Food Banks
Graeme Downie Excerpts(4 days, 9 hours ago)
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Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
That is pressure, Ms Vaz; It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) on securing this debate.
Every Member wants to reduce the number of people relying on food banks and to tackle poverty effectively. I am surprised that the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East chose to reference so many devolved policy areas—he made clear in his point of order in the Chamber yesterday that he does not believe that such behaviour belongs in Parliament.
I shall begin by thanking the 200 volunteers who operate the Dunfermline food bank in my constituency. It has one site in Dunfermline itself and four satellite sites around the area. It is led by the fantastic Sandra, whom I was delighted to meet over the summer. I spoke to Sandra again this week and asked her for an update. She said that, in the year from April ’23 to March ’24, the Dunfermline food bank fed just under 9,000 people, approximately one third of whom were children.
The Government have already delivered a genuine living wage in Scotland, meaning a pay rise for more than 200,000 of the lowest-paid Scots and £3.4 billion of extra funding for Scotland. The question now for the SNP is: how will they spend that? There are no hiding places. Will they carry on as they have to date, scrapping the fuel insecurity fund from £30 million to zero, cutting and scrapping the parental transition fund, and driving more people towards food banks?
I genuinely hope that the SNP take action in their budget in December to tackle poverty, and I truly hope that they are successful, but the warning signs are not positive. Groups such as the Poverty and Inequality Commission and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have said that we are running out of ways to stress the need for rapid action from the Scottish Government.
Food banks and the Trussell Trust have told us that the cap on universal credit deductions is one of the main things pushing people towards food bank use. That is why I am delighted that the Budget last month reduced the cap from 25% to 15%. Is this the limit of what the Government and I want to achieve? Absolutely not, but the Budget set a clear direction and showed the priorities of the Labour Government. I will return to Sandra, who said to me:
“I am the only person who wants to see my job eliminated. I want to be out of a job, because it would mean we have successfully ended the need for food banks in this country.”
Oral Answers to Questions
Graeme Downie Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Sir Stephen Timms
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for drawing my attention to that. What he has described sounds very odd indeed, and I will be happy to look at the details if he will let me see them. We are absolutely committed to making sure that universal credit does the job that we need it to, including for people in the situation that his constituent has found herself in.
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
Last week, I was made aware of a constituent who is a carer for his wife, who experienced a stroke in 2016. The constituent is a veteran who lives with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was awarded carer’s allowance in 2017. Late last year, the DWP began demanding the return of more than £51,000 in alleged universal credit overpayments, and this April, under the previous Government, the DWP began taking it from his state pension without warning. Will the Minister meet me to discuss this case in more detail so that I can help my constituent?
Sir Stephen Timms
As my hon. Friend will know, there have been some very troubling cases of carer’s allowance overpayment. I am not sure whether carer’s allowance is part of the overpayment he describes, but I will be very happy to meet him to discuss what has gone wrong in this case.