Fairness and Inequality

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Inequality is one of the great political scandals of our age, and it is important that we have had a chance to debate the subject at length today. I have been somewhat disappointed, however, at how few speeches there have been from Government Members. Nevertheless, what we have lacked in quantity we have made up for in quality, with a number of substantial and considered speeches from both sides.

Over the past three decades, the gap between the rich and the poor in our society and elsewhere has grown exponentially. The rewards of economic growth have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small minority, while those in the lower half of the income spectrum are being increasingly deprived of the just rewards for their efforts. We on these Benches have made the case that inequality, on the scale that we see in the UK and internationally, is bad for all of us. It is in no one’s interest to have a society that is so divided by extremes of income and so damaged by social deprivation, but it is especially bad for those people who find themselves trapped on low incomes and who have seen their spending power and social mobility reduced dramatically over the past 25 years.

We have had a wide-ranging debate today. It has tackled issues as diverse as land ownership, fuel poverty, health inequalities, taxation and social policy, as well as a range of other disparate policy issues that would normally be debated separately. All those topics have been underpinned by the issue of economic inequality and the income gap that has grown so wide over recent decades. We have argued that inequality is not inevitable, and that it is a political choice. The Government have at their disposal the fiscal levers to enable progressive and more redistributive measures, but in recent times we have seen tax and benefit policies that have allowed the gulf between the haves and the have-nots to widen. A number of hon. Members have pointed out that the impact of the tax and benefit changes has fallen disproportionately on those in the lower half of the income distribution, particularly those in the lowest quintile, who have paid the highest price for economic austerity.

[Mr MacNeil]

It is important to bear in mind that redistribution applies not only after tax but before tax. In regard to productivity gains, we need to ensure that people get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

[Dr Whiteford]

My hon. Friend makes a useful point.

It is also important to note that those fiscal levers are not the only tools at the Government’s disposal for tackling inequality. Addressing the underlying drivers of wage inequality requires sustained effort and a fresh mindset about the policy choices that we can make to further a more equitable model of economic growth and to build a fairer, more inclusive and less divided society.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) outlined some of the positive ways in which equitable growth could be pursued in Wales. He opened the debate by drawing our attention to the geographical distribution of inequality across the UK, and argued convincingly that while much of Government policy was oriented towards the needs of London and its surrounds, the consequences of that for the other nations and regions of the UK could be dire. Many of us have paid a heavy price for London’s prosperity.

It is notable that, with a few honourable exceptions, the speakers in today’s debate have come from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Perhaps that shows how seriously the issue of inequality—which is distinct from, but related to, poverty—is taken in these islands. It is obviously a pertinent issue in the context of Scotland’s referendum later this year, as we weigh up the two futures that are opening up before us and consider not only the benefits of making policy decisions based on our own values and aspirations but the uncertain consequences of continuing along the path that the UK seems determined to follow, with wealth and opportunity being increasingly concentrated among a small elite.

[Dame Anne Begg]

Obviously, if we are going to pursue a more equal society, we will have to ensure that those at the top do not get richer. What are the SNP’s policies for ensuring that those who are already rich become poorer in order to narrow the income gap?

[Dr Whiteford]

Had the hon. Lady been here for the earlier part of the debate, she would have heard some back-and-forth chat about tax rates and such like. I will not rehearse those arguments. For Labour, there still seems to be a zero sum game in which rich and poor have to share out a very small cake. The fundamental point that my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr made earlier was that if we want to tackle inequality, we need to grow the economy. Once we have done that, we will be in a much better position to tackle inequality and poverty alike.

[Mr Bain]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dr Whiteford]

I will not give way. I want to make some progress; I have a lot to get through in a limited amount of time.

The extremes of income inequality that we see today had their genesis in the late 1970s. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) challenged the motion’s wording about the upward trend of inequality in the UK. I am prepared to grant him that, in the early years of the Labour Government after 1997, there was a stem in the rising tide of inequality, but if we look at the long-term historical perspective we find that it is clear that from 2003 onwards inequality started to rise again. We can argue the piece about that, and I would not take away from the Labour party things it managed to achieve in government that were beneficial to people, but I question the lack of responsibility we have seen from Members on both sides of the House. They have tried to blame each other for not only the financial collapse, but how we have been dealing with the aftermath. It is incumbent on us all to take responsibility for the situation in which we find ourselves and work out how we can build a more prosperous future for everyone, in which the rewards of our prosperity are shared more evenly.

Today, the richest 10% of the population across the developed world have incomes nine times greater than those of the poorest 10%, but in the UK the margins are even more stark, with the richest 10% having incomes 12 times greater than the incomes of the poorest 10%. Can we really say that a person’s contribution is worth 12 times that of another person? I find that a difficult piece of maths to do; I certainly do not think I work 12 times harder than people who are earning a lot less than me in my constituency, as I know they work very hard in difficult and often demanding jobs.

