LABOUR WILL AMEND WELFARE BENEFITS UPRATING BILL

Labour has tabled a 'reasoned amendment' to the Second Reading of the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill and will seek to put this to a vote in the House of Commons tomorrow.

Labour MPs will challenge the Government to support Labour's plan for a compulsory jobs guarantee for long term unemployed people. The vote comes as new figures from the IFS show 7 million working people will be hit by the Government's 'strivers tax'.

The new report from the IFS shows that 7 million working families will lose out under the government’s real terms cuts to tax credits and other benefits. It follows Children’s Society research which shows that a second lieutenant will lose £552 a year, a nurse could lose £424 a year and a primary school teacher could lose £424 a year.

The Government’s myths about who will be hit by their cuts to tax credits and benefits have now been exposed.  While millionaires get a tax cut, 7 million striving working families are paying the price for the economic failure of Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg.

It’s now clear. There's a Labour way to bring down the welfare bill and a Tory way.  The Tory way is to hijack support for working people. The Labour way is to help people work.

This hopeless Tory-Lib Dem Coalition has delivered a flatling economy and rising long term unemployment which has increased the welfare bill by over £13 billion more than planned. And now they want working people to pay the bill with a strivers tax that will hit 7 million families. Yet they're happy to give a £107,000 tax cut to 8,000 millionaires.

The Government’s Bill does nothing to create a single new job, fix the chaos in Universal Credit or the Work Programme which has been an utter failure.  So Labour will be asking MPs to vote for real welfare reform, a compulsory Jobs Guarantee that for the first time will end a life on welfare.

Ed Balls said: " Our plan is tough but fair and the Government should back it"

This is the full text of Labour’s amendment that will be voted on tomorrow:

“That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill because it fails to address the reasons why the cost of benefits is exceeding the Government’s plans; notes that the Resolution Foundation has calculated that 68 per cent of households affected by these measures are in work and that figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that all the measures announced in the Autumn Statement, including those in the Bill, will mean a one-earner family with children will on average be £534 worse off by 2015; further notes that the Bill does not include anything to remedy the deficiencies in the Government's work programme or the slipped timetable for universal credit; believes that a comprehensive plan to reduce the benefits bill must include measures to create economic growth and help the 129,400 adults over the age of 25 out of work for 24 months or more, but this Bill does not do so; further believes that the Bill should introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee, which would give long-term unemployed adults a job they would have to take up or lose benefits, funded by limiting tax relief on pension contributions for people earning over £150,000 to 20 per cent; and further believes that the proposals in the Bill are unfair when the additional rate of income tax is being reduced, which will result in those earning over a million pounds per year receiving an average tax cut of over £100,000 a year.”