Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Wales has the highest poverty rates of the four parts of the state, with almost one in four people living in poverty. Worse still, Wales has the worst child poverty rates, with 31% of our children living in poverty. My party is determined to solve the crisis and to end that gross injustice through its work in the Senedd and at local level.

To give one example of our efforts, under the recent three-year agreement with the Welsh Government that I referred to in an intervention on the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), school meals will be free for all primary school children; they will be phased in from September. That is a substantial step forward. It has been an ambition of my party and the Labour party in Wales for many years. Indeed, it has been long-promised by Labour. I am glad that Plaid has made sure that we have at last acted on those fine words.

More generally, families across Wales have been failed by the Westminster welfare system, inadequate as it is in meeting the cost of living crisis. Universal credit is the main tool of support for a third of Welsh families but it is just insufficient. Nearly a third of Welsh adults in poverty are actually in work. I agree that getting into work is a good way to get out of poverty, as Conservative Members have already noted—I have no argument with that—but when wages are so low, the effect is lessened to say the least. Universal credit is just not good enough.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Citizens Advice Scotland saw a 20% increase in sanctions-related advice from March to December last year compared with the same period in 2020. The Department for Work and Pensions’ stats show that the number of people sanctioned while looking for work increased fivefold in August compared with June. Does the hon. Member agree that imposing further sanctions on those looking for work will only compound financial hardship unnecessarily?

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[Hywel Williams]

I thank the hon. Lady for that point. The sanctions regime has increased misery for many people over many years, and I wish it were not applied as sternly and as regressively as it is. We need another way forward.

One of the things I most regret—I am sure many hon. Members regret it, too—is the Chancellor’s cruel £20 cut to universal credit. Forty-three per cent. of households across the UK in receipt of universal credit are food insecure, and it is worsening. In Wales alone, the Trussell Trust distributed 145,000 emergency food parcels in 2020-21—that is the number of emergency food parcels, not the total figure, which gives an impression of the scale of the crisis people face—which is 88% up on the level at the height of austerity five or 10 years ago. It is now much worse.

On a local level, I draw attention to the efforts of my constituents in Caernarfon. The Porthi Pawb scheme, which means “feeding everyone,” has distributed hot meals throughout the Caernarfon area for many months but, of course, it is not enough, despite its great efforts. I will burden the House with another example. Plaid Cymru has a very successful food share scheme in Bangor. It opened its doors at 10 o’clock on Sunday, and it was cleared out almost immediately, such is the scale of the demand.

Universal credit and, in many cases, employment are simply not paying enough to keep people out of poverty or to put food on the table. Poverty and its consequences for food security are, as has been said many times, an inevitable, direct and foreseen effect of Government policy. Where the benefits system is, to a degree, devolved, as it is in Scotland, the national Government can act for the good of all the people. For us in Plaid Cymru, and for Wales, having parity with Scotland and Northern Ireland on welfare powers is the obvious next step towards defeating and, indeed, eradicating poverty from our country—that and a proper allocation of money from Westminster to support this laudable objective.

In the meantime, I urge the Government to restore the £20 universal credit uplift immediately, to end the two-child limit and to increase local housing allowance back to the 30th percentile of market rates. Labour in Wales does, and indeed should, support Plaid Cymru’s proposal for rent controls to stop the spike in rents in Wales. Many more measures could be taken. Such measures, partial as they are, would boost hard-pressed families’ purchasing power, boost local economies and help to eradicate poverty and the curse of food insecurity from our country.