now rebranded by the Labour Government and the rest was further spending commitments. The Government are incapable of cutting spending, so we know where this is headed: tax rises in the autumn. There will also be tax rises on wealth. We know what wealth is: it is the product of economic success. It is what happens when people risk their capital and make things that people want. Wealth means more jobs, higher wages and more tax revenues. It means that we can reduce debt and invest in more businesses. And wealth taxes, which are coming, will mean less of all that. That is the Labour way—circling the drain and then going down to national bankruptcy. That is where a wealth tax and welfare spending lead us to, and the rest of the House seems to support that plan.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member’s archaeology in finding my previous quotes. Many things did get worse over the last decade and a half—of course I recognise that. But much of it was as a consequence of the global financial meltdown that his party presided over. We spent many painful years fixing the deficit that Labour left us. I want to quickly cite the previous Government’s record on young people. Labour Members have boasted of the new Labour years, but in 1997 youth unemployment stood at 650,000, and by the time Blair and Brown had finished in 2010 it was up a third to 940,000. When we left office 14 years later, we had almost halved it down to 560,000—lower even than in 1997. That is the Conservative record. I will conclude shortly, but I first say to those across the House who want to lift the child benefit cap to consider what they are asking. They are asking working people who pay more in tax than they receive in public services—and who themselves have had to take agonising decisions about whether or not they can afford to have another child given the taxes they pay—to fund the benefits for other people who receive more from the system than they pay in.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Welfare Spending · Hansard source

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  It just doesn’t flow as well, but yes, apologies Madam Deputy Speaker.

• 14 Jul 2025 · Northern Ireland Veterans: Prosecution · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and I am grateful to him. Last week, I met a number of veterans of the Northern Ireland troubles in my constituency, and they made the exact point that he is making: they never went out to kill; they went out to defend British citizens. Is it not particularly outrageous that the proposal suggests some sort of equivalence between the killers and those who were appointed to protect? As he says, it will impose a terrible chilling effect on recruitment to our services.

