Living Standards: East of England

Alex Mayer Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Clive Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman is a champion of such issues in his constituency, and I agree: poverty is very often out of sight, out of mind. The dispersal of rural poverty makes it easier to hide, and harder for organisations to point out, but he does a very good job of doing so. His point was well made.

[Alex Mayer (Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard) (Lab)]

Continuing on the theme of averages, as council areas get bigger, the averages are skewed a little. Within my area, which is already in a large unitary authority, life expectancy can vary by up to eight years. If the Government say, “Hooray! The council area is getting a Best Start family hub!”, I ask, “Where?”, because it could end up in a leafy village or in an area of deprivation. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to redouble our efforts to find pockets of deprivation, and perhaps use artificial intelligence as a new tool to do so?

[Clive Lewis]

I thank my hon. Friend for an interesting contribution. I will take a time-out on the AI component. I think it has a place and could, I am sure, contribute something, but the real way to ensure that resources are going to the right place is to ensure real devolution: empowering communities, local government and local people to decide where the money is spent, because they know best. Ultimately, pushing power down is how we will get better outcomes.

Let us be blunt: living standards as currently measured give us a snapshot, but not the whole picture. They can tell us whether the tills are ringing, but not whether the people are thriving. Look at Norwich: a zero-hours care worker has no work-life balance to speak of; they have work-life whiplash. Mental health referrals in Norfolk are up 40% since 2020—we will not find that in an Office for National Statistics income chart. The poorest wards in my city have five times fewer parks per person than the richest. Try raising kids in a concrete cage in one of the most polluted parts of the city—where, unfortunately, our Government subsidises electric SUVs that, through their brakes and tires, churn out more particulate matter than smaller electric vehicles—and then tell me that their living standards are on the rise.

Let us look at Norwich South. We had more than 500 sewage pollution incidents last year. My constituents are not comforted by fines levied on Anglian Water; their lived standard is filthy rivers, dead fish, cancelled swims and massive bill hikes, while they watch multimillion-pound payouts to shareholders and executives—and that is after the passing of our much vaunted Water (Special Measures) Act 2025. So when the Government cheer that GDP is up, or that the average household is a few pounds better off, I say, “Growth for whom? Growth for what? Growth at what cost?”

I acknowledge that this Labour Government have already taken steps to make a difference. The extended household support fund for councils, soon to be replaced by the crisis and resilience fund, has been a lifeline for many. Our new Best Start hubs, replacing the axed Sure Start programme, will help millions, as will our new universal breakfast clubs and investment in home energy efficiency, which will cut bills for years to come. Those are brilliant and welcome tangible measures, but we cannot stop there.

Too often, we give with one hand and take with the other. We extend support, but keep the two-child cap that pushes hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. We invest in households, but cut disability benefits that provide dignity and security for millions. We offer relief, but leave the structures that drive poverty and insecurity untouched.

As the charity Norfolk Community Law Service told me:

“We’re seeing a growing number of families live in extreme poverty, struggling with benefits that don’t provide enough to live on, unable to feed themselves properly or heat their homes. This is not because they are lazy or unprepared to work hard in their lives, but often because they are caught in the poverty trap, unable to break free.”

The problem is compounded by neglect of prevention. As Age UK in Norwich explained:

“The lack of strategic investment into community, preventative services is not only threatening the voluntary sector—it’s chipping away at the foundation, the NHS and social care so many rely on.”

Here is the challenge: unless we deal with those deeper structures, we will never truly lift standards in the fullest sense of the word. That means overhauling our tax system. Yes, we need higher taxes on wealth, windfalls, capital gains and inheritance, but we must also face a hard truth: without structural reform, much of that revenue simply flows straight back into the pockets of large corporates—companies that now absorb vast amounts of public money in contracts, subsidies and outsourcing while skimming billions in excess pay, dividends and profit.

Tax reform must go hand in hand with a clampdown on corporate capture. I fear that many of my colleagues now in Government understand that after 45 years of privatisation, deregulation and outsourcing, the levers of state are increasingly connected to very little. “Deliver, deliver, deliver,” we are told; but how can we deliver when the accelerator and the gearstick are connected to thin air?

Let us not forget that, when those same interests come under pressure, they rarely look in the mirror. Instead, they reach for the oldest trick in the book and tell us that the problem is not profiteering landlords or privatised monopolies. They tell us that the problem is foreigners; that migrants are the reason wages are low; that Europe is the reason services are stretched; that some other is to blame. That scapegoating is not accidental. It is structural. It protects an economy built on extraction—extraction of wealth, of labour, of nature—and it corrodes our democracy, replacing solidarity with suspicion, and common purpose with division.

Labour, at its best, has always known better. There was a time when our movement understood that redistribution of income, wealth and power was not a footnote to our mission—it was the mission. We understood that we could not simply leave the means of production, distribution and exchange in the hands of those who use them to extract, rather than to serve; that, if our economy was to work for the majority, if standards of living and wellbeing were to rise, people needed more than just money in their pocket. They needed more say, more power and more ownership over the things that make life bearable and meaningful.

That meant public ownership of essential services, from water and energy to rail and post. It meant universal basic services such as healthcare, transport, housing, education and, in our age, internet access. It meant building new institutions to strengthen the cohesion of our society: co-operatives, trade unions, community media and local assemblies. It meant giving people not only the means to live, but the means to shape the communities in which they live.

