UK Government<\/a> was forced into a late climbdown on a central plank of its welfare reform agenda in a bid to avert a major backbench rebellion.<\/p>\nIn a late concession on Tuesday, only 90 minutes before MPs were to vote on the Bill, ministers shelved plans to restrict eligibility for the personal independence payment (Pip), with any changes now only coming after a review of the benefit.<\/p>\n
Mr Lyons was scathing of the Government\u2019s approach while giving evidence to the committee.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it is important that I place on record just how appalled I am by this Labour Government and how they have conducted themselves over the last number of months,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe their approach has been shameful. I believe that it has caused significant stress for many in our society, even those who I believe would never have been affected by the changes that have been proposed and those that perhaps would have been.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has caused a huge amount of stress.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister added: \u201cWe\u2019re at very early stages of assessment, but we believe ultimately that it will end up costing, it will not create any saving at all in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I think that that has been an incredible mess, they\u2019ve made a real hames of it, if I\u2019m being honest.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the winter fuel payments, Mr Lyons said: \u201cThere are 336,000 pensioners in Northern Ireland and HMRC are now estimating that 86% or 288,000 will receive the winter fuel payment in 25\/26 because they have an income of less than \u00a335,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty per cent will not receive it in the UK as a whole, that is only 14% in Northern Ireland. Again, another mess by this Government. It was inevitable that they would have had to have changed course.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister said he had received confirmation on Thursday that Northern Ireland could potentially have a share of savings generated by any welfare fraud measures taken by the Executive.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there are savings through us tackling welfare fraud and error that are certified by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury will consider providing for us a share of those savings,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd those savings are massive.<\/p>\n
\u201cA very, very small amount of money that we put in (to introduce fraud prevention measures) and you can get incredible savings from those.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that could be a net benefit to Northern Ireland. We will be progressing that business case.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a paper with the Executive. I hope it will get on the agenda, because I think that could be very, very important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Lyons faced several questions on his draft anti-poverty strategy.<\/p>\n
The minister said he respected those who had criticised it, but made clear he did not agree with several of the claims that had been made about the plan lacking ambition and targets.<\/p>\n
He said he remained open during the public consultation phase to listening to alternative proposals.<\/p>\n
SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan put it to the minister that Sinn Fein First Minister Michelle O\u2019Neill had appeared to distance herself from his proposed strategy.<\/p>\n
Mr Lyons said he never encountered any \u201cpush back\u201d from Executive colleagues when the draft proposals were presented to ministerial colleagues for consideration.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s safe to say there was not a lengthy debate around this issue, and I certainly left that Executive meeting believing there was good consensus on the way forward, and that we were open to consultation on this and to listening to what people had to say, and that there was broad agreement on what we had in front of us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI listen to what others have to say. I will do that through the consultation period, but I was not getting push-back at all within the Executive and I believe that there was good unity among Executive colleagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand people can come under a bit of pressure, and they can change their positions, or they want to be seen to be on the right side, but I\u2019ve taken on board all of the criticisms that have been made of this, and we will certainly listen to those.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe a lot of those don\u2019t have a basis in reality.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope I\u2019ve explained and I\u2019ve reassured the committee today about the approach that I am taking.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if anybody inside or outside the Executive have changes that they want to make to that that they haven\u2019t expressed to me so far, I\u2019m open to listening to those, but I hope that they will also be willing to provide the funding that is necessary if it comes at an additional cost as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-241387","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-northern-ireland","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114803457644200519","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}