Poverty: Glasgow North East

John Grady Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke), who is my neighbour, for securing this important debate. Glasgow has disgraceful levels of absolute poverty, with families who cannot afford the essentials to live: food, heat, school uniforms and clothes.

We do not help those in desperate poverty by making unaffordable promises. But despite the constrained public finances, our Government have taken action. Our last Budget raised billions in extra taxes to fight poverty. In Scotland, that means an extra £4.9 billion for the Scottish Government, so that they can tackle record NHS waiting lists and arrest the alarming decline of Scottish education. Our Employment Rights Bill tackles the evil of in-work poverty, with the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation. Our Government have increased the living wage well above inflation.

Our Government have been in power for 10 months; the Tories were in power for 10 years and the SNP have been in power for 18 years—at the helm of an incredibly powerful devolved Administration blessed with significant powers. The SNP have run Glasgow city council for eight years.

[Kirsteen Sullivan (Bathgate and Linlithgow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that many of the essential services that families rely on are delivered by local authorities, and that local authorities have had their budgets slashed year on year by the Scottish Government, which impacts their ability to protect and support the most vulnerable people in our societies?

[John Grady]

I agree. Local government has been emasculated by the Tory Governments in England and Wales and the SNP Government in Scotland. I must say that they are pretty non-discriminatory in their emasculation, because they have failed to properly fund the SNP council in Glasgow for years.

In Scotland, one cause of poverty is the shocking state of the NHS. Record waiting lists do not just delay people getting back to work; the delays mean that their conditions deteriorate to a point where they cannot return to work, and we should be incredibly angry about that. In 2007, the Scottish Government promised to establish a ministerial taskforce on health inequalities, yet Scotland continues to have the worst health inequalities in western and central Europe. On disability health checks, following a successful pilot in 2019-20, the Scottish Government committed to carry out annual health checks for people with learning disabilities in 2022. It was to be completed by 2023, but as of 2023-24, only 6.9% of eligible people had been offered a health check. The SNP’s record in Holyrood on health is absolutely shameful.

Education is an essential pathway out of poverty. However, the attainment gap in Scotland is widening, which means that kids in my constituency and others with large working-class populations have fewer life chances, and they are getting worse—it is an absolute scandal. College education is in crisis. Again, this should be a source of anger.

Glasgow city council has an opportunity to help some of the most vulnerable in Glasgow. Homeless Project Scotland has a food and night shelter in the Merchant City in Glasgow. It serves free hot meals and provides an immaculately clean shelter for homeless people. However, it has had its planning permission refused. The shelter is at serious risk of closing, but I am heartened to hear that Glasgow city council has said:

“We are available to engage...and do whatever we can to help them secure suitable property”.

I hope that the council does that. It has two golden keys to a resolution. It has an extensive property portfolio and it is the planning authority. I cannot think of an organisation better placed to help.

I helped at the shelter on Sunday night. That night, it served over 100 men and women, but because children are also homeless in Glasgow, it serves them too. On Sunday night, there was a boy—just like my boy—with his dad, a teenage boy with his mum, and a girl perhaps the same age as my daughter. If the shelter is closed, where will those children and their mums and dads get a hot meal? Where will the most vulnerable in my city get a safe bed for the night? I hope that Glasgow city council delivers on its promise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

May I start by acknowledging the very powerful speeches that we have heard this afternoon from the Members for Glasgow? I would not say that my view is that the people of Glasgow are generally well represented by Scottish Labour, but they have been very well represented in this debate.

I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke) for the way she highlighted the tragedy of low life expectancy and of poverty in general in her constituency. She mentioned Easterhouse, which occupies a particular place in the pantheon of Conservative thinking about welfare because my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) visited it 20 years ago and had his epiphany about what she described as the context of poverty. He described the interconnectedness of the different factors that drive poverty, which go so far beyond simple income poverty—issues around welfare itself but also joblessness, family breakdown, addiction and so on.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) talked about the long consequences of deindustrialisation, which are relevant across our country but especially in places such as Glasgow. He also mentioned the consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North East mentioned the stagnation of wages in her constituency. Low wage growth has been a problem across the United Kingdom since that time. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green became the Welfare Secretary in 2010, he introduced reforms that offered real, direct benefits and improvements in welfare and in worklessness. There were 1 million fewer workless households in 2020 than in 2010 and, after housing costs, 1 million fewer people in absolute poverty—100,000 fewer children, 200,000 fewer pensioners and 700,000 fewer working-age people in poverty.

The last Government did make a real impact on poverty. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge some of the points that have been made in this debate. The fact is that the fiscal situation that we inherited and the choices made by the coalition Government meant that insufficient support was given to people who needed it, particularly as a result of cuts to local authority budgets and reforms to the DWP budgets.

I echo what the hon. Member for Glasgow North East says about the neglect of Glasgow under the SNP since devolution and over the past decade, but I do not agree with her about the value of the reforms being introduced by the new Government. What we have seen is a rushed effort driven by the imperative to balance the books in consequence of a failed Budget last year, leaving a real crisis in the public finances that is now being felt by the recipients of benefits. The Government are balancing the books on the backs of the people least able to sustain that weight.

[John Grady]

On failed Budgets, my constituents go to the shops with terror at the rising prices that followed the Budget of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is the very definition of a failed Budget—one that plunged many of my constituents into poverty?

[Danny Kruger]

I am not going to defend the mini-Budget to which the hon. Gentleman refers, but I do not accept that the rise in prices that all our constituents have experienced are solely, or even in large part, due to that event. They are a result of wider global events—and since this Government came in, I am afraid to say, of a failed economic policy that has driven the necessity of the disability benefit cuts that have been introduced and the winter fuel payment cut, causing 10 million people to lose a vital part of their income. Since the cut, 100,000 more pensioners have been admitted to A&E and 50,000 children have been plunged into poverty in consequence of what is happening at the DWP.

I am very concerned about the announcement of cuts to the benefits regime before the review of the assessment system that gives people the entitlement to benefits. We have a genuine failure at the DWP. In addition to that, jobs are being destroyed by Treasury decisions to raise national insurance on employers, drive up energy costs and introduce a new Bill that will make employers much less keen to take on new workers.

My suggestion to the Minister, if she will allow me to make it, is to rethink the changes to winter fuel payments. I am conscious that in Scotland the Scottish Government are taking over responsibility for this area of policy and I echo the point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) that it would be good to hear from the Minister about how the interaction of the benefits reforms will work in the light of Scottish Government policy. I also hope that the UK Government will rethink the disability benefit cuts until we get the review of the eligibility assessment schemes. We need more support for people who need help to navigate the system and get into work.

Let me return to the point I made in response to the reference to Easterhouse by the hon. Member for Glasgow North East. We need to attack the drivers of poverty—the interconnected factors that account for the demand for welfare, which is so high. It is social breakdown rather than purely DWP systems that account for the high— indeed, unsustainable—benefit bills that we have. We need to grow the economy to create jobs—good jobs, as the hon. Lady said, that will be right for Glasgow and right for the UK.