Ministers face fresh challenge to welfare reforms in Wednesday votes

South Wales Guardian

2 days ago

The Department for Work and Pensions will try to steer the Universal Credit Bill through its final Commons stages, including clause-by-clause scrutiny, on Wednesday.
The Bill, if agreed to, would roll out two different rates of benefit for claimants who cannot currently work.
It would also freeze the limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCW and LCWRA) elements of the benefit until 2030.
The PA news agency understands that a 'substantial number' of Labour rebels have agreed to vote to gut the Bill of these reforms, if they can trigger a division.
When MPs debated the reforms last week, Government frontbenchers rolled back on their plan to reform the separate personal independence payment (Pip) benefit, vowing to revisit any proposed changes only after a review by social security minister Sir Stephen Timms.
'The Government for all the goodwill of pulling clause five on Pip, they've lost it over being so stubborn and obstinate over clauses two and three,' Labour MP for York Central Rachael Maskell said.
Clause two of the Bill includes a framework for two rates of LCWRA, with claimants who are eligible for the benefit before April 2026 able to claim a higher rate than later applicants.
Claimants who are terminally ill or who have severe symptoms of an illness which 'constantly' apply would also be eligible for the higher rate, regardless of when they become eligible.
Ms Maskell has proposed a change to the reforms, so that someone who has slipped out of and then back into the LCWRA eligibility criteria either side of April 2026 would still be able to claim the higher rate.
Approving this change would be like 'gathering up the crumbs rather than getting the full course meal', she said.
Asked what the Government should do to tackle welfare costs, Ms Maskell told the PA news agency: 'We've got to put the early interventions in to take people off this path of ill health.
'We've got quite a sick society at the moment for all the reasons that we know, a broken NHS, you know, social care not being where it should be, and of course long-term Covid.
'All of that is having its impact, and the endemic mental health challenges that people are facing.
'But to then have the confidence that your programme is so good that it's going to get loads of these people into work and employers are going to have to fulfil their obligations in the future hopefully after the Charlie Mayfield report (the Keep Britain Working review) will make those recommendations – all of that, great, as far as it goes.
'But what we can't do is leave those people that can't work in poverty, because they would love to work and earn money, but they can't, so we have to pay for it.
'And therefore the people who've got the good fortune of earning money, whether it's through income or assets, they're the people that are going to have to support a wider society.'
Labour MP for Poole Neil Duncan-Jordan proposed gutting the Bill through a series of draft amendments, to strike clause two and cancel the freeze in clause three.
He and Ms Maskell were two of 49 MPs who unsuccessfully tried to block the Bill at second reading, when it cleared its first Commons hurdle by 335 votes to 260, majority 75.
Amid fears the Bill had been rushed through Parliament, and referring to the Liberal reformer William Beveridge who published a post-war blueprint for the welfare state in 1942, Mr Duncan-Jordan asked: 'Beveridge didn't design the welfare state on the back of a postage stamp, did he?'
Beyond changes to parts of the benefit specifically for people who cannot currently work, the Bill would demand an above-inflation rise to the universal credit standard allowance each year until 2030.