Conservative peer threatens Lords vote on Universal Credit cut

Conservative peer Baroness Phillipa Stroud has threatened to bring a vote to the House of Lords on today’s cut to the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift.

Lady Stroud, chief executive of the Legatum Institute, a conservative think tank, previously worked as an adviser for Iain Duncan Smith during his tenure as work and pensions secretary.

She warned that over 800,000 people would be pushed into poverty as a result of the cut.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning she said: “By our calculations, the decision today to remove this uplift will push 840,000 people into poverty – 290,000 of those are children – and so this is … a really bleak day for many, many families up and down the country,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

She criticised the government’s argument that people should expect employment to top-up their income, saying: “There are people who are out of work who will move back into work, but there are also 450,000 who will move into poverty today as a result of this who have disabilities or who have children with disabilities.

“It is not just people who are in employment or should be moving into employment who claim universal credit and I think we have to be really honest about who is claiming UC and why they’re there.

“Our safety net is supposed to protect vulnerable people and that includes people who are sick, disabled and who have disabled children at this time.”

She also highlighted the lack of parliamentary scrutiny over the move, explaining: “At this moment in time, MPs have not voted on this at all, it’s been a decision taken by the executive. So my intention is to bring a vote in the Lords, [a] cross-party vote that would say to the House of Commons, think again on this issue.

“Is this something we really want to do as a civilised nation? Putting our poorest people into poverty is surely not the way forward as we come out of the pandemic.”

Anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has estimated that the cut will leave 5.5 million families across the United Kingdom £1,040-a-year worse off.