Queen’s Speech

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and I am very inspired by the image of his whizzing around London on his scooter. I will certainly join in.

I congratulate the Government on having a levelling-up Bill but, as others have said, this feels a little hollow at the moment. I would like to touch on the environment and women, but, first, I will touch on food. The term “food insecurity” gets bandied around at the moment—I think the confusion is whether we will get wheat from Ukraine or whether it is about people in an individual household. In fact, what food insecurity means when you are a human being in this country is not being able to afford breakfast for your kids, having to skip dinner, or having to go to the supermarket and buy a pizza that is full of not good calories for £1 because that is part of your daily budget. It means being hungry.

As we have all seen from the reports from the Food Foundation this week, food insecurity rates are now double the pre-pandemic levels. Particularly shocking is the level among those on universal credit: 47.7% of households on universal credit have experienced some kind of hunger, have needed to miss a meal or have had to choose to buy cheap and unhealthy food. That £20 that we took off universal credit might not mean a great deal to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—it is like a tip at a London restaurant—but for someone on a budget it means absolutely everything.

I have been working in food policy—what I really mean is food poverty; I am now the chair of Feeding Britain, among other things—for almost 15 years now. Quite frankly, from what I know, it has never been so bad. In 2008, when I first started working for the now Prime Minster as chair of the London Food Board, I asked him to come to a food bank with me. I asked several times; he never came. I think there is a sense that if you keep these things out of mind, you can sort of keep them out of your policy. What the levelling-up strategy comes up with is all fine and dandy, but it does not actually address the here and now, which is a massive discrepancy.

If people were desperate back in 2008, today is a whole new ballgame. Of the many facts that I have learned in the past few weeks, the fact that people will now not take vegetables from food banks because they cannot afford to cook them is probably the saddest thing. As my noble friend Lord Kakkar said in his excellent speech about health disparities, we now have an enormous gap not just in relation to the age that you live to but in relation to the years in which you live a healthy life. That unhealthy life is not just a nightmare for the person; it is actually a nightmare for us. It is short-sighted and just plain stupid. It costs the NHS, it costs the taxpayer, and it costs the lot of us to have a generation of people—small fat kids, quite frankly, at the moment—who will be a burden on society and a misery to themselves. We can change this.

Poor diet, as I have said, is now associated with more illnesses than any other factor. If there is to be a serious levelling-up attempt, it must start by levelling up the food system. I had four questions for the Minister, but now I have a fifth. Will she accept the invitation to come with Feeding Britain to see some of our foodbanks, the invitation that the Prime Minister turned down all those years ago?

First, will the Government agree to increase the amount of money in people’s pockets by keeping working-age benefits genuinely in line with inflation? Will the Government provide a safety net for kids by expanding free school meals, breakfast provision and Healthy Start, so that children can be protected from both hunger and lousy food? Will the Government explore tax and subsidy regimes to balance the price of healthy food, which at the moment is much more expensive? Will the Government commit to a new good food Bill? As someone who worked with Henry Dimbleby on the food plan, I am very disappointed that there is no mention at all of this in the whole of the Queen’s Speech. It makes me think that when we get the White Paper in the next few months, it will be weak rather than robust.

I turn now to the environment. This Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill must address net-zero policies. The levelling-up paper does, I admit, recognise that the transition to net zero will have lasting effects on virtually every aspect of the economy, including jobs and skills, but the Government are not prioritising net zero as an integral part of their levelling-up agenda. Indeed, there is actually no mention of net zero in the 12 levelling-up missions, despite the fact that it could be easily woven into most of them. We can put it in skills, transport, pride in community, and education. I could go on. All those actions would be in line with our goals.

One key area where levelling up and net zero can align is in relation to fuel poverty. Making our notoriously draughty and very poorly built homes much more energy efficient—we have some of leakiest homes in Europe—would help to reduce bills and reduce emissions. The levelling-up paper does address the quality of homes, but what about the retrofitting of the ones we are already in? We know that this is costly—it costs a fortune—but the cost of inaction is way more than the cost of action.

It is worth saying and repeating, because it has not been said so far today, that we are in a climate emergency, and the signals are coming from all sides. Just on Monday, the Met Office said that there was a strong likelihood that at least one of the next five years would exceed the 1.5-degree level that the world is struggling to achieve. There are crop failures. We will face proper food insecurity. We have to get our head out of the sand and into the solution. Lots of Bills have been announced that could be levers to address these problems, but they are piecemeal. Why can we not have a proper overarching strategy?

I am very disappointed to see that there are an increasing number of Conservative MPs—okay, a minority—who are questioning the Government’s continued commitment to net zero, a commitment which I truly honour and value. I am also disappointed by the Government’s recent decision to agree to a new licensing round for oil and gas projects. We will not level up if we go backwards. Polls show that voters, including a huge number of Conservatives, do not want to see this. History will judge all of us by how we respond to this challenge. We are meant to be at 50% carbon emissions by 2030, so everything that is done now and in this Session that is set out in this Queen’s Speech will add to this. It is crucial.

To spend parliamentary time arguing about how we can criminalise people for protesting is, I suggest, not a good use of that time. I want to hark back to just over 100 years ago. The suffragettes broke every single window within half a mile of Trafalgar Square to get their point across. Marjorie Hume locked herself on to one of the statues in St Stephen’s Hall. We do not look back on them as criminals; we look back on them as heroines. Indeed, they are the reason that all these women are here today.

It makes me very sad to see that one of the Government’s ideas to save money is that we should water down the quality of nurseries. Fifty years ago next month, I co-founded Spare Rib. I cannot believe that we are still in a society where women cannot get childcare. Again, it is a lousy use of taxpayers’ money not to do it; we could have a more productive and more equal society.

Those are my three contributions to levelling up. I look forward to the Minister’s response.