Helen Whately

I do not agree with the hon. Member. I am going to talk about poverty in a moment, so if he will just hold on, he will hear my view on that point. This is a ticking time bomb. If we do not solve this problem, our economy will collapse, yet opposite me sit members of this Labour Government who have just shown us, with the welfare chaos over the past couple of weeks, that they will not, and indeed cannot, fix this. In fact, they are just making it worse. If hon. Members cast their minds back to early 2020, they will remember that Labour was in the midst of a leadership election. The now Prime Minister made a clear and unequivocal commitment to “scrap…punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.” Then, once he had secured the leadership of the Labour party and the election neared, he changed that tune. He said Labour was not going to abolish the two-child limit. He acknowledged the need to take tough decisions and not to make unfunded spending promises, and on this we can agree. But saying that he would take tough decisions is not the same as actually taking them. Take for example the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, now just called the Universal Credit Bill, which Labour voted through last week. It was meant to save £5 billion. The first U-turn brought that down to £2 billion, and the next U-turn then brought it down to—well, the Minister on the Front Bench at the time could not tell us, but the consensus is that it will now cost the taxpayer around £100 million.