Debbie Abrahams

My hon. Friend may not know this, but the Minister and I were on the Work and Pensions Committee when the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Trussell Trust presented the case for the essentials. I think there is overwhelming support for such measures, but it is a question of how we do it in a sustainable way. If I may go on and develop my argument a little, he will see that I am moving in his direction. As we have heard, the new state pension will also increase by 4.8% in April to £241.30 per week, which is in line with the annual increase in the average wage earnings index from last May to September. Briefly, I will explain why it is important that the increase in UC should be above CPI and inflation. Although state support for working-age people and pensioners was fairly similar when annual uprating was first introduced in 1972, the uprating or increase in working-age social security support such as UC in line with inflation has not always happened. In the last 15 years, social security support for working-aged people increased by only 1% between 2013 and 2016, and it was frozen between 2016 and 2020. If anyone wants to look at the changes to inflation over the past 15 years, it makes interesting reading, particularly in 2022-23 and 2023-24, and the increase was far below inflation. As a result, since 2012 benefit levels for working-aged people and their families have lost 8.8% of their value. The UK’s social protection levels are among the least generous in the OECD. In 2021, the New Economics Foundation estimated that the actual loss in cash terms was equivalent to £14 billion. It also estimated that if spending had been maintained, there would have been 1.5 million fewer people living in poverty. People are often surprised to hear that over the last 20 years or so, the amount of DWP spending as a percentage of GDP—that is acknowledged as the only way we can fairly compare spending—has changed very little: it was 10% in 2005 and 11% in 2025, with the slight increase being accounted for by an increase in spending on pensioners. I think we would all agree that that is the right thing to do. What is alarming is that although poverty levels have been stabilised and will start coming down this year as a result of, for example, the removal of the two-child limit for social security support and the increase in the living wage, the depth of poverty is increasing.