Food Poverty

Jonathan Reynolds Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will be briefer than I had intended, Sir Alan. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) for securing this debate, her excellent speech and her campaigning outside Parliament, which has been noticed and appreciated by many people.

As a society, we want to look after our children, nurture them and make them happy and healthy. Everyone in the room surely finds the idea of children going hungry truly shocking. However, the evidence all around us is that many families find it increasingly difficult to give their children enough to eat.

It is worth pausing for a minute to let that idea sink in. In 21st-century Britain, when we carry around more technology in the mobile phones in our pockets than it took to get to the moon, when we can cure diseases that were deadly a generation ago and can pay our sports stars £250,000 a week, how can it be that any child goes to bed or to school hungry? That is shocking, and it should be shocking.

I agree that we have to admire the Church groups, charities, volunteers and groups such as the Trussell Trust, which have stepped in to run food banks to help the most vulnerable. Across the country, thousands of people have appreciated their help. They do tremendous work, and I would definitely pay tribute to their commitment, hard work and dedication. However, I am also deeply concerned that many people are forced to seek such help. I hope that this debate, and some of the personal stories that we have heard, will encourage the Government to take another look at what is happening here in the UK.

With food and energy prices rising more quickly than wages, more and more working families are finding themselves edging towards food poverty. They often struggle simply to get by from week to week. Many of them just do not have enough to spare when something unexpected happens. Any sort of unanticipated crisis—whether redundancy, bereavement, delays in benefit payments or even the breakdown of a freezer—leaves them with nowhere to turn but the food bank.

My local citizens advice bureau tells me that the majority of people needing food parcels in my area are in that situation because their benefits have been stopped or their expected payments have been delayed. That should particularly be in our minds when we consider the transition to universal credit. Other examples of reasons given by the CAB include people leaving prison who have had to wait for their benefits to start, someone who lost their job because of mental health problems after working for 23 years, and a woman whose husband had just died and was not able to access his bank accounts until after probate.

Many people who have received such help appreciate it, but I agree that in nearly every case they have exhausted every other option before having to turn to a food bank. We should acknowledge—I am pleased that other Members have said this—that it is never an easy option to go to a food bank. We should not underestimate the stigma that people feel when forced to do that. As our economy fails to recover, unemployment remains high and prices increase, I fear that it will become increasingly routine for the most vulnerable to have to turn to such help.

Last month, I joined Church leaders and volunteers collecting groceries from shoppers in my local Tesco store, for a food bank in east Tameside that has just been set up by the Trussell Trust. I was struck by the incredible generosity of people, many of whom are not enjoying the best of times. In only two days, the charity collected almost 2 tonnes of groceries from shoppers in Stalybridge, an incredible amount given that people are tightening their belts. That shows how determined we can be to help those most in need when we come together as a community.

It is appropriate that this debate should follow yesterday’s discussion of the autumn statement in the main Chamber. Government policies, whether it is the increase in VAT, the real-terms cuts to tax credits and benefits or decisions that have led to people losing their jobs, are hitting the most vulnerable people in society. As families struggle with higher living costs, lower wages and changes to welfare, the situation will only get worse, especially after April when some of the welfare benefit changes come into force.

If the Chancellor had come to the Chamber yesterday with an autumn statement that uprated benefits and asked everyone to give more, that would have been one thing, but the autumn statement represented a net give-away for the next three fiscal years. There was money for tax cuts for millionaires and for corporation tax cuts for banks, but the money has to come from the people who get up and go to work for some of the lowest wages in this country. How come that is not an economic necessity as much as lowering corporation tax is? That is the question that the Government must answer. I think, though, that we know the answer. It is a sick and cynical political game that is designed to be some sort of political strategy. We need to know from the Liberal Democrat MPs whether they think that is a good thing to go along with.

Finally, I agree with the points made about the long-term future of food banks. We know from America, where food banks operate very widely and often on a huge basis, that they are essential in the short term but are not a long-term solution. I do not want to see them publicly funded, as in some American states, and we should recognise that if that happened, it would be an erosion of the state’s responsibilities to its own people. To rely on food banks as a long-term policy solution would be to gloss over the underlying causes of poverty and falsely to give an illusion of security.

Rising food poverty should be of concern to us all. But up and down the country tonight, as families struggle with lower incomes and the squeezed cost of living, we all have to admit that food poverty is the reality of modern Britain.