Savings Accounts and Health in Pregnancy Grant Bill

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

My reference to the hon. Gentleman related just to the fact that he used the term “ladies” quite frequently during the debate, which is actually charming in its own way.

Earlier today, after a heavy morning spent in the Finance Bill Committee, by way of light relief I watched a video that had been posted on the ConservativeHome website in January this year. It was one of those videos that the Conservative party was very fond of when it was on a mission to convince the British voters that it really had changed and was no longer the nasty party. It featured the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister, of course, in his shirt sleeves talking with well-rehearsed spontaneity to an audience carefully chosen to seem like a random cross-section of the general public. He said that he wanted this Government

“to be the most family friendly Government we’ve ever had in this country and that is about everything we do to support families and it’s about supporting every sort of family.”

What have this Government, in collusion with their friends from the Liberal Democrat party, done to support families? For a start, what have they done to support children? The so-called emergency Budget and the spending review take away almost £7 billion from funds to support children, three times the amount the bank levy is estimated to raise. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, families with children will lose the most from what this Government plan to do by 2014-15. The poorest 10% of families will lose 7% of their income. The Government are freezing child benefit, cutting child care tax credits, restricting the Sure Start maternity grant to just the first child and, of course, axing the child trust fund and the health in pregnancy grant under the Bill that we have considered today.

What about when the children get a bit older? Education maintenance allowances are being abolished, school spending per pupil is being cut in real terms and the IFS has said that the pupil premium could widen funding inequalities. As the End Child Poverty campaign said after the comprehensive spending review, it was

“a dark day for any family struggling to stay out of poverty, or deep in it already and fearing things will get worse still.”

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am afraid I do not have time.

What about the impact on women? Our research has shown—we have had to do our own research, because this Government seem to have abandoned any notion of doing real and meaningful equality impact assessments, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) for her work on it—that the cuts hit women twice as hard as men, without considering the impact of cuts to public services. We know that 65% of public sector workers are women and that two thirds of the public sector redundancies arising from the spending review are expected to be women.

Of the £16 billion cuts in total, £11 billion comes from women. Some 72% of the emergency Budget cuts will be met from women’s income, and in the CSR cuts £5.7 billion will be taken from women compared with just £2.7 billion from men. A million more women claim housing benefit than men, 70% of tax credits are paid to mothers, 94% of child benefit is paid to mothers and 90% of lone parents are women. So much for being family friendly. So much for looking after every sort of family. So much for doing everything they can to support the family.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) stole my line earlier when he talked about the Government believing in women and children being first when it came to cuts. The phrase “women and children first” comes from a mariners’ saying when a ship is doomed to sink, and what we are discussing today is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Bill might be tiny in terms of written content—it is just three pages and four clauses—but it does a huge amount of damage. It scraps the support that we have given to families to help them save through the saving gateway. It scraps the chance a child from a poor family had to enter adult life with a little pot of money to help them fulfil their dreams and ambitions, something that hon. Members on the Government Benches, with their multi-million pound trust funds, could never hope to understand. It snatches away money from pregnant women—money that was designed to help them have healthy, happy pregnancies and healthy, happy babies.

We on the Labour Benches will carry on fighting for those families and for children who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and we will oppose the Bill tonight.