Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:43 pm on 8 February 2022.
Well, Llywydd, I completely agree with Huw Irranca-Davies that that is the inevitable result of the mismanagement of the UK economy—that the costs of that mismanagement will be loaded onto those people who can least afford to bear that burden. Can I just pick up two points from the many powerful points that the Member made? I'm very glad that he made reference to the Way2Work programme, because I don't think I've heard it discussed on the floor of the Senedd, and it deserves to be. We've already seen the impact of the £20 cut in universal credit for families here in Wales, one of the most cruel decisions that I think any Government has made in the last 70 years. You've got to back before the war to the 1930s to find a Government that deliberately and knowingly took money on that scale out of the pockets of households that needed it the most. In our discretionary assistance fund, where we've been able to extend the criteria to help families, because of universal credit, last month 57 per cent of all the applications were because of people not being able to manage without that extra £20 a week. It really is an astonishing scale of distress that has been caused by that decision. And now, on top of that, as Huw Irranca-Davies has said, we have that announcement smuggled out, that in future people will only have four weeks in which to find a job for which they are skilled, experienced and capable. It takes five weeks to get a payment out of universal credit, and I think there were even Members here—Conservative Members here—who pressed, earlier last year, for the Chancellor to reduce that waiting time. So, it takes you five weeks to wait for a payment, and four weeks to wait to be sanctioned. I think that just tells you everything you need to know about where the priorities of the UK Government lie.
The second point that Huw Irranca-Davies made that I wanted to draw on, Llywydd, was the buy now, pay later scheme. So, here we are: the help that people will get with their bills will be that they themselves will end up paying later than they would pay now. Now, you might have thought, if you'd just listened to the way that UK Ministers talked about it, that this help will be available to people in the next few weeks. It will actually be October. It will be October before that help is provided. And I hear Ofgem saying that they intend to shorten the period over which they revisit the price cap from six months to three months, which means that, potentially, there will be two further price rises in fuel bills before people get even the help that the Chancellor has announced so far, and then they'll have to pay it back. That does not sound to me like something that is likely to be broadly welcomed by people who are struggling, not just with fuel bills, but with the national insurance contributions, with food prices rising, with inflation at 7 per cent. All of these make for a very torrid time ahead for the families in Ogmore, with which their Senedd representative, I know, will be deeply concerned.