Universal Credit

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 12 January 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:13, 12 January 2021

Well, Llywydd, I'm very happy to do just that. 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, Llywydd? 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.

But, Llywydd, 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.