Oral Answers to Questions

Gregor Poynton Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Western]

I am very happy to raise with the Home Office the issue that the hon. Gentleman has highlighted, but I would say to him, and indeed to his colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench, that what genuinely undermines confidence in the welfare system is the record of the previous Government, who allowed welfare fraud to spiral towards £10 billion a year and failed to take the powers needed, as we are doing now, to get that number down.

[Gregor Poynton (Livingston) (Lab)]

2. What steps she is taking to reduce the number of children in poverty in the Livingston constituency.

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

4. What steps she is taking to reduce the number of children in poverty in Gloucester.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Liz Kendall)]

If I may briefly say so, I am very proud that the spending review delivered the largest ever investment in employment support for sick and disabled people—quadrupling what we inherited from the last Government to over £1 billion a year, or a total of £3.5 billion over this Parliament—so that those who can work get the support they need, while we protect those who can never work.

Tackling child poverty is my personal priority, so I am proud that the Education Secretary and I are bringing in free school meals for all children in families on universal credit, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty—a down payment on our child poverty strategy. We are also delivering the first ever three-year funding settlement for the household support fund, including for holiday hunger, and we are committed to funding the holiday activities and food programme, stopping kids going hungry while they are at school and during the holidays, too.

[Gregor Poynton]

I thank the Secretary of State for that response. One of the best ways of reducing child poverty is helping parents into good, stable and well-paid jobs, which the SNP Scottish Government are failing abjectly to do. For example, the SNP manifesto in 2021 promised to double investment in the paternal employment fund to £15 million over two years to help low-income families get into work. However, in 2023 that pledge was scrapped. Will the Secretary of State call on the Scottish Government to put some of their record funding into employability funds, to help my Livingston constituents get into work and to provide good jobs right across Scotland?

[Liz Kendall]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Economic inactivity is higher in Scotland than in the UK as a whole, and a staggering one in six young Scots are not in education, employment or training. We have delivered an extra £9 billion for Scotland over the spending review—the biggest settlement in the history of devolution—and I hope the SNP will match our ambition to get people who can work into work by investing in employment services, not cutting them, as they have in recent years.