Liz McInnes
Main Page: Liz McInnes (Labour - Heywood and Middleton)Department Debates - View all Liz McInnes's debates with the Leader of the House
(9 years ago)
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Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Last week, the Prime Minister said that he did not want anyone reliant on food banks, yet this week, the Work and Pensions Secretary told the Select Committee that he planned to station job advisers in food banks. Is it right for extreme food poverty to become an accepted element of DWP national planning? May we have a debate on this proposal and on the plight of the starving poor?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Lady has got this plain wrong. I remind her that the use of food banks in this country is much lower than in Germany, for example, and it is simply not true that food bank usage can be linked to Government policy. Surely if we have people who are in need of food banks, we should be helping them into work to lift themselves out of poverty. Making sure that jobcentre advisers are aware of what is going on in food banks seems to me sensible, as we try to help those people do better with their lives.