According to the OECD, the UK is now placed 28th out of 34 in its inequality league, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Of course that is not the only way in which to measure inequality, and some commentators who use a wider range of measures consider the UK’s inequalities to be even more stark. For example, Professor Dorling of Oxford university considers the UK to be the fourth most unequal country in the developed world, despite being one of the wealthiest. Those of us who aspire to live in a fairer, more equitable society will have been shocked by the research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in December, to which reference has been made. It showed not just that 13 million people in the UK are living in poverty, but, for the first time, that more than half of those people live in working families.

We used to hear the mantra that work is the route out of poverty. For people who are able to secure better-paid, full-time jobs that is undoubtedly true, but the reality of modern Britain is that now most poor people are working, but that work no longer guarantees a life above the breadline. About 5 million people in the UK are paid below what would be considered a living wage, and millions of working people find they have to depend on the benefits system to top up their income to adequate levels. My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) made the point that the report published yesterday by the Living Wage Commission showed that 21% of the work force are being paid below a living wage, which is a 9% increase in the past 12 months. People cannot get out of low-paid work. One of the most important points in the report, which echoes comments made by the hon. Members for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), was that once people are in a low-paid job, it is extremely difficult for them to get out of it. Only 18% of those people manage to get out of minimum wage work in the course of their working lives; a decade later those people are still stuck in those jobs. So work is a route out of poverty only for those people who have well-paid jobs.

A number of hon. Members, the first being the Minister, mentioned food banks. We have seen a huge increase in their use over the past two years, which is a shocking development in a wealthy country. We know that that increase has been driven by changes to the benefits system, particularly by delays in benefits payments and the increased use of sanctions. It has also been driven by the rising cost of living. One thing that has shocked me most in my constituency is the number of working people who are now dependent on food aid parcels. Half a million people in the UK now depend on food aid, and instead of squabbling about whose fault it is and whose Government the levels rose most under, we should be trying to tackle the problem and ensure that people have enough to eat.

Ours is a mature democracy with a well-developed welfare state, but the tax and benefits system remains the main lever through which Governments mitigate poverty and inequality. The recent reforms of the past couple of years have been overwhelmingly regressive and have exacerbated hardship. The promise from the Chancellor in recent weeks that £60 billion of further cuts are on the way shows that there will be no respite for disadvantaged people in modern Britain. Of all the regressive measures we have seen in the past few years, perhaps the changes to housing benefit best illustrate both the willingness of the Government to squeeze the incomes of the poorest households and the London-centric drivers of policy making. The under-occupancy penalty, or the bedroom tax as it is better known, is punishing disadvantaged people in our society who live in social housing and need help with their rent. It is squeezing the incomes of those who are already most hard pressed financially and driving the most extreme forms of inequality. In Scotland, around 80% of those affected by the bedroom tax are also affected by disability, which highlights that link between poverty and disability. Disabled people are still disadvantaged in the workplace and often find it hard to make ends meet. The proportion of disabled people in the UK as a whole is slightly smaller than it is in Scotland, but it still represents two-thirds of the households affected by the bedroom tax.

We also have a structural mismatch between the available housing stock and the needs of tenants. Some 23% of the housing stock is one-bedroom accommodation, yet 60% of tenants need a one-bedroom house. Even if it was in anyone’s interest to play musical chairs with housing allocations, there are simply not enough one-bedroom homes to go round. Provision of one-bedroom lets in the private sector also falls well short of demand and, in any case, costs the public purse considerably more than renting from social landlords. As well as pushing low-income households into debt, the policy is costing more than it saves, and the Government’s persistence in pursuing the policy is foolhardy in the extreme.

I know that the Scottish Government have already made extensive efforts to mitigate the impact of the bedroom tax by increasing the budget for discretionary housing payments to the legal limit. In answer to the strange and bizarre interventions by the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Pamela Nash), there are legal constraints on how much the Scottish Government can top up those payments.

[Pamela Nash]

rose—

[Dr Whiteford]

No, I will not waste time taking an intervention from the hon. Lady. Her earlier intervention was really quite unbecoming. There has been cross-party support in the Scottish Parliament—not just from the Labour party and the SNP but from the Liberal Democrats who are represented on the Government Benches—to increase the discretionary housing payments budget to mitigate the effects of the bedroom tax. I therefore ask the Secretary of State, who is in his place, to talk to his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions about the matter so that when the Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is in London on Thursday, she can meet the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to progress the issue further.

Transfers made to low-income households are the major tool through which our tax and benefits system compensates for the low-wage culture and, in a small way, mitigate the inequalities created by the structure of our labour market. Over the past two years, as the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) highlighted, changes to tax credits have created significant reductions in the incomes of families in low-paid work. Although some very low earners have been lifted out of tax, the gains have been more than cancelled out by cuts to tax credits and the freeze in the uprating of other benefits, which have fallen in real-terms value. That point was also made at length by the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams).

