A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]]

I am very pleased to be able to respond to Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech and to highlight the issues facing my constituency of Wansbeck, and of course, the north-east as a whole.

Nothing is more important than this nation’s young people—our children—but, sadly, millions of them are being left behind as we speak. I want to focus on the real world of child poverty, not some rose-tinted parallel universe that many people appear to be living in. This issue needs to be addressed as a major Government imperative; for any Government, child poverty should be of extreme importance, if not top of the agenda.

The Queen’s Speech proclaims

“Measures will be brought forward to ensure that children have the best start in life, prioritising their early years.”

It also says that the Government

“will address lost learning during the pandemic and ensure every child has a high quality education and is able to fulfil their potential.”

Those are noble aims, but the Government could do a lot worse than look to reverse their own dismal record over the past 11 years.

The Government cannot dare talk of levelling up unless they tackle the gross inequalities in opportunity affecting our young people right across the length and breadth of this country. A decade of brutal austerity and cuts has taken its toll. When children in my constituency look around at communities that are spoken about with such pride and nostalgia by their parents and grandparents they can be forgiven for scratching their heads and wondering why. The schools are overcrowded, underfunded and in many cases absolutely falling apart. The high streets are ghost towns, and the traditional industries that once fostered such a strong sense of community are ghosts of the past, leaving these young people with no clear idea of what to do with their futures. We also lack reliable systems of support and these young people often look around and find they simply have nothing to do.

These are serious issues. In part of Wansbeck, in my constituency, almost half the children grow up in poverty. That is not acceptable—it really isn’t. In 2019 we decided with the National Education Union to produce a child poverty report including the testimonies of teachers and others on the frontline. It found that teachers were routinely providing food and basic supplies to children, and their testimonies were heartbreaking. There were tales of children without winter coats, without proper shoes, with holes in their shoes, with different sized shoes, with different shoes and of course issues with school uniform. What does that actually mean? What does it mean for child poverty? It means that kids are going to school without any food in their bellies, and that really is not fair, and politicians of all colours and of all political persuasions need to push this to the top of the agenda. I am sure in my mind that, despite the fact that some people decided to vote against free school meals, there is not one Member of Parliament who wishes to see any kid going to school hungry—starving, in fact. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the teaching profession and everyone in the education system who has worked tirelessly to help the kids.

We live in the fifth richest economy in the world, and our children should not be forced to live like this. Rickets is on the increase. In the north-east area, over one in four—35,000—children are living below the UK poverty line and are not eligible for free school meals under the current criteria. More than one in 10—about 13,000—north-east children who are currently eligible for free school meals do not take up the offer, and another 4,000 schoolchildren in the north-east are not covered by universal infant free school meals. There are families with no recourse to public funds, many of whom will be living well below the poverty line, but they are not usually eligible for means-tested free school meals.

To make things worse, this Government have changed the way funding is allocated to schools, which is leaving them thousands of pounds worse off in missing pupil premium funding, while those same schools are unable to take advantage of the Government’s catch-up funding. In the north-east alone, this amounts to a cut of between £5.16 million and £7.26 million—all this after a decade of cuts to our schools that has really hammered our schools and the school infrastructure. School funding in the north-east is down 2.6% in real terms since 2013-14, and class sizes have greatly increased.

To turn the tide, we need bold Government intervention and initiatives to breathe life into our schools, communities and industry to give our children a fighting chance and a fair chance to move on to honest work so that they can build a life for their families and break the cycle in the next generation. Our asks are modest: a fair chance for our children to find good, decent, dignified work that they can build a life and a family around. We should accept nothing less in a country as rich as ours in the 21st century. Levelling up will mean nothing if our kids continue to go to school hungry. Everyone has a right to food: it is a human right.