Nia Griffith MP has used her first appearance at Parliament’s Welsh questions as Labour’s recently appointed Shadow Wales Secretary to attack the Prime Minister’s broken promise on child tax credits.
Speaking up at Welsh questions, Nia said,
“In spite of the Prime Minister promising before the election not to cut child tax credits, his Conservative Government is now pushing ahead with cuts which will mean an average loss of £1000 a year for a quarter of a million families across Wales.
Child tax credits currently help top up the income for families encompassing 60% of children in Wales and we should remember that the majority of these have parents who are in work.
The Secretary of State for Wales, Stephen Crabb MP knows perfectly well that independent experts from the Institute of Fiscal Studies have shown that 90% of the cuts to child tax credits will NOT be made up by any increase in the minimum wage, and to pretend otherwise in his parliamentary replies is totally disingenuous.
With these cuts to child tax credits which actually reduce incentives to work and will hit low and moderate income families across Wales, any pretence the Conservatives ever had to represent working people has been exposed as the sham that it always was.
It is not only families who will lose out: these cuts will suck two hundred million pounds out of the Welsh economy. This is money that families out of sheer necessity spend directly back into local high streets, so these cuts will have a negative knock on effects on the local economy, including job losses, in our communities across Wales.”