To be Frank

Unveiling the Budget in July, George Osborne invoked the words not of a Conservative MP, but a politician on the opposition benches. As he announced cuts to tax credits, the chancellor quoted Labour MP Frank Field, who described the payments as simply “not sustainable”.

The quote will have come as a surprise to few onlookers, since it is not the first time a Conservative has pilfered the 73-year-old MP’s arguments. Nearly 40 years ago, in 1976, Conservative MP Timothy Raison cited his support when tabling an amendment that would have introduced the Right to Buy three years before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.

The year before, as director of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), Mr Field had called for a “wholesale transfer of council houses to their tenants” in a small, green pamphlet, Do we need Council houses?, arguing it would help to achieve “the twin principles of extending human freedom and creating a more equal society”.

Now, the MP for Birkenhead is going to be in a crucial position of interest for social landlords. Inside Housing has come to meet Mr Field because he’s just been elected to chair parliament’s influential work and pensions select committee, where he will be charged with closely scrutinising the government’s welfare reform agenda.

Mr Field’s ideology is a complicated web, sometimes contradictory at a glance, and rather difficult to navigate. For example, given his early support of the Right to Buy, one might assume he supports the government’s plan to extend the policy to benefit housing association tenants, funded by the forced sale of council properties. Indeed, he called for an extension to housing associations in 2012.

But at his paper-strewn desk in Westminster the day after the Budget, the MP frowns slightly at the suggestion. “I’m opposed to it,” he answers quietly. “I said that we should be thinking of selling these assets dear and using the money to reinvest, repair and build. [The policy] was picked up by Mrs T, who forgot about selling dear and sold cheap, and forgot about rebuilding or building, and used it for tax cuts. I’ve never been in favour of selling public assets off cheaply.”

There is something rather composed and reserved about Mr Field in person, with attempts at small talk repeatedly greeted with silence. He was a Conservative Party member as a young man, but joined Labour after he was “shoehorned” out of the Tories for his opposition to apartheid, he says.

“I only wished my own side 15 years ago paid attention to the pernicious effects of wage subsidies. We might have won the 2010 election.”

In his 1975 pamphlet, he advocates taking big construction firms into public ownership, yet he mainly sits comfortably on the right of the Labour Party.

The son of a factory worker who grew up in Chiswick, west London, he wanted to be a politician for a long time before he was successfully elected in 1979. Mr Field, who is unmarried, took the job at CPAG to make him “a better MP”, he says.

So how did it feel to be quoted by the chancellor as he declared his first Budget since beating Labour in the general election? “It doesn’t worry me. It’s all part of the theatre, isn’t it?” Mr Field says. He has seen five prime ministers try to reform the benefit system, and this is his second time in charge of scrutinising the welfare system, as he was chair of the social security select committee in the 1990s. Mr Field wistfully discloses: “I only wished my own side 15 years ago paid attention to the pernicious effects of wage subsidies. We might have won the 2010 election.”

The “pernicious wage subsidies” he refers to are tax credits: a system Labour introduced to top up the wages of the low-paid. In the Budget, the chancellor took the axe to them while introducing a ‘living wage’ of £7.20 an hour by April.

Tax credits debate

Mr Field has “always opposed” tax credits because they subsidise employers that pay low wages. However, he is aghast at the way the government has gone about slashing them. He thinks tax credits should have been scrapped only when the new living wage was fully introduced.

A couple of weeks later, Mr Field joins his party in abstaining on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill (which contains the tax credit cuts) on its second reading, hoping to oppose individual measures at the bill’s committee stage.

He is uneasy about the government’s removal of 18 to 21-year-olds’ entitlement to housing benefit. “I think it does show a huge gap between where the government’s experience runs dry,” he says. “If you’ve been thrown out because you object to the new boyfriend beating up your mum, are we saying they shouldn’t have any housing benefit?”

Yet Mr Field is well-known as a welfare reformer, advocating a contributory principle to benefits. He wants to drive down the benefit bill, and stop giving “yet more subsidies for landlords through housing benefit”. He supports the government’s policy of reducing social rents by 1% over four years.

The rent cut, which was revealed in the Budget, came as a shock to housing associations, which are preparing to reduce their development programmes as they are facing cuts by as much as 7% to turnovers. But Mr Field has little sympathy. “They’ve just got to run their organisations better and the best ones, of course, will rise to the challenge,” he says.

Mr Field’s relationship with social landlords has long been prickly. One of his main preoccupations has been the behaviour of people living in social housing and benefit claimants.

Mr Field’s relationship with social landlords has long been prickly. One of his main preoccupations has been the behaviour of people living in social housing and benefit claimants. In 2002, he introduced a private members’ bill that would have withheld housing benefit on the grounds of anti-social behaviour. In 2012, he tabled another bill that would have introduced a good citizenship test for the allocation of social housing. Controversially, Mr Field has argued that foreigners are disproportionately favoured for social housing.

Does he still hold this view after the 2011 Localism Act encouraged councils to give preference to long-established residents? Yes, he does. “[Government] has made recommendations. It’s left it up to local authorities. Many of them are scandalous in advancing the interest of people who have recently arrived in this country over people who are long established,” he says resolutely.

It is difficult to understand how Mr Field has drawn this conclusion. In 2013/14, 91% of social lets were made to UK nationals, according to the Department for Communities and Local Government.

So what is the driver behind Mr Field’s views on social tenants and benefit claimants? “Most of the reforms I’ve advocated have been how I respond to constituents and their needs,” he answers.

Tom Murtha, who was executive director of Merseyside Improved Housing (now Riverside) in the late-1980s, used to handle complaints from the Birkenhead MP. The constituency has some of the most deprived areas in the country, according to the Multiple Index of Deprivation. Mr Murtha says the MP “definitely appears to believe that within there are people who would fall into the skiver rather than the striver areas”.  

“He’s a very private man, he’s a very insular man, and I think a lot of his views are down to personal experience of surgeries in Birkenhead and dealing with individual cases,” he recalls. “I think he has a view that housing associations have not helped and have contributed to the problem. I don’t think anyone has understood Frank Field.”

Critical of sanctions

Mr Field is sometimes impatient (“Right, come on, one more minute,” he says, trying to speed to the end of our interview) and difficult to read. However tough on benefit claimants Mr Field appears, he is also a fierce critic of the government’s sanctions regime. In June, he wrote to Iain Duncan Smith over claims that terminally ill claimants have been asked when they expect to die.

So the government should not be expecting an easy ride from Mr Field’s new committee. He plans for the committee to travel the UK, and members will be invited to chair sessions where they hold expertise. “If we go to Scotland, for example, as we would do – I’m looking at the overlap between our work and the Scottish Parliament – Mhairi [Black] is a Scottish National Party member, so she will chair our sessions. It seems common courtesy to me,” he says.

It is an unorthodox way to run a select committee, but one that may appeal to those who want to make parliament more accessible. What do his parliamentary colleagues think of this approach?

“No idea, not interested,” he curtly replies. And that sums up Frank Field. His views are at times perplexing and often at odds with his own party. But he’s held them for decades and, Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.