Income Equality and Sustainability

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, Covid has revealed further the underlying poverty in this country, as well as exacerbating the problem. There is no more obvious symptom of that poverty than food banks, demand for which was the greatest in 2019, before the health crisis started, so it is clear that when we look at current demand, it is considerably higher than it would have been without that base level.

Food banks are one of the biggest black marks against this country. It is self-evidently a social problem that a significant number of people cannot afford to put food on the table, because poverty itself is a social ill. It continues to surprise me how little food banks are raised as an urgent matter, perhaps because they have become too much an accepted part of the social landscape. Nevertheless, Philip Alston noted last year, as others have done, that they should not be a safety net. It is the Government’s job to provide at least that.

It is difficult to question the Government on this, since what we tend to hear about in reply is the public’s generosity and, since the health crisis, the departmental and charitable support for food banks—anything other than the current necessity for their existence. Can the Minister say whether the Government intend to take steps to make food banks unnecessary? I plead for a focused reply.

If you pull at food banks, inevitably you pull at so much else. Social problems are largely treated separately and compartmentalised, even as the evidence of a link between poverty and social problems such as mental health and domestic violence builds up. Yet that remains largely unaddressed by the Government.

In 2016, a Joseph Rowntree report on poverty estimated costs to the public purse of £78 billion per year, including healthcare, social care, schools, policing and children’s services. This is money that for social and financial reasons should be spent at the very beginning of the process, either through welfare or, better still, through a universal basic income, to provide the decent standards of living that all citizens have a right to and to avoid many of the social problems to which poverty leads.