Mike Amesbury: It’s time to admit failure or step aside, Esther McVey

The section of Esther McVey’s speech to Conservative Party conference that grabbed immediate headlines was her claim that budget cuts in her department were “fake news”.  It’s not the first time the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has courted comparisons with Donald Trump. Her misinterpretations of the National Audit Office report into Universal Credit during a House of Commons debate in July were referred to as “Trumpisms” by DWP select committee chair Frank Field, and any suggestion that our welfare system has not faced real terms, real life, cuts over the last eight years is, of course, fake news in itself.

What makes it all the more surprising is that the evidence and consequences of her department’s failures are right on the Secretary of State’s doorstep. As the Labour MP for Weaver Vale, I don’t have much in common with Esther McVey – but I do share a constituency border with her. As such, our constituents use the same JobCentre and foodbank. It’s a foodbank that has seen demand rise by 41% in a year, a rise that staff, charities and others put down to the failings of Universal Credit. They are clear, as we are in Labour, that nothing short of halting the current approach and implementing major and radical reform is good enough.

Her suggestion that the DWP is building a welfare state fit for the 21^st century couldn’t be further from the truth for my constituents, and the same must be true for hers. The National Audit Office says Universal Credit is failing to achieve its aims and there is currently no evidence that it ever will. Last month Liverpool City Council produced a hard-hitting report highlighting the many unexpected consequences of Universal Credit on that City. All real life experiences – and certainly not fake news.

If Esther McVey wanted a reason to reference her home town in the speech, she would have been better off responding to the recommendations and realities of that report rather than offer glib comments about Labour’s conference.

The announcement of £39m for Citizens Advice to support people to access Universal Credit is welcome – after all, few organisations know the chaos that it has caused as well as Citizens Advice do. But it comes with no new money, and for the thousands of people already failed by Universal Credit it is too little too late. This smacks of a department asking somebody else to clean up the mess it has created. It is also far from certain that, even with their undoubted expertise, Citizens Advice alone can make a success of a policy that needs a complete overhaul.

If her speech revealed a denial of the failures of Universal Credit, it was nothing compared to her level of denial about the wider economy and the damage her department is causing. As our own spokesperson Margaret Greenwood pointed out after McVey’s speech, there was no acknowledgement of four million children growing up in poverty and no recognition of the million people on zero-hour contracts. An attempt to paint her party as supportive of disabled people was as thin on evidence as it was insulting to the thousands of disabled people who’ve seen vital support slashed and continue to face major barriers to work.

Shocking as these omissions were, her conference speech did acknowledge who might be to blame for this eight-year-long record of failure. McVey proudly told delegates that she had spent all her ministerial career in the DWP, and has held a position at every level in it. Is this really cause for celebration? At least the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has been open with us about who has been present during the consistent failure of this department. The next step is for her to take responsibility for that failure, and either fix it or step aside for someone who will. We in the Labour Party stand ready and willing to do so.

Mike Amesbury is MP for Weaver Vale and shadow minister for employment.