Cost of Living: Healthy Start Scheme

Andrew Western Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Western (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Healthy Start scheme and increases in the cost of living.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I am pleased I have been successful in securing a debate on this issue at such a timely and critical moment.

Hon. Members will be aware of the shocking revelations from Sky News last week that parents are being forced to steal baby formula to feed their infant children. Other parents revealed that they are watering down formula or mixing it with other ingredients, such as flour, in a desperate attempt to make it last longer. One parent in that situation, who was quoted in Sky’s report, talked about his baby’s “hungry scream” and how he has heard it so often that he knows it now.

It has also been reported that an unregulated black market has sprung up with second-hand baby formula, which is often less safe than formula found in supermarkets, being sold online at a cheaper price, to which parents are now turning in their panic. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service has warned that parents being forced to make such decisions is putting the UK on the brink of a public health crisis.

Let me be clear from the start: the fact that parents are in such a situation in 21st century Britain is utterly shameful. Although I do not want the debate to turn into a political slanging match, last week’s reporting from Sky should make the Government reflect on their record on the cost of living crisis. Not just baby formula is proving out of reach for struggling young families. Food banks are reporting steep increases in the number of parents with infant children coming to them for support. When asked what his Government were doing in the face of this cost of living catastrophe, the Prime Minister said:

“We have particular support for young families, something called Healthy Start vouchers, which provide money to young families”

to help

“with the costs of fresh food.”

I am sorry to say that the Prime Minister is living in a different world if he thinks the current rate of Healthy Start, which has been frozen by Conservative Governments in each of the past two years, is sufficient for struggling families who are living through the worst cost of living crisis on record. That is the reason I have secured the debate today. Healthy Start is simply not living up to its stated purpose. It does not cover the cost of healthy food, it does not cover the cost of baby formula and it is no longer acting as the nutritional safety net for families that it was originally intended to be.

Although many much-needed reforms could be made to Healthy Start to make it more effective, including auto-enrolment, on which my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) is doing great work, fundamentally, as is so often the case, this is a question of money. The money being provided by Healthy Start is simply not enough for struggling parents. The solution must, therefore, be to uplift the value of Healthy Start so that payments reflect inflation and so that children, regardless of background, are given the best possible nutritional start in life. That is what I am calling for today.

To set out the context: Healthy Start was introduced by the previous Labour Government in 2006. It provides payments to people who qualify to help buy milk, baby formula, fresh fruit and vegetables, and pulses. Eligible families receive £4.25 a week from the 10th week of pregnancy, then £8.50 a week while the baby is from nought to one year old and £4.25 per week thereafter, until the child is four. As of April 2023, there were 336,468 beneficiaries of Healthy Start payments, although my understanding is that there is a lack of transparency on the number of Healthy Start recipients as data is published only on the number of beneficiaries, as opposed to the number of actual children the claims relate to. I would be grateful if the Minister could set out why that data is not published, and commit to sharing that information as soon as possible, given the seriousness of the issue.

Healthy Start payments have been uplifted only once under the Conservative Government—once in 13 years. That was in April 2021 and was in response to a recommendation from the National Food Strategy. That date is important because, since the last increase, inflation has torn into the budgets of the poorest families hardest. The cumulative change in UK consumer prices from April 2021 to March 2023 was 17%. Looked at in isolation, food inflation was much higher than that and was running at 17.2% in the last year alone.

New data from First Steps Nutrition Trust shows that the cost of the cheapest brand of formula milk has risen by 45% in the past two years. Other brands have risen by between 17% and 31% in the same period. Currently, Healthy Start payments do not cover the full cost of any baby formula on the market in the UK. What might have been affordable when the last increase was announced is now out of reach for many of those in most need.

The Government talk about halving inflation, but I am sure that even the Minister would agree with me that that cannot be achieved overnight. In the meantime, families have to make ends meet, but at the moment they simply cannot. Increasing Healthy Start payments to reflect the 17% rise in costs that families have endured in the last two years would make a real difference. That is being called for by the national charities working in this area, as well as my local Labour-run Trafford Council, which I must credit with first raising this matter with me and highlighting the impact that freezing the allowance is having on families in my constituency and across Trafford.

I understand that money is tight, and 17% might sound like a big increase, but we are talking in real terms about less than £1 per child per week for those on the lower rate of Healthy Start, which is the vast majority of recipients. If the £4.25 voucher were uprated to reflect inflation, it would rise to around £4.97—72p more than current levels. For context, the Best Start Foods scheme in Scotland is currently £4.95 per child aged between one and three years old, so the uplift would effectively bring parity. I do not believe that in 21st century Britain, which, despite all our many issues, remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a 72p increase to help the poorest children is beyond us. Not only is there a strong moral case for it; there is also a compelling economic case. We know the impact that child poverty and the poor nutrition that comes with it have on a child’s health and wellbeing, with a knock-on effect on their future life chances.

