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Living Standards

I apologise, Mr Speaker. I am afraid I got carried away in the heat of the moment. I should have asked whether the Economic Secretary will press the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to review urgently their planned changes to child benefit, which are unfair, unworkable and ill thought through. As we have heard time and again in this debate, it cannot be right that a two-earner family each earning £42,000—a total of £84,000—would keep all their child benefit, but a single-earner family on £43,000 would lose it all at a stroke. When the Exchequer Secretary was asked to explain that, he seemed to indicate that it was a bit of a challenge, but he did not say how he was going to solve it and how he would remove that burden from the poorest. The Government should put the implementation of their child benefit cuts on hold and conduct an urgent review that will report before their changes come into effect next January. Labour Members did not come into this debate only to score political points in this Chamber, notwithstanding what some Government Members have said, or only to put this Government under pressure, although we have done both those things; we did so because we want the Government to listen. We want them to stop what they are doing, to re-examine the issues and to come back with a fairer alternative. There now seems to be some dispute at the heart of the Government; I listened to what was said in questions earlier today, when I heard the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions seem to blame the Treasury, and reports tonight suggest that No. 10 and the Treasury are at odds over this. The Government's own internal brief is for them to sort out, but either way the problem is of their own making. Perhaps they thought they would get away with it —although, again, we are hearing reports tonight that perhaps the Chancellor never really intended to implement these changes but the problems in the economy mean he is now not able to back away from them. If the Government do not listen today and they fail to act, they will be confirming that they are out of touch and that they have no understanding of the realities of life for families. There are families up and down the country who simply will not forgive them.