Holiday Hunger Schemes

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Mike Kane

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, as it was to serve under your leadership as a young councillor on Manchester City Council. I suspect the love-in will cease there as we approach Manchester derby day on Sunday, given that we support different colours of the city. We will just have to try to get along as best as we can over the next few days.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) on her excellent speech and on securing this timely debate. I will be critical of some Members in a moment, but it was really interesting to hear the passion with which all Members spoke about this issue in their constituencies. I will know my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for ever more as the sandwich lady, and the hon. Members for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) know exactly what is going on in their constituencies with respect to hunger. Before I came to the Chamber, my parliamentary assistant sent me my monthly digital bulletin to sign off. In it was an appeal for more food for food banks, which are running desperately low as we approach Christmas. That is a worry for many of us in our constituencies.

Hon. Members will be aware that I am not my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck), who should be answering the debate—she cannot be here, for which she apologises. I pay tribute to her and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) for their work on the All-party Parliamentary Group on hunger. They do not just walk the walk on this issue—they talk the talk. They set up a charity to tackle it after touring constituencies up and down our land.

Let me return to my Scottish colleagues for a second. After you, Mr Stringer, bid for the Olympic games for Manchester and secured the Commonwealth games, I became a huge friend of Glasgow’s. As a director of Manchester velodrome, I supported Glasgow through its bids to build a velodrome and to host the Commonwealth games. However, having changed hue last May, Glasgow City Council is still being forced to implement millions upon millions of pounds of cuts—£53 million of cuts to services in the constituencies of the hon. Members for Glasgow Central and for Glasgow South West—by the Scottish Government. Last year, it cut more than £5 million from education budgets. We begin to see that it is not just central Government who are to blame for this issue—there are other Governments up and down our land who have not walked the walk or talked the talk. I am sorry to have to raise that, but it is the case, and there is sometimes very little scrutiny in this place of what goes on north of the border.

[Alison Thewliss]

Does the hon. Gentleman not appreciate that the Scottish Government have a fixed budget, a lot of which comes from this place? Austerity comes from Westminster and is only passed on up the road to the Scottish Government and then to Glasgow City Council.

[Mike Kane]

I did not realise that we had any Liberal Democrats in the room. That is the old cry of, “This is the problem and they are to blame for it,” without the Scottish National party’s taking any responsibility, despite its control over lots of levers of power, which is important.

As has been pointed out, more than 3 million children were at risk of hunger during the school holidays this summer because they were not getting their term-time free school meals. That is shameful. At the heart of the debate is the impact of the Government’s eight years of unrelenting and indiscriminate austerity. Universal credit is failing in many of our constituencies, and the urgent question on it the other day was really interesting. There should be preferential options for the poor when we make public policy in our country, and universal credit should have a preferential option for those who are in the poverty of having mental health problems. Its impact on those people causes much stress and tips them over the edge.

More than 4 million children are growing up in poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North made an absolutely fantastic point on inequality, which I see in my constituency and other Members see in theirs. In some schools, 40% of children are not school-ready—they do not know about reciprocity or play or how to hold cutlery or pens, which my hon. Friend mentioned—but in others in my constituency, that figure is up to 80%, and growing, because of the austerity of the last few years.

More than 1 million people now go to food banks, and the situation is predicted to get worse. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the number of children living in poverty is likely to soar to a record 5.2 million over the next five years. Government Members should hang their heads in shame that families in that situation cannot afford to feed their children in the school holidays.

It is interesting how, in our city, Mr Stringer, schools compete over which of our two great teams runs their holiday club. Schools generally choose the team that provides the most free school meals, because that is what some of our schools desperately need. The football clubs are having to look at this in their summer holiday provision in our cities.