Child Bed Poverty

Debate between Lee Rowley and Catherine McKinnell

Monday 19th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Lee Rowley)]

It is a pleasure to respond to the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I am grateful to all hon. Members who have spoken. As the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) said, we are small in number, but I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the topic. I am also grateful to the hon. Members for Halifax (Holly Lynch) and for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) for their contributions, and I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for introducing the debate.

As hon. Members already have, I want particularly to thank Bex Wilson, founder of Zarach. The great work her and her colleagues have done in West Yorkshire has been referenced on multiple occasions. She highlights some of the challenges that she has seen on a local level within Leeds and I accept that there are challenges in other parts of the country as well. I pay tribute to her organisation and its brilliant work to provide beds for families who are struggling, especially for those with young children.

As the hon. Member for Luton North said, we all share the same end, which is not to have families or children who need support, do not have access to beds and do not have the ability to have a good night’s sleep, which we all benefit from and often need to be able to make progress in the next day, week and month as we go forwards in our lives. It is down to all the people who work day in, day out to ensure that children can sleep safely and comfortably in their own home that we have, I hope, made progress over recent decades, whether as part of wider work to educate and support or to ensure welfare is in place.

We absolutely agree that sleep is important. The hon. Member for Luton North talked about a number of studies from China and research has also been carried out by the University of Maryland in the United States, which found that pre-teens who slept fewer than nine hours a day had noticeable differences in brain structure, mood and thinking compared with their peers who had sufficient sleep each night. Although science will always be developing in these areas, it is recognised that sleep is a hugely important part of ensuring that people are ready for the next day that they need to face.

We agree on the issue and that it exists—which it does, in certain places. We might take different views on how much it exists, and I accept the point that it is sometimes difficult to understand the level of challenge, but the question is what we do next. We all want to ensure that there is support for those who are in need, and we want to find the best way to ensure that we can cover that need. We want to highlight the amazing work of volunteers from Zarach and wherever else such work is happening in the country. I acknowledge their understandable concerns about why, at times, the system does not work as perfectly or as well as we would ideally like it to.

No system with hundreds of billions of pounds in it will work perfectly. The job of Government is not to claim that the system is perfect but to recognise that there are challenges, and try to structure that system in a way that works while ensuring that we do not change the way in which people work, operate and are incentivised where they can resolve some of the issues themselves—I recognise that not everybody can.

All that brings questions: ultimately, what do we do when we see issues such as this; and secondarily, what is it proportionate for the Government to do, and how should they respond when they see such issues? The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North anticipated some of the points I am likely to make. A substantial amount of work is going on across Government to provide a system of support for vulnerable children and families, which I hope includes the ability to tackle sleep deprivation and the drivers behind it.

I will spend some time explaining how that work is broken down between the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, in which I serve, and why, given the plethora of initiatives across multiple Departments, we do not think that a national sleep strategy is the way to go at this time. A substantial amount of work is already under way that we hope is helping in this difficult and challenging area.

I will start with the top line, which is about tackling poverty; it is the question with which the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North ended her speech. We recognise that there are often multiple, complex reasons why families find themselves in poverty. The hon. Lady suggested that the Government are a mere bystander, which is difficult to evidence given what we are doing. This year, we will spend the best part of a quarter of a trillion pounds—£245 billion—through the welfare system to tackle such causes head on, recognise that there are vulnerable people out there and ensure that people have the support they need. That includes about £110 billion of support for people of working age, who are the most likely to have children.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I want to challenge the Minister on his statement. I did not say that the Government were a bystander; I said that they were not a bystander on this issue and they have the power to do something about it. The concern is that, for everything the Government may be doing, they are also the architect of the problem. That is my view and the view of many in this area. I appreciate all the initiatives the Minister is outlining, but they are clearly not solving the problem.

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful for that clarification, and I apologise if I inadvertently suggested something that I did not intend to. I was merely trying to contextualise. The hon. Lady accepted that a substantial amount of work is going on. That needs to be acknowledged and contextualised within the wider discussion. There is such a substantial amount of work going on—I will go into that in a moment—that the challenge is knowing how best to approach things. I will try to address a number of the suggestions outlined by the hon. Lady and her colleagues.

It is important to acknowledge that a substantial amount of money is going into the issue. This has been a relatively well-regarded debate and I do not seek to make it particularly political, but, given the multiple references to austerity, I have to highlight that some of the difficult decisions that we have had to take over the last 12 years have been as a direct result of pre-2010 spending. We need to acknowledge that our decisions have trade-offs and consequences, and we are still living with those consequences a decade or so later, despite the fact that in absolute terms we are spending substantially more money than we were a decade or so ago. [Hon. Members: “Such nonsense!”]

We are going to spend over £245 billion through the welfare system this financial year, and £110 billion to support people of working age. That builds on wider efforts to lift more people out of poverty and to support those who have been highlighted in this debate. There were 1.2 million fewer people living in absolute poverty in 2020-21 than in 2009-10, including 200,000 fewer children, 500,000 fewer working-age adults and 400,000 fewer pensioners. That is not to take away from the challenges we face today, particularly the cost of living, but it is important to contextualise where we are.

In response to the global challenges we are facing, the Government have provided £37 billion of emergency support this year, and we are putting in place more help over the coming months. In the autumn statement, £26 billion of cost of living support was announced as a taxpayer subsidy for 2023-24, meaning that from next year households on eligible means-tested benefits will receive up to a further £900 in cost of living payments. From April next year, we are also uprating benefits for working-age households and disabled people, as well as the basic and new state pensions, by over 10%. Benefit cap rates will be increased by the same amount.

Just today, in the local government finance settlement we have announced a further £100 million of support for people who are deemed to be the most vulnerable, including a discretionary element that gives local authorities around the country where there are challenges—whether they are to do with access to beds or something else—additional funds to be able to close those gaps and ensure people have the things they need.

Crucially, there is also a dedicated household support fund, overseen by the Department for Work and Pensions, that councils in England can use to help families struggling with essential household costs, including the purchase of new beds and mattresses. A further £1 billion is going into that fund over the next financial year. Nearly £850 million will be distributed in England, and the remainder will be distributed in the devolved nations according to the Barnett formula. That will mean we have allocated £2.5 billion of taxpayer subsidies since October 2021.

Crucially, local authorities will have the freedom to allocate funds according to the needs in their communities. Given the acknowledgement by the Opposition that this issue is difficult to assess or even find, which was one of the points made a moment ago, the best way that we can respond to challenges that are hidden or semi-hidden is to provide both funds, which we have done, and the freedom to allocate those funds in the most proportionate and reasonable way in communities, driven by representatives in communities themselves, including the kind of councils that the hon. Member for Luton North highlighted, which are setting an agenda and making important decisions for their local area.