Extreme Poverty and Human Rights: United Nations Report

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, we have done an enormous amount to tackle poverty since we came into government. We have invested huge sums of additional money into developing a welfare system that encourages people into work and supports them in work and with progression in their jobs, so that they can better provide, because we know that the best way to get out of poverty and save children from it is to work. As the IFS said today:

“Absolute poverty remains at its lowest ever level”.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

Will the Minister comment specifically on Wales? The report says:

“Wales faces the highest relative poverty rate in the United Kingdom, with almost one in four people living in relative income poverty. Twenty-five per cent of jobs pay below minimum wage”.

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, we are tackling poverty across the country. I refer noble Lords to the leader article in the Times of 25 May:

“The failings of Mr Alston’s report are legion … it is padded out with such accusations as that the government evinces a ‘punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach’”.


This is the Times. It said, “This is nonsense”. It goes on:

“yet poverty in this sense does not exist in Britain in the 21st century”.

We are responding to reports with care but, in all seriousness, we must say that many things in this report are exaggerated and inflammatory.