Speeches by Timms.

“I will not give way at the moment. The Bill opens up that possibility, and it deals with work disincentives inserted into universal credit by the previous Government. The current system forces people to aspire to be classified as sick in order to qualify for a higher payment, and once so classified, it abandons them. W…”

“Let me make a little bit of headway before I give way again. Under the last Labour Government, in the 12 years up to 2010, the disability employment gap fell steadily. In 2010, as soon as the Tories and Lib Dems took over and scrapped the new deal, it stopped falling, and it has barely shifted since. This Bill opens up…”

“I can assure my hon. Friend that the review is not intended to save money—that is not its purpose. The review is to get the assessment right and make sure we have an assessment that will be fit for the future.”

“No, Madam Deputy Speaker. Let me tell the hon. Gentleman one of the things that the Bill does. Part of the problem is that it is very hard to bring up a family on the standard allowance of universal credit. The Tories reduced the headline rate of benefit to the lowest real-terms rate for 40 years. Families have to rely…”

“Let me make a little further progress. I still have not quite answered the question put to me in the first place in the intervention by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). His question was about whether the outcome of the review will be implemented in primary or secondary legislat…”

“I want to make some further headway. In her speech, my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) drew attention to the fact that she and I had known each other for a long time, and that is correct. She urged us to listen to the voices of our constituents. In February, someone I had not met before came t…”

“I will not be giving way again. The Tories were never really interested in the disability employment gap. They had a brief flirtation in the 2015 general election campaign, when David Cameron suddenly announced a target to halve the gap. Unfortunately, as soon as that general election had been safely won, that target w…”

“My answer to my hon. Friend is the one I gave earlier: we need to await the outcome of the review and the assessment that it develops to determine whether it will be implemented in primary or secondary legislation.”

“We will set out those figures in the usual way. The last Government wanted to change the personal independence payment from cash to vouchers. They wanted to take the independence out of the personal independence payment, and we opposed them. It has been suggested that the benefit should be frozen, but the costs that th…”

“I need to make a little more progress. As a number of Members highlighted in the debate, including my hon. Friends the Members for Clwyd North (Gill German) and for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), a key step in this Bill is the first ever permanent real-terms increase in the standard allowance of universal credit. …”

“Let me say a little about the announcement I made in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes) earlier on. We have listened to the concerns expressed in the debate, specifically about the new four-point threshold being implemented before the outcome of my review. As I have said, we wi…”

“Yes, I can confirm to my hon. Friend that that is the case. We will table the amendment to do that. Let me say in answer to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann), who raised this point perfectly properly in the debate, that we will also remove the parallel provisions for Northern Ireland. He suggested that tha…”

“This is the universal credit health premium that we have just been talking about?”

“I think you are absolutely right. I am sure that the cost of living challenges are a very big factor in what has happened. People who may well have always been eligible but have not in the past claimed benefit are now doing so and that has driven this very substantial increase. As I say, the current trajectory is not a…”

“Yes, depending on exactly what inflation turns out to be. It may be that the total income does not quite keep track with inflation.”

“For somebody who is receiving the universal credit health premium, their income will typically consist of the universal credit standard allowance and the universal credit health premium. The latter will be frozen in cash terms. The universal credit standard allowance is being increased by more than inflation. If you ad…”

“What we have said is that they will be able to receive the higher frozen rate of the universal credit health element and in addition we will assure them that they will not need to go through universal credit reassessments in the future. Those are the two key things that we envisage.”

“I completely accept much of what you say. Indeed, the Resolution Foundation has set out quite helpfully that working age social security spending as a percentage of GDP is not much more now than it was before the 2008 to 2010 recession, but as you say the share on disability and incapacity benefits is very substantiall…”

“That is a very important part of the system that we will need for the future.”

“The work capability assessment will be in use for some time yet, I think another three years or so. The severe conditions criteria and whether somebody fulfils those criteria comes out of the current assessment, but once the WCA has gone we will obviously need another way of establishing that and that requires some ser…”