SNP, Lib Dems, Greens and DUP all oppose controversial bill but Corbyn’s rivals in Labour race – Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall – opt to abstain

Jeremy Corbyn has become the only Labour leadership contender to unreservedly reject the government’s welfare bill, as his three rival candidates said they would abstain on whether to give the bill a second reading.

Corbyn told the House of Commons that the proposed legislation would make even bigger holes in the welfare state, with the result that more people would fall through into poverty.

Corbyn’s rivals – Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall – all said they would reject the bill through a shadow cabinet amendment but would not at this stage take their opposition any further and planned to abstain in the vote on a second reading.

It is not clear if Corbyn will benefit in the leadership ballot from his outright opposition to the bill, but most senior Labour figures agreed that the party had badly mishandled its response to one of the government’s biggest changes since its re-election.

Labour has been split over the decision by the acting leader, Harriet Harman, that the party needed to send a signal to the electorate by not voting against the bill, but should instead abstain, and express its support for the government’s reduction of the household welfare benefit cap.



Labour will decide its position on limiting child tax credit to the first two children after the new leader has been elected.

Harman tried to defuse a mounting rebellion, led by many Labour MPs in London and from among the new intake, arguing that her amendment was close to rejection of the entire bill. The Scottish Nationalists (SNP), Liberal Democrats, Greens and Democratic Unionists (DUP) all said they would reject the bill in its entirety.

“We stand for the right to work and the responsibility to work,” said Stephen Timms, who was standing in for the shadow work and pensions secretary, Rachel Reeves, who is on maternity leave.

“We believe the government has a responsibility to ensure full and fulfilling employment. We believe in making work pay, so that people are always better off in work, and that work is the best way out of poverty.

“The deficit has to be eliminated. We believe in controlling the costs of social security so that it is fair on the working people who pay for it, so it is there for the people who need it.”

Timms said the opposition supported a number of measures in the bill, but said the legislation did “very bad things as well”.



He focused on the government’s plans to scrap the child poverty target, pointing out that the bill instructs MPs to start referring to the Child Poverty Act 2010, which introduced the target, as the Life Chances Act.

“They aren’t now just changing the definition,” he said. “They aren’t interested in stopping child poverty – just stopping people talking about it.”

Timms was responding to a statement by the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who argued that the changes to the welfare system in the bill would help Britain move towards a “low tax, lower welfare, higher wage” economy.

Duncan Smith said the three key principles behind the bill were that work was the best route out of poverty, and that it should always pay more than benefits; that welfare spending should be sustainable and fair to the taxpayer, while protecting people in poverty; and that people on benefits should face the same choices as those in work.

“We will also continue to bear down on the deficit and the debt, achieving a surplus by the end of the parliament,” Duncan Smith claimed. “We are spending £3bn on debt interest payments alone every single month. £33bn per year. That’s £1,236 per household.

“Every pound we spend on paying off the debt is a pound we give to others, such as overseas investment funds, rather than necessary public services like schools and hospitals, or being able to reduce taxation further.”

The Green party’s Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion, accused the government of “playing politics with poverty”, arguing that her constituents would be hit hard by government plans to introduce a benefit cap of £20,000 outside London and £23,000 in London. She argued that Brighton was nearly expensive as London.

“The reality is that none of this is in any way absolutely perfect, but we believe this resets the balance better than just leaving a single figure at a lower level that makes London suffer more than the rest,” Duncan Smith responded.