Kit Malthouse

As my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) said, no one in this House doubts the importance of supporting children. Labour Back Benchers are feeling good about the fact that they have organised themselves to deliver what they see as a simple moral good, but as they know and we know, things are much more complicated than that. I know they think they have delivered a simple moral good because not a single one of them has mentioned the rate. None of them has questioned why the additional rate is set at £17.25, rising to £17.90. They have not asked whether that is enough to address poverty. They have not sought to get under the skin of whether this is a more complicated and nuanced argument than it might at first appear. Just the simple act is enough, without contemplating the unintended consequences. I am concerned that the Government are stumbling into a “Careful what you wish for” measure. First, a number of Opposition Members—and, indeed, the Secretary of State—mentioned the demographic time bomb that we face. There has been no discussion of this measure in the context of the overall fiscal problem that our children will face. At the moment, we have about 3.6 workers per pensioner in this country. By 2050, that will have fallen to two. How will we pay for all of this in the future? How will we fund it all without enormous debt? We have only to look across the channel at France to see what a fiscal eruption can look like, with civic disruption and unrest on the streets, when the necessary correction is made to a welfare state that is running out of control. I am afraid that that is exactly the situation we find ourselves in. No one is pretending that decisions about welfare are easy—they are not easy. Having worked briefly as a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, I know that these are difficult decisions, yet no one is questioning the micro-decisions that are made. It is simply enough to say to people, “We’re pumping money out there. Let’s hope for the best.” Why is the standard rate for the mobility section of the personal independence payment set at £30.30? I do not know. Does anybody else know? Is there an argument for it? These are the decisions that Ministers have to make on a daily basis, not just about whether we pay welfare but how much we pay. One of my concerns about this measure is that none of that is part of a wider conversation about the massive demographic steam train that is coming down the tunnel towards us. The second issue I have is that this legislation treats children as a burden to be somehow mitigated, necessarily because it includes them in the welfare bill, rather than as a bonus to be encouraged. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) said, we on the Conservative Benches would much rather there were work incentives that came alongside children. When I was briefly the Secretary of State for Education, I was inundated with correspondence and approaches from lots of highly productive and ambitious women who wanted assistance in work. They wanted some kind of bonus, relief or package to encourage them to have children, rather than a safety net that rescued women if they had children. For a country that needs more children, we need a tilt in our mentality and approach to move from mitigation towards encouragement; that is my concern about embedding the notion that people should have more children in the welfare system. The final issue I will raise is the legitimacy of the system, which has been raised by a number of Members. We often pretend that we do things for the first time in this country, whereas we can in fact look overseas for lessons, and we do not have to look very far. In France, where successive Governments increased family-related welfare with weak links towards work or contribution, it has created a wider resentment in society. Any successful welfare system must have an eye to legitimacy and consent from the wider population for it to exist.