Food Poverty

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. We went to that food bank together, and we have been to many others. I will speak in more detail about my concerns for the future, but I have a snapshot of where we are at the moment. We have just had the autumn statement, and reports show that the poorest 10% in our communities will be hit even harder. I worry about the future, and that the figures will become even worse.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate, and on the excellent work she has done over several months. She is right to look to worsening times. Last week, I was told about a constituent who currently has £12 a week left with which to buy food after paying his bills. That is less than £2 a day, which is about to be wiped out by the bedroom tax, and means that he will lose £12 a week in housing benefit.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. There is so much I could have included in my speech that I did not even reflect on the bedroom tax. It is a good point. I know many constituents who are affected. The problem on Merseyside, which is replicated throughout the country, is that the Government want people to move into smaller properties, and if those properties do not exist, our constituents will be hammered every week and will struggle to put food on the table.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I can also share a story with the House; this may be something that other hon. Members have experienced. A number of us travel back to our constituencies on a Thursday, and I often do my shopping in my local Asda on a Thursday night. I am sometimes there at 10 or 11 o’clock at night if I have been to an evening engagement and I see people waiting for the knock-down-price milk. They wait there for the price of the milk to go down to 11p. People know what times to come in for the different items, and I have seen people fighting over items in the knock-down-price section. That breaks my heart, and there are other such examples. More Ministers need to see what that is like and why people have to make those choices.

[Kate Green]

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend again, but I have one final point. The issue is not just the financial hardship, but the humiliation—the degradation. People feel demeaned by the fact that they are forced either to accept handouts or to buy low-priced, cut-price, poorer-quality food. They do not have the dignity of participating in the way the rest of us can.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The knock-down-price items are not necessarily things that I would like to eat, but for some people that is the only choice that they have.

When a food bank voucher is issued, people have to tick a box to explain why they are going to that food bank. I will talk more in a moment about the vouchers, but there were two main reasons why people were referred to food banks in 2011-12. The biggest reason was benefit delay: 30% of people nationally gave that reason when the Trussell Trust aggregated the reasons why people were going to food banks. It is higher in my own constituency; I will come to those figures in a moment. Low income was the second main reason, at 20%.

I will say a little about DWP figures. I know that this matter is not directly under the Minister’s control, but it is particularly relevant to this debate. The DWP has something called the AACT—average actual clearance time—target. It says that it aims to ensure that people get income support within nine days, jobseeker’s allowance within 11 days and employment and support allowance within 14 days.

If someone has no money and suddenly finds themselves in a desperate situation, those waiting times are difficult enough, but we know that 45% of professionals referring families and adults for food packages cited troubles and delays with benefits, that that figure was up from about 40% the year before and that it had more than doubled since the recession began.

The DWP has issued a response to the figures; this was in The Guardian on 16 October 2012. It stated:

“In response to the figures, a DWP spokesperson cited the fact that 80% of benefit claims were turned around in 16 days,”

so it is not even meeting its targets.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

This has been a worthwhile debate, and I commend the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) for introducing it. I also commend the other hon. Members who have taken part: my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and the hon. Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds), for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies). They have all made valuable contributions today.

I want to say from the start that I do not think that any Member should ever ignore the fact that there are people who face the most invidious choices that any person should ever have to make in their daily lives—choices about finding the money and deciding whether their family is able to eat or whether they have to meet the other demands on what are sometimes their very meagre incomes. That problem has existed for a very long time indeed, but I recognise—it would be very silly not to do so—that those pressures are increasing, particularly in the food sector, because of the cost of food and the fact that that cost is putting increasing pressure on many households at a time when the economic circumstances of this country are far from good and when there is a lot of difficulty.

Where I part company with some of those who have spoken, including the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree, is the contention that this has somehow been concocted by the current Government and that it is the current Government’s fault that we find people in these situations, because it clearly is not. The circumstances of poverty have been with us for a long time.

I am not sure that the concept of food poverty is actually a helpful one in this context. Poverty is the issue; the fact that people find it difficult to meet what is required to help their families to survive. That is the problem in this country. When we talk about fuel poverty, we are talking about a number of different factors; we are talking about whether there is energy wastage in people’s homes that they cannot afford to do something about. But with food, the essential issue is the price and the fact that people have or have not got enough money in their pockets to deal with it—end of story. That is why we must remember that these issues have persisted for a very long time and certainly through the most recent recession.

[Kate Green]

rose—

[Mr Heath]

No, I have not got time to give way.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree made a point, which was picked up by my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire, about the percentage of income or budget spent by a less wealthy family on food; she made the comparison between the figures of 15.8% and 11%. But the fact is that if we go back to 2003-04—a situation that was not, I think, the result of the present Government—we were looking at figures of 16.3% and 10.4%. So a higher proportion of their budget was actually spent on food by less well-off families in those days, and there was also a bigger differential. It is important that people recognise that.

What are the reasons why we have this difficulty? Well, we have a very significant increase in food costs—[Interruption.]