The Government’s own distributional analysis of their tax and benefit changes shows that the lower half of the income spectrum has paid the greatest price of austerity, while tax cuts at the very top end have allowed the gap to grow between the haves and the have-nots.

A number of Members have drawn our attention to the fact that women make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid work force. In an early intervention, the hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) made the point that the Government have made tax adjustments of £14 billion, £11 billion of which have fallen on women. It is unfortunate that he was not able to stay to make a longer contribution, as I am sure that it would have been worth while.

Women are more likely to be in low-paid, part-time work. They are more likely to be working in insecure, temporary jobs, or on zero-hours contracts, and more likely to be working in jobs for which they are overqualified. More than 40 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970, women are still paid 12% less than men. When we look at who is poor in the UK, we find that women, especially women with children, are over-represented. When we look at who has been impacted most by the UK’s benefit reforms, we see women once again in the front line. That is largely because women take on the greater share of responsibility for child care and for looking after elderly relatives. Child benefit, child tax credit and working tax credit are all paid to the main carer of children, and when the changes were introduced, 83% of in-work families receiving those benefits had a woman payee.

The second half of the 20th century saw women enter the labour market in ever-greater numbers, to some extent masking the ever-widening gulf in wages by increasing overall household incomes. None the less, women are losing out heavily and as a society we lose out because women are not reaching their full potential. According to a recent report by the Resolution Foundation, two thirds of mothers find the cost of child care a barrier to working more. The UK labour market has some of the lowest participation rates by mothers of any OECD country. Some women make a choice not to work when their children are small and choose to take a break in their working life. Many, particularly those with more than one child, want to work part time, but most women find that their choices are financially constrained. There is clear evidence that many women who want to work full time or work more hours face barriers because they cannot afford child care. They cannot get work in the hours for which they are available, or they cannot get the kind of work for which they are qualified. We all know families in which a second earner has given up work because they cannot afford the cost of child care for pre-school children. That is particularly the case for people on low and average earnings, but I know men and women on graduate-level salaries who have given up work because child care for more than one child, plus commuting costs, adds up to working for free. That is bad for families in the longer term, but it also extremely bad for our economy.

Child care has been mentioned by a number of speakers, and in my view, a step change in child care would be the single most transformative policy that the UK Government could make in tackling inequality, because it would boost prosperity, improve work incentives for parents, empower women in the workplace, and would help to tackle child poverty. The hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), in an important intervention, discussed the Child Poverty Act 2010, and the important gains that were won with cross-party support in the House in the previous Parliament. This week, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a report on child poverty in Scotland that showed that, although gains have been made, progress is under real threat because of the austerity measures introduced by the Government.

Child poverty in Scotland has fallen by twice as much as in England. Most reductions in poverty are attributable to improvements in employment rates, but it has been argued that the additional fall in child poverty in Scotland, where it is now 40% lower, is due to a shift to full working—both parents in the family are working, and at least one of them is full time. That has not been replicated across the UK. I have no doubt that that is partly due to the fact that in Scotland we have the best child-care package anywhere in these islands. We have to go significantly further if we are to compete with the best in Europe and have ambitions for the next generation. Otherwise, we face the threat of more and more children falling into child poverty.

The Scottish Government have made huge efforts to try to ensure that all our young people have opportunities. A point made early in the debate by the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), which was not picked up very much, concerned the issue of skills, which are at the heart of how we increase prosperity and close the wage gap between high earners and lower earners. The Scottish Government have introduced the “Opportunities for All” programme, which means that every single school leaver has the offer of a positive destination to take up when they leave. We have record numbers of young people in apprenticeships. We also have record numbers of people completing apprenticeships. Some 92% of young people who complete an apprenticeship are in work six months later, with 79% of them in full-time work. Over 90% of our school leavers are now in positive destinations, and 89.5% of them are in work nine months later, or in education or training. That is the highest it has ever been, and it shows what can be done when we put our mind to it.

Today’s debate shows exactly why Scotland needs the full fiscal levers of a normal country to tackle inequality, why Wales needs the power to grow its economy and improve the prospects of its people, and why it is in the interests of the whole UK not to bury its head in the sand any longer but take responsibility for the failures of the past and respond to the needs of our citizens in the next generation. The motion calls for a commission to investigate the impact of welfare and spending cuts on poverty and inequality, which reflects the wishes of the House expressed on 13 January. Importantly, it goes further, because we cannot really tackle poverty, particularly the kind of poverty that we have in the UK, unless we understand inequality and take steps to tackle its long-term drivers. That is why I fully support the motion, and I hope that Members on both sides of the House who have listened carefully to the debate will join us in the Lobby. The motion would allow us to address the shortcomings of the past, and I hope that all Members will join us in building a fairer and more equal society.