Coronavirus: Supporting Businesses and Individuals

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab) [V]]

Our country’s ability to support families through the covid crisis was fundamentally weak at the very outset. Indeed, a report by the Money Charity found that we entered the covid crisis with 10 million households in Britain having no savings and another 3 million having savings of less than £1,500. Years of pay restraint and insecure employment have left many living off debt, and indeed many businesses and individuals, including the over 3 million excluded, have found themselves unable to claim any Government support specifically intended to relieve the consequences of covid. Among those self-employed groups are taxi drivers, driving instructors, entertainers, performers, small brewers and many freelancers in the hospitality and catering trades.

The Trades Union Congress has found that households owe an average of £15,385 to credit card firms, banks and other lenders. Over the last decade, public spending cuts have led to higher costs for families at a time when wages have stagnated or been cut in real terms. Even as we speak, members of my own union, Unite, are resisting unscrupulous employers, including the French-owned bus company RATP, which is using covid as a smokescreen to implement pay policies that could see some bus drivers lose up to £2,500 a year. Ministers have created a gig economy that traps people between a rock and a hard place—between low pay and destitution, with the social security safety net being cut away. The £20 universal credit supplement is due to be cut, and we are waiting to hear what the outcome is in the Budget. Again, my own union, Unite, is campaigning alongside charities and civil society for the uplift to be consolidated, not cut.

Despite the speeches from hon. Members on the Government Benches, the Government have created an economy that does not make work pay for all. We have endemic in-work poverty, systemic child poverty and an economy that cannot house and feed all of our people. There have been more than 120,000 deaths as a consequence of covid, but it does not have to be like this. There are numerous examples around the world of how things could be done differently. We need only to look at New Zealand as an example. I hope that, moving forward, we can secure a Government who will look on the economy as a partnership between public and private, not as a clash of two competing forces.