On 24th October Victoria Atkins MP spoke in the Universal Credit Roll-out debate.
She said, "Everyone in this Chamber wants people to have the opportunity to work, if they are able to work, and to be supported in the process of finding work. And when they do find work, we all want them to be paid properly. That, I hope, we can all agree on.
I hope we can also agree that the old system was a nightmare. I do not speak just from my experience of working in this place. In my previous career I worked in criminal courts across the country as a prosecutor for the Department for Work and Pensions.
I would work through a whole load of cases when I visited a magistrates court, such as Camberwell Green magistrates court, and I cannot say how many single working mums were being prosecuted by the DWP because they had gone one or two hours over their 16 hours.
Members of this House talk about being caring, but I dropped those cases myself—I took the decision that it was not in the public interest to prosecute. When did those cases happen? In the late 1990s and the early 2000s."
She went on to say, "When people speak about a caring welfare system, let us not pretend that the old system cared. Let us instead work together to make the new system work better for our constituents."
To listen to Victoria's full speech please click here.