‘Angry’ First Minister slams ‘cruel’ benefit cut

Tens of thousands of Mid and West Wales families will be poorer, under Tory plan

A UK government policy to cut universal credit by £20 a week from April have been debated in the Senedd.

At a remote session of the Welsh Parliament on Tuesday (12 Jan) Labour’s Joyce Watson asked First Minister Mark Drakeford to oppose the plan – and to demand that the UK Government explain how hundreds of thousands of low-income families in Wales will cope with the £1040 per-year reduction.

Joyce Watson MS (Mid and West Wales) said:

“We know that this is an extremely stressful time for all families in all areas of the UK. It does seem rather inhumane to me to keep that pressure on those families who are struggling, in all sorts of ways, and the uncertainty that it is giving them that, in just eight weeks, they might have their funds cut even further.

“I assume the UK Government based this change on evidence that people needed an additional £20 per week just to survive…What evidence do they have that they can now survive on £20 less from next April. I haven’t seen the evidence.“

Last Spring, during the first wave of the pandemic, the UK Treasury increased the welfare payment for working-age people by £20-a-week.

Around 300,000 families in Wales receive universal credit, double the pre-pandemic number. The latest available figures from August 2020 show that the proposed benefit cut will affect more than 35,000 households in Mid and West Wales:

·         Carmarthenshire: 10864

·         Ceredigion: 3486

·         Gwynedd: 6928

·         Pembrokeshire : 7864

·         Powys: 6236

The true figures are likely to be much higher, however. Wales-wide, the number of universal credit recipients has gone up by more than a third since last August.  

In a passionate reply, Mr Drakeford promised to continue to lobby the UK Government to scrap the cut.

The First Minister said:

“We have and we will continue to lobby the UK Government to maintain the additional £20 universal credit weekly payment and to announce this without delay. If they do not, many households in Wales—300,000 of them—will lose over £1,000 annually. This uncertainty is causing untold levels of anxiety for some of our most vulnerable families.

“In November, the Chancellor said that he will be making a determination on this matter early in the new year. On 8 January we finally got a reply to a letter that the finance Minister here had written with counterparts in the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive back in November, saying that the Chancellor was going to wait for more evidence before making up his mind. Well, what evidence does he need?

“Presumably the £20 a week was a recognition of four years of freezing benefits for people of working age and the abolition of the family element of tax credits and universal credit. If they need further evidence, Llywydd, I’m happy to provide it myself.

“I’ll just for one moment tell you that my constituency office staff, as well as having spent the run up to Christmas having to give out food bank vouchers on a scale we’d never seen before, on Christmas Eve we were contacted by a single-parent family with five children who literally had nothing in the house at all with which to feed those children over the Christmas period. My office, like all of yours, people are working from home and they are having to do the very best they can in those circumstances, and they spent Christmas Eve running around trying to make sure that those five children had something to eat over Christmas. In the end, a fantastic local business provided them with the food they needed and we managed to get it to them.

“I cannot tell you how angry it makes me that, in the twenty-first century, we have a system that leaves children here in Wales in that position. They were in that position not by accident; they were in that position because the family cap policy of this Government had left that family in that circumstance. It is a cruel policy—a cruel policy—that shifts onto children the consequences of parents’ behaviour. I’m very happy to provide that evidence to UK Ministers when next I have an opportunity, and to say to them that those families need to know now—now—that they are not going to be asked to manage with £1,000 less after the end of March of this year.”

As part of the economic response to coronavirus, as well as the £20 uplift, the rules about who can claim universal credit were changed, making more people in low-paid jobs eligible for the payment, as well as out-of-work families.

MPs will today vote on a motion tabled by UK Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer saying the Tory government should maintain the current level of payment.