Loughborough University has estimated that the costs of child poverty on future lost earnings retained by individuals were £11.6 billion in 2021. Not only is that terrible for the individual, but it represents billions in lost tax revenue for the Treasury. That is before we get to the fact that people on the lowest incomes are more than twice as likely to say that they have poor health than people on the highest incomes, meaning that they are more likely to be reliant on an NHS that is now at breaking point.

I am pleased that yesterday the Labour party put prevention at the heart of our mission for the national health service. I am sure that when the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), responds—[Interruption.] He says “Hear, hear” from a sedentary position, but he might not when I finish. I hope that he will agree on the importance of tackling health inequalities and on why it is such an important issue. An improved Healthy Start scheme can be a part of the journey, given we know that it is effective in improving childhood nutrition and leads to greater consumption of healthy foods.

I will not pretend that increasing the value of Healthy Start is a silver bullet. The increases that I am calling for are modest, but they must form part of a much wider national effort to tackle child poverty, which has now reached such a level that more than 4,000 children in my constituency of Stretford and Urmston are growing up under the yoke of poverty. Labour has a record to be proud of here: the last Labour Government lifted more than a million children out of poverty, largely through fairly redistributing the proceeds of sustained economic growth, which this Government is failing to achieve. Alongside that, they prioritised tackling child poverty and implementing the measures in the Child Poverty Act 2010. Those measures were scrapped by this Government several years ago, leaving us in the mire we now find ourselves in.

The debate is about calling on the Government to take action now. They are the ones with the power to make a difference. A modest increase to Healthy Start could have a significant impact on the poorest families. When considering the issue, I urge the Minister to think of last week’s reports, the indignity that poverty brings and the stigma, shame and anxiety felt by families who are forced to steal or risk their child’s health. Think of what it must be like to feel helpless, hearing again your child’s hungry scream, which many parents now know so well. With all that in mind, if the Minister does not support uplifting the value of Healthy Start in the face of such powerful testimony, I ask him, why not?

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Western]

I thank everybody who has taken the time to participate in the debate. This matter is incredibly important to me, my constituents and so many people up and down the country in the midst of this cost of living crisis.

I will comment on some contributions from hon. Members, beginning with the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). I am very grateful for his support for uprating the Healthy Start allowance. He is right to highlight the scheme’s importance to the people of Northern Ireland; it is also important to people across the whole UK, as he rightly said. He was also right to mention free school meals, because that is a major problem with the scheme as it stands. The Healthy Start allowance finishes on a child’s fourth birthday, after which the children of some of the very poorest families do not receive that support. We are talking about children and the food they eat, rather than about the families. At a crucial time in any child’s development, those children do not receive that support until they are at school and in receipt of free school meals. I thank him for making that point.

I also agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point about the potential extension of eligibility. I very deliberately sought to put forward a reasonable ask of Government today. Based on the Minister’s response, I need not have bothered to do so; I could have asked for all the issues with the scheme to be addressed. I made a minimal request in the hope that there might be a positive offer in response. The extension of the eligibility criteria would be particularly welcome not just to those with children over the age of four, but to everybody in receipt of universal credit. The current level of eligibility is set at any family earning up to £408 a week from employment, which is not a significant sum when there are little mouths to feed.

I very much associate myself with the comments from the hon. Member for Strangford about the complexity of the application process. I hear what the Minister said about the move online and the digitisation of the scheme, but there have been significant problems, not least with the availability of reporting and data as a result of the shift to digitisation. The hon. Member for Strangford made a point about his dear friend who spends so much time advising on benefits that it is a full-time job. He is absolutely right: it would need to be, because the scheme is so complex that many families are simply not taking it up. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), pointed out that we are missing the Government’s target, and I will return to that serious issue momentarily.

I turn to the comments of the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), whose expertise in this matter—not least that garnered as chair of the all-party group on infant feeding and inequalities—is second to none. I stress that I am not here speaking specifically about baby formula. She says that that is not a new issue, and I absolutely appreciate that. However, on this issue, we have an acute and current problem that is relatively new across the piece, because Healthy Start is used for things other than baby formula, including milk, pulses, fruit and vegetables, and so on. I know she understands that, but I am trying to continue making the case for why this is important in and of itself. There is a broader remit up to the age of four, and it is incredibly important to note that, but I endorse everything that she says about milk formula, and the challenges for the lowest-income families as a result of the current system and the current pricing regime.

