Income Equality and Sustainability

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, income inequality is accompanied by a lack of security and inequalities in health and longevity. Keeping the poorest poor is not good value for society or the state. The financial crisis slightly levelled incomes but left millennials comparatively disadvantaged, and now they are the ones most likely to have younger children, hit by school closures and cut off from grandparental help.

Indices now show that inequality is back on the rise, and the pandemic has already created its own economic inequalities—those who can work and those who cannot, those qualifying for grants or furlough payments and those who are not, those who will have jobs to return to and those who will not.

In January, a World Economic Forum report indicated that increasing social mobility—a key driver of income inequality—could benefit the UK economy by $130 billion by 2030. Tell me a better way to help recovery.

We can use what we have learned in lockdown for good. The “new normal” should treasure the positives, keep them and reinforce them. Work from home has been enabled for so many more people—use that to enable a more sustainable work/life balance, cut transport, and open more jobs to the disabled, carers and other people who have not been given the chance to work entirely from home.

We can have a green recovery, a caring recovery, a better shared recovery—and find that it pays its way. Will the Government seize that opportunity?