Speeches by McFadden.

“I know that you have a deep interest in this. This system across the whole piece is dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in the country. When it goes wrong, it can result in the worst possible outcomes. As you and the Committee members will know, there have been cases where people have taken their own lives …”

“I have no reason to hide from information. If there is more information, I want to know it. When I speak to our work coaches, I think they really try to care for people, but there is no denying that this system has made mistakes. It has made decisions that have contributed to people’s distress. Those things have been r…”

“There is a lot there. I am an optimist about growing older; I hope people see a productive working life when well up in years. One part of the story is that the increase in the state pension age has been accompanied by increasing rates of employment in people close to state retirement age, but you are right that anothe…”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“Yes, we are quite close.”

“Let me take every opportunity, including this one, to encourage anyone watching to apply if they might be entitled to pension credit. They have nothing to lose by applying. I encourage every pensioner who thinks that they might be able to access this help to take it up. It is theirs as a right. There has been a long-te…”

“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…”

“Correct.”

“This is a really important point—I am glad you have asked about it—not just for DWP but across Government. Data sharing can really help. We began our discussion with Connect to Work and devolved systems, and data sharing is a really important part of that. There are trust issues, and people want their data to be protec…”

“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…”

“There are two main things. Of course, we have the basic state pension, which rose by 4.8% last year, if my memory serves me right. That was worth about £575 a year to people on the new state pension—less on the older state pension. That is a sizeable increase. For those who do not benefit from that—we were speaking abo…”

“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 really important. Of course, there is an overlap because an increasing proportion of young people are, as we said earlier, registering for long-term sickness benefits. I want us to take this seriously. We have not got into the Access to Work system this morning, which we might. We are employing 500 people to clea…”

“When it is published, you will see that what we are trying to do through the action plan is learn from what happened before and think in particular about how we communicate with people. How you communicate with people and where they get their information now is of course vastly different to the way it was in the past. …”

“That I will always put work and opportunity at the heart of what I do. What I have tried to do since being appointed is to say that we need to change the question the system asks from simply assessing people for benefit entitlement to asking, “How can we help to change your life?” I think that is a more dynamic, fuller…”

“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…”

“There is a lot in that. It has gone up as a proportion of GDP by about 1% over the last six or seven years—”

“I am not announcing benefit changes today. We have just implemented a benefit change from April, which the Committee will know about, on UC health. We have cut in half the difference between the UC health rate for new claimants and the standard rate—it goes back to the questions Ms Baxter raised to me. There are two pa…”