The hon. Lady’s comments about the value of the voucher, in terms of the loss of milk, are really pertinent. For the value of the voucher to be down by the cost of more than two pints of milk over a relatively short period shows the impact on families. I am incredibly fortunate to do this job. I do not know what it is like to have to sit there and work out, “Can I buy an additional pint or two of milk this week?” For families in that situation, it must be absolutely devastating when they have a hungry child crying for food as they make that calculation.

I also associate myself with the hon. Lady’s comments about individuals with no recourse to public funds. That is really important, and I firmly agree that that should not be a barrier to receiving the Healthy Start allowance. In particular, the Government have moved on that specifically in relation to free school meals. When one considers a child’s journey through the early years and on to education, I can see no difference that would excuse these two alternating and contradictory positions. If nothing else, I hope that the Minister will take that away and endeavour to look at it.

The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish, made some really important points about uptake, building on the comments of the hon. Member for Strangford. We have up to 200,000 beneficiaries of the allowance not currently taking it up. We have a Government target of 75% against a national average of 64%, so that is a significant failing. Having said that I would restrict my requests to one particular area, I place on record that I support the Food Foundation’s request for a £5 million investment campaign spent on promoting the scheme to drive up the uptake.

My hon. Friend’s broader list of points, in setting out Labour’s agenda, shows the breadth and scale of change that is needed to genuinely tackle the cost of living crisis. I said in my opening speech that this change alone would not be a silver bullet. It is one of myriad interventions that are needed, given the scale of the crisis that young families and people up and down the country face, whether they have young children or not. That sort of visionary and transformational agenda will be required to tackle child poverty. I know that my hon. Friend will agree that the last Labour Government did that, and I hope that the day when we can do so again comes very soon.

To turn to the Minister’s contribution, it has probably come across that I am relatively disappointed by the response. He refused to say, and presumably has not even looked at, what the cost of this intervention would be. He mentioned that the data—which I pointed out was troublesome—made this complicated. I am happy to give way if he wants to provide clarification on this point. There is an awful lot of talk about “beneficiaries”—he used that term—but that does not make it clear to me whether we are talking about one parent in a family, two parents in a family, one family, one child or two children in the same family. It is not clear, so I have had to make these calculations based on 336,000 current recipients of Healthy Start, assuming that around 30% of those fall into the category of children between nought and one. An inflation-level uplift of 72p a week for those on the lower rate and therefore £1.44 for those on the higher rate would add up to a whopping £16.3 million. That is nothing when one considers the grotesque scale of waste that the Government incur through failing to intervene early enough in children’s lives, before they face deeper problems further down the line. That is nothing against what I set out in my opening speech in relation to the lost revenue to the Treasury when one considers the lost potential over the course of a lifetime.

These are tiny sums in reality, but they would make an enormous difference to people on the lowest salaries and incomes. When the Minister lists the litany of interventions from the Government and says, for instance, that the living wage has been increased to £10.42, it is important to recognise that that can be a problem for previous recipients of Healthy Start, because not uprating the Healthy Start allowance means that some people may roll off it and be worse off. There is no taper and no support for those just over the limit. Forgive me, I had not considered this in advance, or I would have made this point in my opening speech: I think I am correct in saying that the decision not to uprate Healthy Start will lead to fewer people being eligible. That is shameful, given the crisis that we face in this country, and given that we have families stealing to feed their babies. It terrifies me that the Minister hides behind an increase in the national living wage, when that leaves people potentially worse off in this instance.

We have to be honest: this invest-to-save measure would have been particularly cheap for the Government to enact. The greatest impact that we can have on anybody’s development is in those first few years. That is why we have policies such as Sure Start and why we have the Government’s albeit limited family hubs policy. No child can reach their potential if they grow up without the food and nutrition that we all need, particularly in our youngest years.

There are many issues. As I said, I began in a rather restrained way, but we received such a disappointing response from the Minister. He did not even consider this proposal and pointed to broader lists, seemingly not having looked at what the negligible costs would be, so I will briefly set those issues out. I would have liked to say more about auto-enrolment and take-up; expansion of the scheme to all children under free school meals age; and widening the eligibility criteria to all families on universal credit and those with no recourse to public funds, who can now get free school meals.

Fundamentally, however, I came here with a reasonable ask today, at a time when we know that families are so desperate that they are stealing to feed their children and are listening to hungry cries because of the empty bellies of the very youngest people in our society. We are talking necessarily about the most vulnerable young people in our society, in families on the lowest incomes. This proposal would have cost next to nothing, but I fear that the price for those individuals will be grave indeed. I am grateful to everybody who has participated today, but I have to say, I remain deeply disappointed by the Minister’s response.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Healthy Start scheme and increases in the cost of living.