Cost of Living Increases

Ian Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

I would like to raise the terrifying consequences of the declining living standards experienced by my constituents in West Derby and by people across the city of Liverpool. One third of the people in my city are now in some kind of food poverty. Two thirds of my constituents are having to cut back on hot water, heating or electricity. The crisis was not inevitable; it has been fuelled by political choices—the political choice of Tory Governments to privatise our utilities and infrastructure; the political choice to allow profiteering in supermarkets and the oil and gas companies; the political choice of this Government to inflict 13 years of brutal austerity on my constituents; and the political choices to cut our vital public services to the bone, to decimate the social safety net and state pension, to strip away workers’ rights and to create a crisis of insecure contracts and low pay. The Government’s political choices have destroyed the services that can be the difference between life and death for many of my constituents in these times of crisis.

The rise of 19.2% in the price of food in the past year is the highest since 1977, and it is alongside the sharpest fall in real wages since 1977. The Resolution Foundation calculated that had wages continued to grow as they were before the financial crash of 2008, the average worker would make £11,000 more a year than they do now, taking rising prices into account—imagine where we would be. Recently, the Food Foundation reported that child food poverty has doubled in a year: 3.7 million children—one in five—have eaten less, skipped meals or gone without meals for an entire day. We are in danger of losing a generation of children through no fault of their own. Those who will shape the future of our nation will not reach their full potential because of the preventable scourge of hunger.

It is a disgraceful injustice that many of my constituents and so many children across this country are in this situation, yet at the same time inflation has been fuelled by “greedflation”, with supermarkets, food manufacturers and shipping companies protecting shareholder dividends by giving extra lifts to prices. Unite the union has highlighted:

“Despite the rise in wholesale prices, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda still managed to increase their profits by an astonishing 97% in 2021.”

At a recent sitting of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, we heard evidence from the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, who told us:

“Corporations have a significant amount of power in markets”,

but

“Governments have tools in place to stabilise prices.”

In West Derby, there are nurses, educators, firefighters, postal workers, rail staff and civil servants all using food banks. This is one of the most grave and frightening crises we have seen in our lifetimes. The situation simply cannot go on, so I ask the Minister to intervene now to support my constituents and services in West Derby, and curb the selfish profiteering by some companies in the food supply chain and energy industry.

I also call on the Minister to make food a legal right for all, to enshrine the right to food in legislation, and to end the scandal of hunger and food banks once and for all, beginning by providing universal free school meals for every primary and secondary pupil in state education. Let us heed this evidence, and invest in our communities and our children. We do not need sticking plasters and tinkering around the edges. We need the kitchen sink throwing at this dire situation for millions to transform the future of our nation. We should demand nothing less and settle for nothing less.