Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I thank all those who have spoken in this debate and I welcome the Secretary of State—I presume it means that he has not been reshuffled and can hear the end of the debate. I thank all those who spoke in the debate, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), the first Back Bencher to speak from our side. She described her inspirational social action, which we all think is fantastic. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) spoke of the brilliance of the east end of London, and my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) rightly paid tribute, in the week before HeartUnions week, to the role of our trade unions in our country in supporting working people.

My hon. Friends the Members for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) and for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana), the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), and my hon. Friends the Members for Bootle (Peter Dowd), for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) and for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) all, in their different ways, made the simple and direct point that poverty in this country is a result of political choice.

I want to refer to a song my grandfather wrote called “In my Liverpool home”. Many Members in this House may know it. Unfortunately, a version of it is sung on the football terraces and I hope you will not mind, Madam Deputy Speaker—I think the language is just about parliamentary—if I repeat it to make a point. It goes like this, “In your Liverpool slums, you live in the gutter with nothing to eat, you find a dead rat and you think it’s a treat, in your Liverpool slums.”

That chant is horrible. I hate hearing it. Lots of other football fans sing it and not just about Liverpool. In fact, I heard it on Sunday when it was sung by Cardiff fans about Swansea. The chant stings and it is meant to hurt. I quote it because it describes something we all know in our hearts to be true: poverty in this country is associated with deep shame. Football crowds choose the abuse because it is the ultimate indignity that they can hurl at the other side. So when I hear the Minister, in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), explain that the reason we have food banks in this country is because housing and energy costs are fixed and food costs can therefore be supported by charity, I have to tell her that I cannot accept it. I cannot accept that the answer to a failed Tory decade is charity, not change.

As we have heard time and again in this debate, the indignity of being unable to provide for yourself and your family is exemplified nowhere better than in the exponential growth of food banks in the last decade. Even before covid hit, 2.5 million food parcels were handed out to our fellow citizens—up from just thousands in 2010. In 2019, with the help of great organisations around the country, I wrote a report on how we could make ends meet and end the need for food banks in this country. I can never forget the women I met in Fife who started a food co-operative precisely because both of them had fallen foul of the two-child policy in universal credit and ended up at the food bank door. They were horrified to be there, so they found a way to provide cheaper food for local families to buy and give them back the dignity of choice. Their starting point was that the shame of begging was no way to help any family. That is why the phenomenon of food banks in this country cannot be allowed to continue. We applaud the community spirit of volunteers who help, but we have to ask ourselves: how long can this generosity be allowed to paper over the cracks of 11 failed years?

For every family in this country, whether or not they have ever needed a food bank, have ever sat around the dinner table and worried about paying their mortgage, or have ambitions for their children that they worry will not come to pass, we have to get to the cause of our country’s failures and put them right. In order to do that, we have to get to the root cause, which is a lost decade of economic growth that has been far too low. We have had low growth and it is now exacerbated by a broken Brexit deal, which promised a great deal and has delivered so many problems. Those problems have led to 4.5 million people in food insecurity and to 3.5 million people in insecure work, with terrible contracts that mean that they do not know how much they are going to earn from one month to the next. Even worse, the Office for Budget Responsibility is telling us that 18% of people, nearly one in five in this country, are working below their skill level. They could be doing more, they could be earning more, but they are not. That has led to low productivity, exacerbating the problem of low growth, which has been going on and on for far too long.

So what should the plan for change be? As many Members have said, we need a windfall tax on oil and gas to support the expansion of the warm homes grant. We could take action now: we could take action on VAT and we could help people with energy prices. I am at a loss to know why the Government do not do that. Of course, we need a long-term plan on energy, too. We need proper investment in sustainable sources that will help to ensure we can keep the lights on and help bill payers, too.

Again, I am at a loss to understand why the low-growth Tory party would also want to be the high-tax Tory party—and that is what you are. I am at a loss to understand why they want to compound the problems in our economy without the more fundamental changes to the tax system that we need. Madam Deputy Speaker, my apologies for the use of the word “you” there.

We do need fundamental reform. As I mentioned, 3.5 million people are in insecure work; that cannot go on. We need a very different labour market, with the Low Pay Commission able to get to the root of these problems: not just low pay itself but the poor pay progression that stops work helping people do better tomorrow and even better after that. Central to that is trade union membership. We need more people to have the help and support of a trade union membership card in their pocket and a union rep when they need them. We know that trade union membership helps people at work and helps to increase pay. We have to fix that problem in our labour market. We need to look again at the broken Brexit deal that is holding us back and we need a DWP that can actually help people to improve their prospects at work, not constant initiatives like kickstart and restart that underdeliver again and again, wasting the time and efforts of all the excellent work coaches up and down our country.

Finally, we need to really help people to move on and move upwards. Instead of the “Levelling Up” White Paper, which has a huge number of pages but promises very little, we need actual rebalancing, giving proper powers to regional mayors and others so they can deal with the labour market in their area, which they know best. We need to fix our infrastructure, from public transport to childcare, so that those people who at the moment are able to do little in work can be supported to move onwards and upwards. That is a plan for people’s incomes that will mean not only that they will have a better working life, but money in their pockets.

In so many ways, I felt today this debate has been kind of ludicrous. It is bizarre to have to explain to the party supposedly of free trade that, when supermarkets are giving away food to stop it going to waste and workers do not have enough to pay, so the price of huge amounts of valuable food is effectively zero, that is a market failure. Surely even the Tory party understands that the existence of food banks themselves is a failure. For our side, we know and see the indignity of vulnerable families sent to food banks. It is not just market failure; it is social failure, too. Our country deserves so much better and the time for change is now.