Ian Lavery
Main Page: Ian Lavery (Labour - Blyth and Ashington)Department Debates - View all Ian Lavery's debates with the Department for Education
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab) [V]
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for leading this very important debate.
Can I begin by saying that child poverty is a political choice? It could be eradicated within weeks if there was the political will. We live in the sixth-largest economy in the world, but the wellbeing of our kids is not a priority. We have to ask ourselves why that is the case. Why has it taken time for the Government to come forward with legislation on the right to food—the right to eat? We know that the Government should be ashamed that kids are going hungry, food banks are on the increase, schools’ food budgets are continually being cut, and class sizes continue to get larger. Unemployment is on the rise, and precarious work is more common now than it has ever been. There is a lack of quality housing, and mass evictions are just around the corner. Fire and rehire is running wild, and the benefits system is not fit for purpose. Soon, the £20 uplift in universal credit will be cut. What an absolute mess.
I understand better than most that we should never believe what we read in the newspapers, but we heard only this weekend about a senior Member of Parliament getting £27,000-worth of takeaways delivered to his house by a delivery driver on a hired pushbike. That figure is utterly amazing. It is more than the average yearly salary of many of my constituents, some of whom have more than just one job in order to make ends meet. For the record, the MP voted against free school meals to feed our kids.
We live in a society where 4.3 million children—31%—live in poverty. That figure is up 200,000 from the previous year, and up half a million over five years. Some 37% of children in the north-east live in poverty, which is the second-highest rate in the UK, behind London. The north-east saw the UK’s steepest increase in child poverty—a rise from 26% in 2014-15 to 37% in 2019-20. All 12 north-east councils are in the top 20 such local authorities in the UK; there have been huge increases.
Let me reiterate that child poverty is a political choice. Despite the tiring and monotonous rhetoric about levelling up, the Government have shown no sign of tackling the endemic child poverty in left-behind communities across the country.