Poverty

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and the House because I had to dash to get here from chairing a Select Committee upstairs and I left my notes upstairs. I am by no means as good an extemporary speaker as the noble Lord, who did have a bit of paper in his hand though it was clear that he was speaking from his heart and his head rather than what was written on the page. I will attempt to emulate him, but if my articulation is not as great as his I hope the House will forgive me.

The noble Lord, Lord Bird, termed this debate “the causes of poverty”. Clearly we are concerned about the causes of poverty—the statistics and the incidence of policy, on which we have some useful briefing—but he is really concerned about getting people out of poverty and, therefore, the amelioration or, indeed, the cure of poverty. In the great debate that we have been having over the past few weeks, the United Kingdom was constantly proclaimed as the fifth-largest economy and one of the richest countries in the world. It is therefore an indictment of this nation that it still has a level of poverty—in both relative and absolute terms—which has not changed much over the years. While relative poverty is the usual measure that Governments use to target changes in poverty levels, the reality for millions of our citizens, including many of our young citizens, is that real poverty means lack of a proper home, lack of a job, lack of support, and a desperate lifestyle on our streets and in inadequate accommodation around our cities and towns. That is an indictment of the fifth-largest economy and one of the richest countries in the world and we need to do something about it. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has spent a large part of his life attempting to do that, and I hope that Members of this House will emulate him.

We know, in a sense, about the cause of many people’s individual poverty. It is because they have had a life of insecurity. They may have missed out on education, have had a terrible family life, suffer from mental and physical illness, have been through bouts of, if not constant, addiction to drink, drugs, gambling or whatever. So we know quite a lot about the individuals.

However, poverty is not just an individual situation. Both the state and the charitable sector attempt to help people in poverty but they do not always help them out of poverty, as the noble Lord has said. One of the causes of continuing levels of poverty in this country is that we have a number of serious dysfunctions in large parts of our economy and society. Some noble Lords will have heard me rant at various stages about the total dysfunction of our housing market. Inadequate affordable housing, particularly for single people and young people in our cities, is a major cause of them falling into poverty. If they manage to find accommodation, the rents they have to pay eat into what little income they have and keep them in poverty.

Only the other day I was talking about the hugely dysfunctional bottom end of our labour market. At the worst end, as we discussed on Friday, there are instances of what can be classified as modern slavery. It goes through inadequate working conditions, zero-hours contracts, uncertain work and extremely uncertain levels of wages.

Historically, much of our system of taxation and social security was built on people being in a job or not in a job, whereas a large proportion of people who fall into poverty at any given time, and some who are in persistent poverty, are actually not in a constant-income situation or anything like it. Some may move from one to the other. The sudden move from working for 30 years in a factory to being redundant is dramatic and, of course, many of those we find on our streets, for example, are actually people who have ended service for this country in the Armed Forces and have been unable to cope with the sudden change into civilian life.

Those are the individual and specific cases, but they reflect a dysfunction for which this House and this and all previous Governments have been in part responsible. The changes we have made in the social security system have not addressed this problem. None of the changes we have attempted to make in the housing market has addressed this problem, and we have allowed the labour market to seriously exacerbate the issue of people falling into poverty because they are not in anything like permanent, full-time or well-rewarded jobs.

However, it is not all a problem for the state alone. I am probably a greater supporter of the big state than the noble Lord and many other noble Lords on the Benches opposite—I think that the big state has a serious role to play here—but I throw my mind back to when this country first became concerned about poverty in early Victorian times. In those days there was the friendly society movement, organisations which turned into trade unions, insurance companies, co-ops and building societies. They were all collective self-help organisations on the ground upwards which actually ensured that a significant proportion of our working class got out of poverty because of collective action at that level. When the previous Prime Minister talked about the big society I thought that he had got a germ of an idea of going back to that. Regrettably, that became a cover for outsourcing and privatisation and has actually disappeared from the lexicon of the Government’s rhetoric. It needs to come back, and we need not only a big state but a big society where local help can be given to the poor, and to help people avoid falling into poverty or to help them out of it.