Speeches by McFadden.

“We mustn’t fall under the illusion that a Committee is the answer.”

“I want to consider all of this after the reviews that I referred to, in particular the Milburn review with regard to young people, later in the year, so I do not want to be ruling things in or out today.”

“I am going to be slightly partisan here, Chair; I hope that is forgivable. I try not to do it too much in front of a cross-party body such as this, but as long as my party is in power, I think this will be a priority.”

“First, I am really grateful to Alan Milburn for the work he has done. You had him before you quite recently for an evidence session; I hope you found that valuable. I thought his report was incredibly powerful. On that 25:1 ratio, I want to change that equation, and that is why I put forward a £2.5 billion investment i…”

“Thank you. I often get treated as a walking history book; I do not know if it is a compliment or not. I think that comparison is a little bit unfair. This Government will do more to tackle child poverty in a single Parliament than, I think, any of its predecessors. The measures we have taken—not just the two-child limi…”

“There are a few things I would say on that. You referred to the longer-term record. One of the things that happened during that longer term was a four-year benefit freeze, but it applied only to some benefits and not to others. The result was that the gap between what people could get on standard benefits and on sickne…”

“They do have discretion. This was an issue in carer’s allowance that had been sitting in the Department unresolved and unlooked at for many years, and we are now trying to get a grip of it. There have been a few issues like that, but this is definitely one of them. There are several elements to it, the first of which i…”

“Correct.”

“Do you want to deal with those in writing?”

“First, I thank the commission for its really important work. There are lots of elements to this, but to go back in history again, the big fundamental reform dating from the latter days of the last Labour Government and the early years of the coalition was implemented as part of the Turner recommendations. We had auto-e…”

“I mentioned the big disparity between ill health incomes and standard unemployment incomes, if you want to put it like that. The gap between them is somewhat closed by the changes we are making this year. It is not always a feature of international systems that you have such a big gap. I do not want to make too many pr…”

“We discuss this all the time, and we have discussed it particularly in relation to events in the middle east over the last three or four months. As I said a moment ago, I hope those pressures will ease, but it is a very unpredictable world. We have had a number of predictions that this conflict would be over and that t…”

“There are a host of them. We may come to this later in the discussion, but the significant thing about the British system is that contribution and contributory benefits play a significantly smaller role Our system is much more needs based and means-tested than the systems in other countries. That is probably the most s…”

“Thank you, Chair. It is right that people push for more. I totally understand it. I spoke to the Child Poverty Alliance in a speech last week or the week before. It said pretty much what you have just said, or a similar version of it. It was very pleased with what has happened, but it wanted to push for more. It is goo…”

“Not all of them, no.”

“The policy direction I have set out is quite clear: it is neither to circle the waggons around the current system, because I think it spends too much on failure and not enough on opportunity, nor to treat it as a fantasy cashpoint for every policy going, but instead to reform it and put work and opportunity at its hear…”

“There were a lot of numbers there. First, on the £400 billion, more than half of that is for the state pension. I do not know whether it is your party’s policy to cut the state pension; perhaps you can clarify if it is. But more than half—about 55%—of the bill that is quoted is the state pension. The health and disabil…”

“A bit like the answer to the question on child poverty the Chair asked me a wee minute ago, we do not have a formal target, but I really want to get these numbers down. Let me tell you what is achievable. I spent last Thursday in the Netherlands, which has a NEET rate one third of ours. I recommend the Committee having…”

“The first thing I would say is that the amount of young people in employment has grown by 1.6% since the last election; it is up 59,000. Under the last Government, it went up by about 1,000. We have a long-term problem and a long-term challenge. Not in any year since the financial crisis, which is the best part of 20 y…”

“It is a very good question, and the answer is yes. This is not “one and done”; there is an ongoing cross-Government effort. In fact, the interministerial group on this meets later today, jointly chaired by my colleagues the Minister for Employment and the Minister for Children and Families. They are working on this tog…”