Inequality and Social Mobility

Debate between Amber Rudd and Danielle Rowley

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Gentleman must acknowledge, as I said earlier, that we took on an economic crisis in 2010 that required some reduction in spending, and those changes allowed us to stabilise and grow the economy. There has now been an acknowledgment that some of that money can be put back, and I am pleased that the Chancellor was able to support us in doing that.

This Government introduced the national living wage, providing the biggest pay rise for workers in 20 years, and increased it this year to £8.21 an hour, and we have also increased the personal tax allowance to £12,500. We are acting to increase female employment and economic empowerment, reaching out to marginalised women and trying to eliminate the gender pay gap. We are spending billions to ensure that opportunity and growth are spread throughout the country through our stronger towns fund and our transport investments, but we will not stop there. We have committed to finding new and better ways to analyse and tackle poverty in this country.

The Social Metrics Commission’s “A new measure of poverty for the UK” report, which the hon. Member for Wirral West mentioned, makes a compelling case for why we should look at poverty more broadly to give a more detailed picture of who is poor, their experience of poverty and their future chances of remaining in poverty or falling into it. We are working with the commission and other experts in the field to develop new experimental statistics to measure poverty, which will be published in 2020 and, in the long run, could help us to target support more effectively. It is vital that we have evidence on the effects of poverty in order to tackle it, and in the run-up to the spending review we will examine what more can be done to address poverty, particularly child poverty, and to support social mobility.

[Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) (Lab)]

I am interested in hearing more about how the Secretary of State, or her Department, plans to measure social mobility and poverty because often it is based on income, rather than wellbeing. Constituents who come to my surgeries week after week are fed up of hearing from the Government in the media that poverty is going down and employment is going up when they are in such desperate situations and are seeing no more money. They are going to food banks and having a terrible time. All they hear about is all the success the Government are having and it does not reflect their lives. So how will the Department reflect people’s lives in reality more accurately?

[Amber Rudd]

I know there are people who have difficulties, and I listen to people in my Hastings constituency. I try to make sure that we respond as a Government, and I try to help them individually, but the Government cannot just base policy on anecdotes. We also have to look at the statistics and there are many different ways of doing that.

The hon. Member for Wirral West may quote relative or absolute statistics, but it is important to have an agreed basis so that we know we are measuring the same thing. That is why I have said we will look at the Social Metrics Commission’s “A new measure of poverty for the UK” report, of which she may approve because it looks not just at people’s income but at their actual spending. That makes a huge difference to people on low incomes. I urge her to look at the report.