Tackling Poverty in the UK

Lord Cryer Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

First, I congratulate the hon. Lady on her election to the Chair of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions. My colleagues and I look forward to being grilled by her in the months ahead, but I hope that we will have a constructive relationship. I hope that we can listen openly to the ideas that come from her Committee and that we can work together to make a difference on some of these issues.

I very much agree with the hon. Lady on mental health issues. One thing that I hope will come through the Work programme, where we have established providers with specialist skills working with employers and people who have had mental health challenges in their lives, is that we will have the kind of partnership that will break some of these barriers down. Once a provider starts to work with a group of employers, starts to bring good people to them, and that works well, more doors will be opened. The hon. Lady makes an important point; more than 2 million people are on incapacity benefit and many have supplemental health problems, and they must be looked after in the Work programme and we must ensure that it delivers opportunities for them.

[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

Can the Minister explain what the future holds for Remploy?

[Chris Grayling]

Remploy does some very good work. We have been in office only three weeks, so there is still a lot of work to be done, but we recognise the importance of Remploy. In particular, I pay tribute to Remploy for doing some of the work that the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Miss Begg) would like to see, such as getting people who have various forms of disability routinely into workplaces alongside members of society as a whole. That is particularly important. I want to see as many people as possible with either mental health problems or physical disabilities in workplaces as a matter of routine, and Remploy’s work in getting more people into work has been extremely valuable.

May I also welcome you to your Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker? This may or may not be your first session, but it is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair today. If you will forgive me, I shall move on quickly and make way, because many Members want to make their maiden speeches.

On pensioner poverty, we are concerned to see that older people enjoy dignity and security in their old age, and that means ensuring that those in work are able to put money aside for their future. We have far too many pensioners living in poverty today, about 1.8 million people, so we need a system that works for our pensioners. We need a fair, decent and simple system that is supported by a vibrant private pensions landscape, too.

As a first step in doing the right thing for our pensioners, we will from April next year restore the earnings link with the basic state pension, and there will be a triple guarantee that pensions will be raised by the higher of earnings, prices or 2.5%. That is a big step forward for state pension provision, and I am very proud to be part of an Administration who intend to deliver that change.

We will also do everything that we can to ease the burden on pension funds, to encourage companies to offer high-quality pensions to their employees and to stop drowning pension funds in the red tape that has been symptomatic of the past 13 years of government. We also need to put people back in control of achieving their retirement aspirations, instead of being reliant purely on the state, and that involves creating the savings culture that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has talked about.

We need to address another area—debt, the single biggest challenge facing the UK. This week we have talked extensively about the national challenge that we face, but we should not forget the challenges that individual families face with debt. People in lower-income families are the most vulnerable; they have nothing to fall back on in an emergency; and the debt that they have to take on is twice as expensive as that for most other people because of the risk that they are perceived to represent. Debt creates tensions in families, it can be a disincentive to work and it leads to worry and stress-related illnesses. We will consider ways of alleviating some of the credit and debt challenges that our poorest communities face. That is essential if we are to deal with some of the issues in those communities, and we hope to bring forward thoughts and ideas in due course.

Drug and alcohol misuse and addiction is closely linked to some of the biggest challenges that we face, whether they are social challenges, educational failure, family breakdown, or even crime. Problematic drug and alcohol users are frequently unable to hold down a job or form relationships that do not revolve around their habit, and such addiction can ruin lives and destroy families, often leaving little room for anything else. Poverty and deprivation are a cause and effect of addiction, born out of the fact that 80% of problem drug users are in receipt of benefits, often for many years, with little realistic prospect of finding employment. Addiction in the home can do huge damage to children too, so as we design the work programme’s detail, we will also be mindful of how we address the deep-rooted problems of addiction in our welfare state and our most deprived communities.

The past decade has been a wasted opportunity for this country. Promise after promise was not kept; hopes and expectations were dashed; and the jobs that were created went to people entering the country from overseas, not those on benefits. The reality is that billions and billions of pounds were spent to relatively little effect. We are determined to ensure that our most deprived communities are not left behind as they were over that decade. We will strive to get people back into work as the economy recovers; we will strive to improve the chances of those people getting a good education; we will work to strengthen families; we will work to break down the barriers between our richest and poorest communities; and we will work to raise the aspirations in those communities.

This is a Government who believe in opportunity, and we will work tirelessly to deliver it for all our citizens.

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[John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)]

May I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker? I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat) and other Members who have made maiden speeches this afternoon.

I am grateful for the opportunity to make my second maiden speech, which might sound like a contradiction in terms. I can say one thing with certainty: I do not intend to make a third. I am delighted to represent Leyton and Wanstead in the House, having represented Hornchurch for eight years until the last election but one. Leyton and Wanstead which, like Hornchurch, is in east London, is a great place. I shall observe the traditions of the House by paying tribute both to my predecessor and to my constituency.

Harry Cohen built a reputation over many years as an assiduous and hard-working constituency MP. He championed certain causes over many years, including Tibet, for which he fought—although I do not mean physically. He represented Tibet in the House, and he was a leading light in the all-party Tibet group, which I joined this morning. He fought, too, for asylum seekers—some of the most persecuted and vulnerable people in the world, and he did a great job on that. He led the campaign to save Whipps Cross hospital in the constituency, which was under threat of closure from the Tories for many years, but whose future was secured under the Labour Government. Whether it will be secure from now on remains to be seen.

