Disadvantaged Communities

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger.

I have sat through many similar debates about communities that have challenges. They are often cathartic but also a Top Trumps of misery in which we each seek to parade around the acute nature of the challenges we face in our communities, not because we want to say how challenging things are in our communities, but because the funding situation the last Government implemented basically meant that unless we could demonstrate that we were the poorest of the poor, the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged, or in some way an outlier from statistical norms, we got nothing. The barrel was left empty or, as described by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Mrs Brackenridge), we had to go through the ignominy of begging bowl politics.

We were put into competition with our nearest neighbours, and ended up trying to deprive them of what they needed so that we could get a little more of what we needed. That often led to a lack of joined-up working among communities whereby we could have had structural and societal change in the places we all call home and love and represent. Instead, we ended up trying to demonstrate why Stoke-on-Trent should get something and Derby should not, because we are slightly poorer than Derby is. That has to fundamentally change, because the systemic problems that we face in our communities—which derive from poverty, if we are being entirely honest—are going to be solved only if we are able to come together collectively, with a national programme of investment that targets the root causes of those problems and allows communities to have the skills, resources and opportunities to build themselves up.

There is a catalogue of concerns in Stoke-on-Trent: we are first for fuel poverty, routinely in the top 10 for child poverty and food bank usage, and in the last year our Lord Mayor had to raise £50,000 to pay for kids to have beds in our city. That is a symptom of a struggling society—one that was let down by the last Government and one that I hope, under the leadership of the Minister and the new Labour Government, we can start to turn around. We owe it to a generation to tackle poverty head on, so that we do not have more debates about how disadvantaged we all are.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, once again, to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Mrs Brackenridge) on securing this debate and bringing in many Members, who have articulated clearly their concerns about a variety of issues across their constituencies.

We all recognise that relieving poverty is one of the oldest and most central functions of our country’s local authorities; it has been enshrined in their duties since their inception. Many Members have referred to programmes of the past—under the last Labour Government, the coalition Government and the Conservative Government —and this debate, fundamentally, is about how we tackle this most effectively. There is no view that these issues are not important; it is simply a question about the most effective way of bringing about that relief, which we all wish to see. Indeed, levelling up, which was fundamentally about all these issues, was a key policy priority for the last Conservative Government, although it was one which, I have to acknowledge in all humility, we did not succeed in delivering in all the ways we wished to. None the less, there were some successes.

When we debate these issues in a political context, we always need to remember that it is not simply a matter of funding, as important as that is. In Wales, for example, the Government have had the benefit of an £1,800 premium over the rest of the UK in public spending. Wales has had a Labour Government for 25 years, and these issues are consistently worse in Wales—where I grew up—than they are in England. So how we spend the money to address these issues is almost as fundamental as the quantum of that spending.

[Gareth Snell]

I have always found the hon. Gentleman to be a diligent shadow Minister, and I appreciate him taking this intervention. He mentioned levelling up, and Stoke-on-Trent was one of the cities that genuinely got one of the larger allocations. The challenge was that it was mainly capital, so it allowed us to build things, but it did not allow us to have the revenue stream to staff those things to provide services. Would he welcome any move by this Government—I suspect that this is coming—to put more into revenue funding to support communities, rather than giving them the capital for big shiny things that look nice but do not actually improve the lives of people in our communities?