Child Poverty: Ethnicity

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, for this debate and for giving us the opportunity to consider the ONS report and, of course, systemic inequality in general. Hungry children cannot learn as effectively and efficiently as those who are well fed, or at least adequately fed and nourished. Teachers and teaching assistants know this only too well; they deal with hungry children in their classrooms every working day of their lives and respond by providing food, often at their own expense. Hunger in the classroom is, alas, not a new problem but education staff observe it to be an increasingly prevalent one.

As we all know, the pandemic has exposed significantly different health outcomes by ethnic group, while the ONS report has shown that Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black ethnic groups have more children living in low-income households than the national average. These children must therefore be exceedingly likely to be disproportionately affected by hunger daily. As we all know, it took a young man better known for football than politics to draw on his own lived experience and push the Government to do something on food which they had no intention of doing originally. Marcus Rushford is no longer just a football star but a champion for the right to food—and now food for the mind, too, with his campaign on reading and access to books.

The pandemic has hit many families’ finances hard. Eight out of 10 teachers say that they have seen this impact. We know that many schools have organised foodbanks and delivered food parcels to pupils in their homes—some, of course, even before the pandemic. We cannot allow our children and their families to languish in hunger during the summer break. Local authorities can be well placed to provide recreational and educational programmes and include food as part of that offer, but they need sufficient resources provided in a coherent and timely manner, and on an ongoing basis throughout the summer and during the autumn half-term. In fact, this should happen in all school holidays to ensure that no child or family slips through the cracks.

If the levelling-up agenda means anything, it must mean an end to child and family hunger and poverty. It must mean a right to food and an end to systemic inequality, which has left so many facing a future in which their own future is less bright than it could and should be.