• 9 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  The fact is, in our time in government we increased the number of disabled people in work significantly. Two million more disabled people were in work at the end of our time in government than before. There is much to regret about the last years of our time in government, and I was a critic of them myself, but on welfare throughout our time in government we have a proud record of improving the broken system that we inherited. We are now a year into Labour’s time in government. They have had all this time to come up with a plan and we have absolutely nothing. Clause 5 did have some changes to the system, but they are going to scrap that today. I want to pay tribute to the rebels on the Labour Benches for finding their voice and showing what Parliament can do, and I particularly pay tribute to the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell)—the real Prime Minister sitting there on the real Front Bench. I respect and honour them all. As for the Government Front Bench, they are chopping the Bill’s title in half. It is now nothing to do with PIP, so we have no reform to welfare and certainly no savings. This is now a spending Bill, not a savings Bill. Looking at the impact assessment that has just been published—the third in the last three weeks, I think—if we add up the savings from cutting UC health for new claims, which is a little over £5 billion, and minus the cost of raising the standard allowance, which is a little over £5 billion, we get £120 million of extra costs over the next four years, plus the £1 billion of extra employment support. Labour’s idea of saving money on welfare is to spend more by the end of the Bill’s passage. The Government have also spent the money that they thought they were saving from the PIP changes before they did the U-turn. Even now they are on a wing and a prayer financially. The Office for Budget Responsibility, on which the tottering Chancellor has relied to hold up her sums, assumes that the on-flow to benefits will fall halfway back to their 2019 levels over this Parliament. If they do not, the Chancellor will have to find another £12 billion. Why should new claims reduce under this Government when there is still an incentive of £50 a week to get on to UC health, and there is no reform to PIP for at least another year? The Minister has also said that his famous eponymous review is not aimed at saving money anyway. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) challenged him earlier to confirm that, and I think he has confirmed from the Dispatch Box that there will be no savings from his review. Meanwhile, the UK is haemorrhaging jobs thanks to the national insurance rise, and we have the Employment Rights Bill coming down the track. The OBR did not even include in its forecast the likely impact of the unemployment Bill that Labour is introducing. That is something we can look forward to in the autumn. We are in a deep fiscal hole, and of course we need welfare reform—in fact, we need welfare cuts. That is why the Opposition wanted to support the Government when they set out their intentions, and we said that we would support the Bill if they reduced spending, got more people into work and pledged that there would be no new taxes, but they did none of that, so we do not support it. We do, however, have a further set of proposals. My friend, the hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky), challenged me to come up with some alternatives, and we have some amendments to that very effect. First, amendment 45 would improve the quality of assessments. There is a bigger piece of work to be done, and I welcome the Government looking closely at the assessments process, but right now we could make one clear and simple improvement. In 2019, 84% of PIP assessments were conducted face to face; last year, the figure was 5%. That was a covid change— [ Interruption. ] That was absolutely a covid change that was not changed back in time; I totally agree. The fact is, the work-from-home culture really took off at the DWP and with its subcontractors, and that does need to change. I recognise that. Why are the Government not doing that? As a result, in the system we have, which is not being changed by the Bill, people are at the mercy of some distant, faceless assessor on the end of the phone. Of course, there will be people who cannot manage a face-to-face assessment, and we would authorise the Secretary of State to specify circumstances for that. It is also right not to call people back for repeat assessments. That was a change that the Conservatives were introducing, and I am glad that the Government are sticking with it. But, for the great majority of cases, we have got to get back to face-to-face assessments for the sake of claimants as well as the taxpayer. Secondly, I turn to amendment 50. We have 1,000 new PIP claims a day—that has doubled since covid—and more than half the increase is in mental health cases. For UC health claims, it is more like three quarters. Of course, distress is real in our society and it is rising—I do not disparage the reality of many of these claims—but as the Minister has said the incidence of disability in our society is rising by 17% while benefit claims are rising by 34%. For some of the less severe mental health claims, it is far worse. In January 2020, there were 7,000 claims for people with anxiety disorders; this year, there are 31,000. In January 2020, there were 155,000 claims for anxiety and depressive disorders mixed; now there are 365,000. Autism was 60,000 and has gone up to 183,000. The hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake) mentioned ADHD, which has gone up from 29,000 to 115,000 over the last five years.

• 9 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  I am sure that the hon. Lady is right. Those disorders have also increased extraordinarily in recent years. I take her point, and I was struck by the point she made in her speech about how many people with ADHD would benefit from being in the workplace. They could be in work, and they need to be supported for that. It is not right that we are consigning so many people to a life on the sofa with the curtains drawn, being told that they have no value and no contribution to make and will receive no help. Last year, 4,000 more people got PIP because of dyslexia, which was twice the number before covid. It was 10,000 for OCD; again, that number has doubled. I want to acknowledge that the charity Mind—of course, it wants to increase benefits, so I do not cite it in support of our amendments—has said that what people with mental health conditions need is decent mental health support, proper employment programmes and flexible workplaces. That is what is needed. Let me finish with new clause 12. The other place where we can look for real savings is with foreign nationals claiming health and disability benefits. I am aware that many visas have no recourse to public funds, but people with indefinite leave to remain do. Some 800,000 people are likely to claim indefinite leave to remain in the course of this Parliament. We do not have enough data from the DWP, so I urge the Government to have more transparency about the information that is received. However, on the basis of the information we have, we believe that some hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are claiming PIP and UC health are foreign nationals—that does not include EU citizens, who have rights under the withdrawal agreement. Welfare is simply not part of the contract that we make with people who come to this country. They are given visas on the basis that they will support themselves and our amendment would make that principle real. Every pound spent on benefits for someone who could be supported into work is a pound less for someone else who cannot or can never work and who deserves all our sympathy and support. We cannot wait another year for this dithering, hamstrung Government to come forward with the changes we need. Our amendments offer a path to a better system that is fair for claimants and fair for taxpayers, and I commend them to the Committee.

• 9 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  I am happy to give way.

• 9 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  I am not talking about explicit fraud. These awards are being given, and no doubt the assessment is judging them to be eligible. There is not necessarily a deliberate attempt to defraud the system. What we have done is create a system whereby one is incentivised to seek higher and more expensive claims.