These are the specific asks I would like to put to the Minister. I ask the Government to introduce rent caps in high-pressure areas, as seen in Austria and Scotland, so that families are not priced out of their communities; to cap food prices for a basket of essential goods, as France and Hungary have, so that no child goes hungry because the basics are unaffordable; to abolish the two-child cap on benefits and reverse the recent disability payment cuts—policies that undermine dignity and trap children in poverty. I ask them to launch a major programme of public housing construction using public land to build secure council homes for rent; to take our water companies back into public hands, ending the scandal of dividends flowing abroad while sewage pours into our rivers; to mandate universal broadband and affordable transport access as basic services in a modern economy.

I ask the Government to overhaul the tax system, to close the loopholes, tax wealth properly and ensure that revenues are not siphoned off into dividends and corporate profiteering, and to tie corporate subsidies and contracts to strict conditions on pay, investment and environmental responsibility. Finally, I ask them to stop mainstreaming racism. By all means, secure the borders and control migration to what we need, but take out the toxicity. Open secure routes and defend and deepen human rights—do not water them down—for all our sakes.

Those are not revolutionary demands, and they are not even radical demands; they are common-sense measures to ensure the economy serves the public, not the other way around. We need a plan for transformation, rather than tinkering at the edges or hoping that growth alone will deliver fairness by accident; a plan in which the demos, the people, have a greater say on how their life, and the life of their community, is shaped.

The alternative is stark. Failure to do those things will deliver our country into the hands of the authoritarian right. If we get this wrong, it will not mean some marginal difference in some marginal metric of living standards—it will be the difference between civil co-existence and barbarism, between a society held together by solidarity and one held together by scapegoating and fear.

People are crying out not just for a few extra pounds in their wage packet, but for security, dignity and hope. That means we must confront the extractive model, rediscover our roots in redistribution and democracy, stop pandering to racism and rebuild the social compact that once gave Britain both prosperity and purpose. People are not simply consumers to be measured or units of labour to be costed. They are the economy—not components of it, or cogs in someone else’s machine; they are the economy, and we seem to have forgotten that. If we forget it, we will not only fail to raise so-called living standards, but we will fail to rebuild trust, fail to hold our community together and fail to protect our democracy from those who would happily divide and rule. We can do better.

Bank Closures and Banking Hubs

Alex Mayer Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Emma Reynolds)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I want to thank and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) on bringing forward this important debate, which was heavily subscribed across the House. He highlighted the needs of his constituents, particularly the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled. My hon. Friends the Members for Weston-super-Mare (Dan Aldridge), for Bolton South and Walkden (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt), and the hon. Members for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas), for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) and for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green) all stressed the importance of in-person services, particularly for vulnerable constituents.

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley), for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) and for Gillingham and Rainham (Naushabah Khan), the right hon. Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke) and the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) on securing banking hubs in their constituencies— in the case of my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales, two banking hubs are soon to open, as I understand it.

Other Members spoke about their campaigns to secure banking hubs, including my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey), my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin)—who is apparently expecting a call from one such bank— and the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking). My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) and the hon. Members for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about the importance of access to cash and banking services in rural areas.

[Alex Mayer (Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Emma Reynolds]

I do not have very long left, I am afraid.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare rightly stressed the importance of these services in urban areas as well. I will not go through all of them, but we heard lots of really good speeches on both sides of the House and a surprising degree of consensus, which is not always the case. It is interesting to see the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth and Ashington so closely aligned, which is not something I expected.

Through the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, the last Government legislated to protect reasonable access to cash, giving the Financial Conduct Authority new powers to ensure that communities could both withdraw and deposit cash. The Government recognise that the ability to access cash and in-person banking support remains essential for many, particularly in rural areas and for vulnerable people, which is why we have secured the industry’s commitment to roll out 350 banking hubs by the end of this Parliament, ensuring that access to face-to-face banking is protected. Over 220 have been agreed, and more than 160 are open.

Banking hubs are a voluntary initiative by banks as part of meeting their access to cash obligations, as legislated for in FSMA. Many Members have asked the Government to demand that Link reviews its assessment procedure, but it is worth reminding colleagues that the process for deciding where hubs are needed is independently determined by Link, the operator of the UK’s largest ATM network. The Government are not minded to review the legislation passed by the previous Government.

A number of Members—including the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway, who mentioned this to me yesterday as well—talked about ATMs’ lack of reliability. I have done a little bit of work on that, and Link assures me that it takes a hard line with its members over the functionality of ATMs. However, I urge Members to raise these issues with me, so that I can raise them with Link. I am soon to meet John Howells, the chief executive of Link, and I will feed back the concerns that Members have raised today about how Link applies its criteria.

I know that this is not necessarily the conclusion to the speech that Members were hoping for, but we think it is important that local communities have access to cash and banking services, which is why our Government are committed to rolling out 350 banking hubs across the country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alex Mayer Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2025 Commons Chamber

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was asked—

[Alex Mayer (Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard) (Lab)]

1. What steps she plans to take to encourage saving.

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Emma Reynolds)]

The Government are committed to supporting people to save and invest, and we want to build a better investment culture. Currently, 85% of people with savings income do not pay tax on it. As we announced at the Budget from next month, we will expand the help to save scheme to all universal credit claimants in work.

[Alex Mayer]

The nation’s favourite way to save is through premium bonds. Does the Minister think that they are good for the country and a valuable way of encouraging saving? For everyone who has them, they are quite exciting every month.

[Emma Reynolds]

I think that premium bonds do provide excitement, not least in my parents’ household, where they are very popular. They are already well promoted and popular, and we have seen annual investments in premium bonds increase by more than 50% since March 2019. The funds raised through them go towards supporting vital public services.