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Work Programme (Wales)

My hon. Friend’s evidence, which the Secretary of State and her colleagues are inadvertently or deliberately ignoring, is absolutely clear. The same banks that strangled the economy are still not lending to businesses in Wales, even healthy businesses that have orders. What are the Government doing about that? They are all talk and no action. Their so-called Work programme is not about work because there is hardly any work available in Wales. Their so-called Work programme seems to amount to little more than a right-wing welfare programme that hits the poorest hardest. It is reactionary, stigmatising and self-defeating compared with our work programmes, which were firm, fair and effective, as my hon. Friend says. Although we support the principle of universal credit, which aims to simplify the benefits system, it is being delivered in a discriminatory and unfair way to cut welfare costs rather than to make work pay. We support employment support to get people back into work and we support insisting that those who can work must work, but those reforms could build on Labour’s reforms in government that made work pay. There is cross-party consensus that the welfare system needs reform, but the Secretary of State has failed fundamentally to listen to our arguments and, more importantly, the concerns of thousands of people throughout Wales who will be hurt by her Government’s reforms. At every step of the way, her Government refused to accept Labour amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill to introduce important safeguards. Let us be clear why we opposed that Bill: it was not because we are soft on scroungers, nor because we do not want work to pay. We oppose the Government’s plans, including the Work programme, because they are a disgraceful attack on benefits for cancer patients, patients who have helped to pay for those benefits. This Government want to cut off contributory employment and support allowance after just 12 months, which will hit people throughout Wales who have worked all their adult lives and who are recovering from cancer and hoping to resume work.