Poverty: Food Costs

Debate between Lee Anderson and Fleur Anderson

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Dowd.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) on securing this welcome debate, but I do not agree with many of the things he said. He thinks that people who use food banks are abusing them, cannot budget or cook properly, have access to huge amounts of food waste—

[Lee Anderson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Fleur Anderson]

The hon. Member had plenty of time to speak; I have only two minutes. He has just made provocative statements completely detached from the facts as I have seen them at my local food bank and from visiting so many people in my constituency. In Southfields and in Roehampton with its Community Box, food banks are doing a fantastic job, but no one going to them wants to go there; they want to be able to go to the shops to choose their food and provide for their family.

In Sherwood, the Minister’s constituency, 1,233 emergency three-day food supplies were given out last year, and in my borough of Wandsworth, 10,000 emergency food supplies were given out. There is a reason for the huge increase in the need to go to food banks, and that is that the system is entirely broken after 13 years of the Conservatives breaking that system.

The people I meet who have gone to food banks are the best at budgeting, at working shifts, at making ends meet and at never wasting food. They do not want to visit food banks, but they are a lifeline in emergency times. Instead of blaming people who go to food banks, the hon. Member for Ashfield should have been looking at the two-child benefit cap, the bedroom tax and the frozen local housing allowance. I commend Sadiq Khan for bringing free school meals to London schools—they will make a huge difference.

In London, housing is the main issue, so I lead with some questions on that to the Minister. With the Budget coming up, will he speak to his right hon. Friend the Chancellor to urge him to use it to end the freeze on the local housing allowance, restoring it so that it covers the cheapest third of rents in an area? With April looming, will the Minister reassure my constituents by ruling out any increase in the Government’s energy price cap from April, but instead pass on recent falls in the gas price to households, so that they will not need to rely on food banks anymore?

Papers Relating to the Home Secretary

Debate between Lee Anderson and Fleur Anderson

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I am extremely pleased to close this debate on an important motion. It is important to my constituents in Putney, Southfields and Roehampton, who have stopped me on the tube recently and said, “What is going on?” They are perplexed about what is being allowed to happen and especially about the issues around the recent reshuffle and its returns.

[Lee Anderson]

rose—

[Fleur Anderson]

I am just starting off.

The public look to the Home Office to keep them, their families and their communities safe, but the Prime Minister’s decision to reappoint the Home Secretary against advice just six days after she broke the ministerial code and had to resign, and in the light of the further reports about security and code breaches, is shockingly irresponsible. We have heard a full, detailed list of questions that we still do not have answers to. I hope to hear answers to them in the Minister’s closing speech.

We heard powerful speeches from my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer), who listed several serious questions that need to answered, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton), who outlined the serious concerns raised by her constituents that need to be addressed, and my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), who raised the questionable decisions made by the Home Secretary—that is what is underneath this whole debate today—and the need to appoint an ethics adviser. Perhaps we will hear about that from the Minister later.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) gave a forensic analysis of the current Home Secretary’s history of leaking being investigated, and the discrepancies in the timeline: when she reported the mistaken email, the selective information given in the letter to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), and the deficiencies in those letters. That letter and the deficiencies in it are one of the reasons why the Opposition called for this debate and for the documents to be made public.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) underlined the importance of trust and the need to rebuild the trust of our constituents in the Government after recent months—years even—of the Conservative Government. We need to rebuild trust and that is why we need to see the documents. The judgment of the Prime Minister is being called into question, as my hon. Friend outlined, and the country deserves high standards.

Let me be clear: these are serious questions for the Prime Minister. This month’s Prime Minister promised

“integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”,

but the unravelling of the Home Secretary’s story throws all three of those into doubt. There are serious discrepancies in the letter to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, which I think releasing the documents would help to show. The written ministerial statement leaked by the Home Secretary, which is central to these allegations and issues, was sent on purpose to a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) and, by mistake, to someone else. That surely throws up lots of questions about what else the Home Secretary is sending out and to whom.

Did the Prime Minister know that the Home Secretary had previously used her personal email on six other occasions when he made this appointment? Did the Prime Minister know about the review into her use of personal and Government IT, and was he presented with the findings before he reappointed her? Did he know about the very serious allegations that the Home Secretary was repeatedly leaking sensitive information when she was Attorney General? Did he know of any other breaches that are not currently in the public domain? Has he seen the contents of the Cabinet Office leak inquiry report? Has he been advised of any further breaches of the ministerial code over the handling of events at Manston? Why has the Prime Minister appointed someone with such a cavalier approach to the security of documents and such a history of leaking, to such an important position for national security? All those questions could be answered right now by the Minister without making any personal information about appointments public. They could just be answered right now and I think that would go a long way to restoring trust. The Prime Minister has an opportunity today to definitively prove he has nothing to hide, or he can Whip those on the Government Benches to vote against this motion. We would then have to assume that there is something to hide.

This is a narrow debate, as has been said many times, and specifically so. It asks only that certain papers be laid before the House within 10 sitting days, so that the decision to reappoint the Home Secretary just six days after resigning can be made fully transparent. We are asking to see only the risk assessment, the documents about security breaches and any leak inquiries, submissions made or advice relating to the appointment, and that if redactions need to be made, understandably so, any unredacted materials are made available to the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.

In his opening remarks, the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, the right hon. Member for Horsham (Jeremy Quin) said that sharing appointment documents would undermine the appointment system. We are not asking for all documents in all cases to be shared. This is a very exceptional and unusual appointment just six days after a ministerial resignation, so the process is already undermined. The allegations will continue to dog the Home Secretary unless we can fully find out what has been going on. I hope that those documents would restore the trust that has been lost.

It is not just the Opposition who are asking serious questions. The Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), also wrote to the Cabinet Secretary on 3 November to ask many questions about the reappointment of the Home Secretary and about many procedural issues. He has written a list of six serious questions that I hope will be answered soon.

Amid all the chaos, it is timely to remind ourselves that there is still no ethics adviser in post. The Prime Minister said that one of the first things that he would do was to appoint a new ethics adviser. The previous Prime Minister said that she did not even need one, but no one believed that. A Cabinet Office Minister also promised me in a Westminster Hall debate on Monday 17 October that an ethics adviser would be appointed very shortly. The Prime Minister has so far not appointed one, but has instead appointed a Home Secretary who resigned over security breaches and an Immigration Minister who admitted acting unlawfully in office. The Minister at the centre of all these allegations remains on the Government Front Bench—it is just “Carry on Conservatives”. Where is the promised new ethics adviser? Why the delay when we are again seeing breaches of the ministerial code left, right and centre? Has the position been offered to anyone or to a succession of people who have said, “No, the work load is too much. We can’t take this on”? Will the Minister update the House today?

The Conservative Government have instead relegated national security to an afterthought, at times an inconvenience and something to be worked around. The Opposition have secured this debate not only because the allegations are very serious in their own right and we need to know more, but because the Home Secretary’s actions and appointment indicate a pattern of behaviour by the Prime Minister in the way that he is making decisions.

There have been allegations that the former Prime Minister used her personal phone for Government business. There are now revelations about the actions of the Cabinet Minister—the Minister without Portfolio, the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson)—and that is relevant to this motion, because that pattern of behaviour cannot become normal. We have to draw a line.