00:01Ali McGovern, who is a Labour minister, has said that work is not a route out of poverty.
00:07I'll quote her.
00:08It is simply no longer the case that work, by definition, provides a route out of poverty.
00:14It is also true that getting any job is not a route to better pay.
00:19What's your analysis of that statement by Labour?
00:24Well, I think the problem is that that reflects the Labour mindset,
00:27which is much more towards giving people handouts and keeping people on benefits,
00:32compared to the approach we take, which is that work is the best way out of poverty,
00:37work is the best way to improve your situation,
00:40and the right thing for people to do is to be supporting themselves and their families,
00:45and that's what the government should be trying to achieve.
00:48There's one reason we believe that they don't,
00:50and why they're having so much trouble getting welfare savings through their MPs,
00:54even with such a huge majority.
00:55But the welfare bill did balloon under the Conservatives, didn't it?
01:00You had Ian Duncan-Smith, your predecessor, introduce universal credit,
01:04the benefit bills came down.
01:07How on earth did you allow it, as the Conservative government,
01:10to get this high, this quickly?
01:13We're talking about £86 billion in a decade.
01:15That is unprecedented.
01:18The benefits bill back in 1985, I looked it up, was £12 billion.
01:22That's equivalent to the savings you're saying that we now need.
01:25That's the entire benefits bill in 1985.
01:28So, as you just said, in the period between 2010 and the pandemic,
01:35we brought the welfare bill down.
01:37We did a particularly good job at getting people back into work,
01:40introducing universal credit, which was a big reform and hard to do.
01:43It was controversial in Parliament,
01:45but we did it because it was the right thing to do to make sure that work paid.
01:49What we then saw, more recently, as I said, coming through the pandemic,
01:52was this rise in people claiming sickness benefits,
01:54and the sickness benefits system not working for the world that we live in.
01:58One of the things that has happened,
02:00and I campaigned on mental health when I was first a Member of Parliament.
02:04I wanted to see better treatment in the NHS
02:06for people with serious mental illnesses.
02:08We did work that reduced the stigma of mental health,
02:11but what we have seen is this huge rise in people coming forwards
02:14with claims to do with mental health,
02:16and, as I said, the shift from face-to-face to more telephone assessments.
02:20These are both things that need to change to fix the system.
02:22We had reforms in progress in the run-up to the last election,
02:26which the Labour government has abandoned.
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