McFadden said: “I very much agree that the welfare state should be there to help people and to help them change their circumstances, not just to keep them in their circumstances. I’m pleased to report we’ve now put in place the crisis and resilience fund that will help people in the most desperate circumstances, and we’ve guaranteed that funding for the next three years.”
Duncan-Jordan’s motion has been supported by 23 other MPs, including those in Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, SNP and DUP.
The Big Issue spoke to the Poole MP about why he wants to see an essentials guarantee, what he thinks about the government’s approach to welfare, and where he thinks Labour is going wrong.
Why are you calling for an essentials guarantee?
During the welfare debate last year, which I was one of the leading members, I took a lot of evidence from disabled organisations and disabled individuals, and it was quite clear that the benefits system – even in its form then, forget about what might be happening in the future – was inadequate for them to meet their daily living needs. People are having to go to food banks or rely on friends and family for loans. I’m a great believer in a universal safety net that catches everybody. The welfare state is full of holes, absolutely full of holes.
Welfare should provide sufficient income for people when you need it. That means that you don’t then have to rely on charity or friends and family, and it means making sure that it covers the basics for living – keeping your home warm, having enough to eat, that sort of thing. We need to up our game on the welfare state and make it truly universal.
I raised this in parliament on Monday with Pat McFadden, secretary of state for work and pensions, and I said it needed to be a universal safety net, not a trapdoor through which people are falling. He didn’t take the trap door part – he just took the ‘trapped’ part and said: ‘Well, of course we don’t want people trapped on benefits. We’ve got to get them off benefits.’ That wasn’t the point I was making. I’m all in favour of people finding work who can work, but what about those who can’t? He dodged the question, basically, which I wasn’t surprised about.
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I’ve got an early day motion down, which currently standing has 24 names on it. I’m hoping to get that up to the 50s. Some Liberal Democrats have signed it, some Greens. This isn’t just a Labour issue, because the welfare state, at the end of the day, should be for all of us. We all fall on hard times from time to time. Members of our family do, or our friends do.
Where do you think the government is going wrong?
Well, blimey, how long you got? I mean, look, the welfare debate that we had last year around disability benefits was basically led from the front by saving money. It wasn’t about helping people into work. They said that, but that wasn’t what the driver was. The driver was to cut the bill. So the fact that we managed to divert £5billion pounds worth of cuts and take them off the table for now was a massive achievement.
And the devastation that would have been caused had that not happened, I don’t even want to think about. That isn’t to say there are cuts coming. The Timms Review will report towards the end of this year, in the autumn period. I don’t know what recommendations he’s going to come up with. It’s quite clear that part of his agenda, I think, is to cut back where he can, whether or not they’ll try and put that through before the end of parliament, who knows?
This is all about timing, of course, and it’s all about whether or not the government want another punch up. I wouldn’t want to bet on that really because the government’s pretty fragile at the moment, I think. Do they really want to drag us through another three, four months of arguments, public arguments about welfare? I don’t know. There are bigger fish to fry, if they wanted to do something.
The public are concerned that the driver of these changes are not to make the system better, but to make the system cheaper. You can make it better and cheaper if you get it right in certain circumstances, but you can’t be driven just by one desire and that is just to cut money.
The government might say the essentials guarantee is too costly to implement. What would you say to that?
I’m sure that would be their answer to my campaign. The fact is that the state is already subsidising poor employers through universal credit and so on, because wages are not high enough. We need to have an enabling welfare state. We need to ensure that we support people so that they can reach their potential. And we also need to accept that there are economic benefits. If you support people on welfare, they’ll spend that money locally. They’re not going miles and miles away to spend that money. So it’s a circular argument about putting some money back in.
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The fact is, we can raise money. We just don’t choose to. There’s been arguments about corporation tax, there’s been arguments about national insurance, there’s been arguments about wealth tax, all of those should be on the table as far as I’m concerned. Did we really need to commit a load of money to ID cards which we then dropped? There is money in the system, we just need to reallocate it and redistribute it.
As a government, and as a society, you need to decide what your priorities are. What sort of society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in one where people are looked after, even when they fall on hard times? Or do you want to live in one that says: ‘Well, tough on you, you just have to grin and bear it’ and then you have to go to your local church for a handout? Is that really the mark of a civilised society?
That’s the paradox of the growth of food banks. On the one hand, the growth of food banks shows just how compassionate a society we are. People are digging in week on, week out to help others less fortunate than themselves. It has to be commended. But of course, we shouldn’t need them, and we certainly shouldn’t have seen the explosion of them that we’ve seen in the last few years. If that’s the only way that people can feed their kids, if that’s the only way that people can get a hot meal, then we are seriously struggling as a society.
That’s not about this government, because this problem existed long before Labour came to power 18 months ago. This is a structural problem in the way our economy works, which at some point we’re going to have to address.
How are you feeling about the Labour Party?
Ha. Are you trying to get me in trouble? Well, look, I’ve been suspended. I was suspended for four months for the welfare rebellion, such as it was called. I’ve already been on record saying I think [Andy] Burnham shouldn’t have been blocked from the by-election in Gorton and Denton. I think that’s a mistake.
I think there’s a there’s a toxic culture inside the parliamentary Labour Party that doesn’t allow for pluralism or debate and one of my big issues is that the government and those in power need to talk to the backbenches prior to making announcements on various topics, ID cards, jury trials, those sorts of things. They need to come to us first, test them out, see what the lines might be, where are the pitfalls, where are the problems, and then adjust accordingly.
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What we have at the moment is an announcement made and people like me are told: ‘You’ve got to back it.’ I’m like: ‘You didn’t ask me about this. It’s not in our manifesto. You’ve just made it up on the hoof, basically, and you expect me to just roll in behind it and actually I’ve got a few concerns.’ I ask for a chat and by that time it’s too late. And then of course you get accusations that the government has to U-turn. Had it spoken to its backbenchers earlier, it might not have had to make so many U-turns.
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