Child Poverty

Debate between George Howarth and Natalie McGarry

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Natalie McGarry (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) on securing the debate, which has been enlightening. It is good to see cross-party participation among Opposition parties. I am disappointed that Conservative Members have not come to defend policies that they will vote for in the Chamber. [Interruption.] I thank the Minister for being here, but it would have been appropriate, given the gravity of the circumstances relating to child poverty, had more Conservative Members been present to defend the levels of child poverty and what the Government are doing.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire said that it is immoral to force tax cuts on children. It is clear that the target of austerity is children. It is a hugely important debate and should transcend party politics, because child poverty should be the concern of us all. Unfortunately the Government’s policies are forcing more children into poverty. It should concern us all that 3.7 million children in the UK live in relative poverty, and it should alarm, astound and worry us that the number in child poverty is projected to rise to 4.7 million by 2020 under current policies. The obsession of the Tory Government is that people at all levels of society must firefight cuts. For their part, the Scottish Government are providing more than £300 million between 2013-14 and 2015-16 to mitigate the effect of Westminster welfare changes for families in Scotland.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) said—and I agree—that there is no mandate for imposing the cuts in Scotland. The Tory party received its lowest support in 165 years in Scotland at the general election; it fell to just over 10% of the vote. My hon. Friend spoke about semantics over substance, and the change in Tory rhetoric and attitude with the renaming of the poverty statistics. The simple fact is that austerity has not worked. It is astonishing that, despite the evidence of the harm from what they are doing, the UK Government continue to attack low-paid families. That makes a mockery of the Conservatives’ claim to be the party of working people. For example, cutting tax credits, which are a lifeline for low-income families and a crucial tool in lifting people out of poverty, will only exacerbate the already dismal projections of rising child poverty. In Scotland alone, 346,000 children will be affected by the changes, and we are in danger of pushing them into poverty and causing lasting damage to their life chances.

We know the harm that austerity is doing to thousands of children across the country. It simply cannot be acceptable to ignore the severe and particular impact on children of the Government’s policies. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said that poverty robs children of their childhood and the life chances that they deserve, and I agree. By changing the definition of poverty and removing the requirement to report on income targets, the Government are doing just that. In renaming the commission set up under the Child Poverty Act 2010 the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, the Tories are trying to airbrush child poverty out of our political debate.

We must of course look at the wider picture of young people’s life chances, rather than focusing simply on one set of statistics or another, but the Government’s changes to the Child Poverty Act will be deeply damaging, for three main reasons. First, the removal of the requirement to report on income targets means that a fundamental driver of poverty—how much a person has in their pocket —is essentially being deprioritised. My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) said that that low wages and increased inflation are key drivers of poverty. Secondly, the Government’s plans to focus purely on worklessness ignore the 67% of UK children who live in a household with one or more working adult. In-work poverty, which will undoubtedly be exacerbated by the changes to tax credits and other Budget measures, is a key challenge that the Tories seem content to ignore. Thirdly, the additional targets that are proposed are not necessarily related to poverty. Family break-up and drug and alcohol dependency affect families in all income deciles, and problem debt is generally a consequence rather than a cause of poverty. The proposals are a step towards characterising poverty as a lifestyle choice, rather than addressing the social and economic drivers that cause people to fall into poverty. That is a mistake that we cannot afford to make.

The hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans)—I hope he will forgive my pronunciation—is correct: we must seek solutions. It is up to this generation. Poverty should not exist in a country as rich as ours and no child should have to experience it. As long as the Government pursue a damaging austerity strategy and attempt to sweep child poverty under the carpet, it will persist and be pervasive. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) said that poverty is a scandal wherever it exists, and spoke of his constituency where the rate of child poverty is 25%, the 110th highest in the UK. In 2012, my constituency’s child poverty rate was 32.6%, which was the 26th highest in the UK. Twenty-five constituencies had child poverty rates higher than almost a third of children. In some parts of my constituency child poverty is almost at 50%.

The Government’s Dickensian policies belong in the House of Commons Library, not in the Chamber or the statute book of any country that has the resources that the UK has. When there is a clear and demonstrable link between Tory policies and low wages it becomes clear that increasing levels of poverty and child poverty are political choices; we have the power to tackle the situation, but we worsen it instead. The Government must halt the changes to tax credits, withdraw the measures in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill and continue to build on the good work of the child poverty commission, rather than eradicating it from political discourse. I urge the Minister to consider what has been said in the debate, from across the parties.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order. We have just over 30 minutes—32 to be precise—for the two Front Benchers to wind up. I ask them to bear in mind that, because of the self-discipline that hon. Members have shown, there is plenty of time, and to recognise that the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire, who moved the motion, would like to make a few observations by way of winding up.