Leyton and Wanstead is one of the most diverse communities in Britain, with a huge range of religions, races, languages, beliefs, persuasions and outlooks. Across all those communities there is a high level of tolerance. People with widely divergent views and backgrounds can live together in harmony most of the time—recently, in fact, all the time—which is one reason why I like it so much. There have been one or two notable MPs for Leyton and Wanstead. Winston Churchill was MP for the old Wanstead and Woodford seat to the north of the constituency, until he retired in 1964. In the 1960s and ’70s, Patrick Gordon Walker was the MP. He fought an infamous by-election after he had lost his seat unexpectedly in the 1964 general election. A vacancy was created in the old Leyton seat by putting the sitting MP, Reg Sorensen, into the House of Lords, so that he could fight it at the election, but he lost the seat. He regained it at the next election, but for a short time he was the unelected Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s first Government. These days it is unimaginable to think that somebody who was unelected could hold such high office, but there we go.

I want to touch on three key local issues. The first is Whipps Cross hospital, which, as I said, was under threat for many years under the Conservative Government. Under the Labour Government, £30 million was spent on it, but it needs more investment. Whether that will be forthcoming, whether the hospital’s future will be secure after all the threats of cuts that we have heard from the Treasury Bench in the last few weeks remains to be seen, but I and others will fight tooth and nail for its future.

The second issue concerns the safer neighbourhood teams, which come under the aegis of the Metropolitan police. They face cuts. We have a Conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, and a Conservative Government, both of whom, particularly the Mayor, have promised cuts. Those teams have made a significant impact across wards in London, particularly in Redbridge and Waltham Forest in my constituency, and to start reducing community officers in those teams would reverse that impact on our communities.

An issue that is particularly close to my heart is that of the Sure Start centres. We are not quite clear where we are with Sure Start. Before the election, the Conservatives said that they would cut them pretty extensively. [Interruption.] This is a maiden speech so hon. Members should pipe down. I do not think that the Lib Dems have quite discovered what Sure Start is yet, but they probably will in due course. However, cuts seem to be in the pipeline.

Sure Start has made an impact in some ways in alleviating child poverty, which brings me to the subject of today’s debate. The Minister got very excited about the idea that child poverty increased under the Labour Government. It is slightly difficult to put the words “the Minister” and “excited” in the same sentence, but he did get a bit worked up about it. The fact is that in 1997 when Labour came to power, the number of children living in poverty was 3.4 million. In the first two terms of the Labour Government, the number fell to 2.4 million, so we took a million children out of poverty. The figure went up to 2.8 million and then levelled off.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) mentioned, the most recent figures that we have cover the year 2008-09, the penultimate year that Labour was in power, and they demonstrated that during that financial year, 100,000 people were removed from poverty and the increase in child poverty started to level off.

The coalition Government now say—we have heard this on a number of occasions—that tackling poverty is one of their priorities, yet three factors lead me to think that that may not be the case, or that the rhetoric may not be matched by the reality. First, we will see cuts in the child trust funds, which have been one of the most successful exercises in encouraging people, particularly from lower-income backgrounds, to save. We have seen a trebling of saving among families with children, predominantly among lower and middle-income families.

Secondly, there is the cancellation of the public housing programmes. Again, we are not wholly clear about this, but it is pretty clear that there will be some cancellations in the public housing programmes that were pushed through in the last year or two of the Labour Government by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), who was an outstanding Housing Minister. They should have happened years earlier. They should have started in 1997, but at least we started them in the last two years, and billions of pounds were going to be pumped into them.

Finally, there is the agency workers directive. Agency workers are some of the most exploited and low-paid workers in Britain. That directive took years to negotiate in Brussels, and it may not make as big a difference as I would like, but it will have a modest impact in creating a certain equality between agency workers and full-time, permanent workers. Very often agency workers are used to undercut the permanent work force.

Again, we do not have a clear position on this. That is partly because the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has Ministers from different political backgrounds. In fact, the Secretary of State has been in more parties than Paris Hilton. It seems that the directive may be abandoned, watered down or renegotiated. That will have a significant impact on some of the most vulnerable workers in Britain.

The roots of Britain’s current position with regard to poverty go back to the 1980s. In 1979, the last time that we left office, we left the country with one of the most egalitarian societies in the western world, rivalling Australia and West Germany in terms of income and wealth distribution. In 1997, when we returned to power, it was one of the most unequal societies in the western world, and the figures back that up. If a Government privatise and deregulate like a bunch of medieval crusading zealots and insist on shackling and attacking trade unions, removing the rights and protections of some of the most vulnerable workers in Britain and ripping up and eviscerating whole industries and communities on the basis of economic fundamentalism and political vindictiveness, an explosion of poverty, like that which came about in the 1980s, can hardly come as a surprise. That was the result then, and it is plain for all to see.

The coalition accuses us of a failure to tackle poverty. In reality, the criticism that can be levelled at the last Labour Government is that we did not go far enough in repairing the damage of the previous 18 years. There were modest attempts to do so, but they did not go far enough, and my worry is that this Government have now come back to finish their previous job. The price of the cuts that we hear about will be paid by our constituents, who are some of the most vulnerable in Britain; Opposition Members will be representing people on the receiving end. The Deputy Prime Minister talks about “progressive cuts”, but it is easy for him to say that when he comes from a background of wealth and privilege and is not going to be on the receiving end of the cuts himself. I should like him to come to the House and explain to us exactly what “progressive cuts” means, because I am struggling to find a definition of it.