Child Poverty

Debate between Imran Hussain and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 26th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd]

It is a damning indictment. If just one organisation was saying that, perhaps we could bypass it, but organisation after organisation is identifying that as a cause of concern. Somewhat topically, if the Government can exempt the most powerful of commercial institutions from paying their due taxes or can slope away from challenging the practices of bankers, who are the real culprits in the economic chaos of 2008, surely they can protect our children from the worst effects of those who seem unable or unwilling to pay decent wages.

The existence of any level of child poverty in one of the world’s wealthiest countries should be a source of deep concern to everyone in this room, but it should also be a source of shame that the levels of child poverty in this country are high and rising. I have many friends who either were or are teachers or health and social care professionals—they work or have worked to make the lives of children better, easier and gentler—but such professionals have a hard task. They have spent much of their careers seeing the number of children in poverty beginning to drop. For example, poverty reduced dramatically between 1998 and 2011, when 1.1 million children were lifted out of poverty, but that has changed over the past few years, as my hon. Friend said. Austerity has taken its toll, particularly on those who can least afford it. Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions indicate that, since 2010, child poverty has, at best, flatlined. Meanwhile, the number of children in absolute poverty has risen by half a million since 2010. That is 100,000 children every year, more than 8,000 children a month, almost 2,000 children every week or, put another way, 300 children a day for five years—year in, year out—which cannot be right.

Let us not beat about the bush. The unspoken question on many minds is whether that poverty is due to the fecklessness of parents. Well, I think not in most cases. More than two thirds of children affected by poverty live in households where at least one member is in work. God knows what type of work permits and enables such poverty, but they are, none the less, in work. End Child Poverty, an organisation considering such issues, is particularly concerned about the rising poverty in working families. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, “A UK without Poverty,” noted,

“Too often, public debate talks about ‘the poor’ as if they were a separate group of people with a completely different way of life.”

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. Does my hon. Friend agree that low-wage, low-skill economies lead to an increase in child poverty? In my constituency, Bradford East, we have an absolute child poverty rate of 28.6%, compared with a national average of 18.2%, which is unacceptable. Does he agree that one solution is not this rhetoric of more employment, which the Government keep telling us, but to provide high-skill, high-wage jobs, so that families cannot just survive but live properly and children are brought out of poverty?

[Peter Dowd]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come back to that in a moment.