Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Southport (Damien Moore), who is clearly a passionate supporter of Southport. I congratulate him: I am sure he will do well in today’s Conservative party.

This Queen’s Speech fails to address the immediate cost of living crisis and does little to end the longer-term issues of growing poverty and inequality in Wales as in the rest of the United Kingdom. That is the context of this debate and the cause of the hollow laughter at its title, “Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old”. In Wales, we have high levels of poverty, and we have done for decades, particularly since the destruction of our heavy industries by the Conservative Governments of the 1980s. That is why we qualified for EU support on a par with the former Soviet bloc countries of the east—that is, until we were blessed with Brexit opportunities, when that support diminished.

Our levels of child poverty in Wales are the highest in the UK, affecting a third of Welsh children, as measured in 2019. As the Children’s Commissioner for Wales said over the weekend, the rate is now likely to be around 40%. This persistent poverty has consequences for children’s development, including damaging their mental health, and those consequences carry on into adulthood. At this point, if the Whips are listening, I would like to congratulate the Government on their intention to bring in a mental health Bill and say that, as a former social worker approved under the Mental Health Act 1983, I would be very glad of the opportunity to contribute to the scrutiny of that Bill.

Poverty carries on down the generations, but not, as some would have it, as something inherently bad or morally reprehensible about working people. It is poverty that damages lives and it is poverty that kills. The cost of living crisis is having a devastating impact on children all over Wales and elsewhere in the UK, and families are being forced to choose between eating and heating. Wales has the highest rate of food bank use in the UK, with over 4,000 food parcels distributed per 100,000 people per annum. People are turning to food banks because they have no other choice.

The cut of £20 per week to universal credit, which took away £286 million from the Welsh economy, was an utter disaster for children in low-income families. As to adults in Wales, one in three people of working age and almost one in five pensioners die in poverty. That is the highest rate in the UK. This disgraceful Victorian value must be banished for good. Smoking is the largest single cause of avoidable early death in Wales, and Plaid Cymru supports the introduction of a “polluter pays” levy on tobacco manufacturers to raise funds for tobacco control, to ensure that our smoke-free ambition for Wales is met.

The real game changer for Wales would be the devolution of social security so that we can build a system of support that meets our particular needs. Control over the administration of benefits would create a more flexible approach at a time when families need it most—for example, paying universal credit weekly to reflect the way that poor people have to budget and changing the current degrading sanctions regime. Welfare support could be delivered to meet the actual needs of people in Wales, with winter fuel payments linked to home energy efficiency. Cold weather payments could be improved to take into account rurality, which has particular effects on people in the uplands of my own constituency of Arfon. Devolution would enable us to create new ways of helping to top up existing benefits. We in Plaid Cymru believe that our Senedd should create a Welsh child payment similar to that in Scotland, and much more.

[Carol Monaghan]

One of the difficulties is that only a very small proportion of benefits—about 15%—have been devolved to the Scottish Government. With the situation that the hon. Gentleman is talking about, all benefits would need to be devolved so that they could be properly administered.

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[Hywel Williams]

I share the ambition of the hon. Lady and her colleagues to have a proper social security system that is tailored to the needs of our communities. The Scottish Government are leading the way, as far as I am concerned, and when we have that power, we will be emulating some of the measures that they have brought in.

Wales comes way down the priority list of this Conservative Government, whose eyes are glued both on their vulnerable red wall seats and their increasingly unhappy homelands in the south and east of England. But Plaid Cymru advocates bold policies for everyone, which will make Wales a good place to grow old and to grow up.