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The Minister for Employment (Alison McGovern)
As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke) on securing this debate on a topic that could hardly be more important. I will take the transcript of this debate as a submission to the child poverty taskforce because Members have made significant points today. I know that my colleagues in the ministerial taskforce and in the Child Poverty Unit in the Cabinet Office will read the transcript of this debate with interest, because, as I say, Members have made very important points.
I thank the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), and my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow East (John Grady), for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) and for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson), for their contributions. I had the pleasure of reading the submission from the child poverty taskforce event that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West held recently. I, too, read the story of the child she mentioned. We should not apologise for engaging emotionally with this issue, because nothing matters more than the fortunes of our kids in this country.
I also thank the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray). I welcome all the contributions that have been made as we move towards the publication of our child poverty strategy. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North recently met some of my DWP colleagues at the Springburn Jobcentre Plus office. I hope that she found them to be really helpful, because they will have enjoyed meeting her. I encourage all Members from all parties to engage with their local DWP teams in their local jobcentres. They are brilliant human beings and all constituency MPs can get a lot out of working with them, so I thank my hon. Friend for doing just that.
As has been made evident by this debate, poverty is a stain on this country, and tackling it is a priority. Our plan for change as a Government includes giving children the best start in life, as well as raising living standards in each and every part of the United Kingdom. Reducing poverty is vital to achieving both those ambitions, and to the lives and life chances of millions of people living in hardship right now. That hardship has been caused, as Members have said, by a combination of social and economic failures.
I feel an affinity with Glasgow. It is a wonderful city and shares many features with my own Merseyside. As on Merseyside, Glasgow’s industrial past of shipbuilding and the long-running effects of deindustrialisation have had huge consequences. One of the points that has come out of this debate really clearly is that all of that not only has poverty consequences but consequential health impacts. I know that picture in Glasgow and it is true for my home as well, so I feel it. These problems are acute and places like Glasgow have felt the consequences of policy failures over a very long period. We have heard some of the statistics already. Glasgow, the city, has the second highest level of people on out-of-work benefits in Britain. That is not a good enough future for a wonderful city.
In my role as Minister for Employment—though in my life, many times before—I have been fortunate to be in Glasgow to hear directly about not only the problems that the city faces, but the opportunities and the work to support people in Glasgow. Last October, I was pleased to meet a number of partners tackling child poverty there. We see good results when we are able to join up support for people, and that is the kind of approach I want to feed into our child poverty strategy when it is published. I apologise in advance for not being able to give all the details of what will be in the strategy, but I know that Members will understand and be patient. The strategy, which we are all anxious to have, is coming.
The DWP in Scotland is working closely with partners in Glasgow, including on identifying where we can join up support to make it better and employers that can help to give people a good chance in life. In November, as part of the child poverty taskforce, I was fortunate to meet child poverty charities, experts, parents and children in Glasgow. They told me their stories, their challenges and their priorities, putting those into the development of our strategy, which is focused on increasing incomes, reducing costs and supporting families with better local services, so Glasgow will influence it. We have heard from people, as we have done again today. We understand what they need. This has to be a cross-Government strategy. Members have mentioned health, housing and education, and we will work across the UK Government and with the Scottish Government to ensure that it is an effective strategy.
I will take a moment to describe action we have already delivered to tackle the scourge of poverty. We have taken some urgent steps before being able to publish the strategy. We extended the household support fund, which councils in England can use to support low-income households, so there was extra funding for Scotland through the Barnett formula. That support is there for crises, which is important, but beyond that, we know that we need to act on incomes and ensure that people can do better.
Just last week, therefore, our fair repayment rate for universal credit came into effect, reducing how much people in debt can have taken off their benefits to pay what they owe. A maximum of 25% of someone’s universal credit standard allowance has been reduced to 15%. On average, affected households will benefit by £420 a year, reducing the impact of debt on people. As my dad always used to say, “Out of debt, out of danger.” As a result of the change, 110,000 of Scotland’s poorest households will now be better off. That marks the Government’s first step into a wider review of universal credit to ensure that it works to help lift people out of poverty.
Thanks to our commitment to the triple lock, more than 1 million pensioners in Scotland will benefit from as much as £470 a year being added to their state pension this year, following the increase we implemented last month. That is on top of the biggest-ever pension credit take-up campaign, helping to drive up claims by 81% in the 30 weeks since July, compared with the same period a year earlier.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East asked a couple of questions about the Green Paper and our proposed changes. She asked me specifically about end-of-life care—I agree that the work of Marie Curie and others is deeply impressive. The DWP supports people nearing the end of life through the special rules for end of life. Those rules enable such people to get faster and easier access to certain benefits without needing to attend a medical assessment or to serve waiting periods. In most cases, they receive the highest rate of benefits. Those rules have been extended to apply to people who have 12 months of life to live, rather than six months, so that people can receive that vital support through the special rules six months earlier.
My hon. Friend also asked me about new employment support and how we will protect people where work is simply not possible. That is a really important point, because we know that there are people who need to be protected. The Green Paper outlines how we will consult on that and work on our safeguarding policies to make sure the process of protecting those people is improved. My particular passion on employment support is making sure that people are treated with real dignity, and that our fantastic frontline staff in jobcentres are able to see the person in front of them, not for it to be a box-ticking exercise, but to make sure that person has access to great opportunities. That is the whole point of our employment support changes.
The hon. Member for Aberdeen North asked about the process in Scotland. That will be finalised as we get towards the White Paper in autumn. As she pointed out, we need to make sure that we have got the solution right for Scotland. We will work with the Scottish Government to do that.
In her maiden speech last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East said:
“Education and further education are a route out of poverty. It gives you a sense of achievement, self-belief and the confidence that anything is possible.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2024; Vol. 754, c. 765.]
My hon. Friend was absolutely spot on with that sense that anything is possible. She was also right when she said earlier that poverty is theft, because you rob people of that sense of what is possible when you leave them with the indignity of poverty. That is why our whole strategy is about giving people chances and choices in life, with them learning skills and gaining qualifications. We are creating more good jobs through the modern industrial strategy. It is about unleashing the full potential of great cities like Glasgow so they have the growth and prosperity that they should have. Good jobs, with our plan to make work pay, will put money in the pockets of people in Glasgow and give them the dignity, self-respect, chances and choices that they deserve.
We need radical change to the help that we give people to escape poverty and to get a good job, but we need the whole Government to act together, and with devolved Administrations, collaborating in work that will see people do much better. I know that Glasgow is a wonderful place, which I have been welcomed to many times, but I also know the truth of what we have heard today—that people in Glasgow are robbed of years of good life that they should have, because of the shame of poverty. I am glad to be able to work with good colleagues from all parties who care about ending poverty to get the right set of policies in our strategy and to make those policies real, so that people have the chances, choices and dignity they deserve.