I am going to focus most of my remarks today on universal credit, particularly as it affects women. Now, this was sold to us as a new, more flexible system that would help people move more easily between work and benefits, and would be easier for people needing benefits to understand and navigate. But behind these apparently laudable aims lurked a poisonous, archaic and, I would argue, as the UN rapporteur has said, profoundly misogynistic agenda. And I would say to Mark Isherwood, who is a fellow Member of this Chamber that I respect, the rapporteur used very strong language because he was outraged, and he was right to be, that our fellow citizens are living in these circumstances in the fifth biggest economy in the world. 

The universal benefits system was designed from the start to reinforce 'traditional' family values, paying benefit to one member of the household on behalf of all, and there are Members of this Chamber—Jane Hutt is one of them—who will remember how we campaigned so hard in the 1980s to protect women by giving them their benefits into their own pockets for themselves and their children. This was designed to reinforce, I will use the old-fashioned word, 'patriarchy'. 

Now, in practice, the single receiver of the benefits is almost always a man in a family where there is one, and this reinforces a stereotypical view of a male breadwinner with dependant wife and children. And I would submit that this is not desirable in general, but when that male breadwinner is an abuser and a beast, that puts women at real risk. This system discriminates against the second earner in a dual-earner household, which is mostly a woman, and that is not an accident: it was designed to do so. This has a terrible effect on women suffering domestic abuse and their children. They almost always suffer financial abuse as part of that abuse, and having no access to benefits in their own rights exacerbates this. Without any access to money, it is incredibly difficult to leave. And if a woman does get away, she has to make a fresh claim for herself and her children, waiting at least five weeks—and I'd emphasise at least five weeks—for the process. On what, I would ask the Members opposite, is she supposed to live in those five weeks? And we know what she lives on: she lives on food banks and the charity of the Women's Aid system.

This supports abusers and makes it harder for survivors to leave, and it is not accidental and it was not unforeseen. Impact assessments in 2011 showed that this would happen, and the Tory Government, supported then by the Liberal Democrats, chose to proceed anyway. Put this together—