Cost of Living

Lord Jones Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always instructive to follow my noble friend Lord Sikka. I thank my noble friend Lord Whitty for his choice of debate. I know of his union life, when he devilled at the highest level brilliantly for the low waged. As a director of the apparatus of the party, he presented manifestos that sought to enhance the lives of the unemployed and the underprivileged.

Born in 1937 and growing up during World War II and the immediate post-war years, one recollects the frequent complete loss of domestic power for many hours. The great winter of 1947 tormented us all and Lord Manny Shinwell’s Cabinet career collapsed when he could not deliver coal to the power stations. In those days, there was only one warm room in the house; it is a history of when we were all in it together. Of course, there was heating—personal heating by hot water bottle. It was a time when one woke up to ice on the inside of the windowpane and when chilblains denoted the cold house and the bus stop queueing routine, as my noble friend Lord Young recalled.

Much has changed. However, climate change has not abolished the contemporary cold house. The cold house does not add to the hope for human happiness. It destroys morale. It makes the young children therein quarrelsome and can impinge on the everyday health of its tenants. Eating and sleeping in a constantly cold house can be soul destroying. There are households where there is always a wintertime contest between the semblance of warmth and debt—for example, the manipulation of the credit cards that the householder might have. There is the predicament of the low-waged having weekly recourse to the church or chapel food bank. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, has great insights here.

We in your Lordships’ House live here, swathed in our ermine and surrounded by carvings, statuary, murals, Axminsters and gilt. We septuagenarians and octogenarians notice the Chamber temperature and the difference between our Monday sittings and the rest of the week. Our civilisation puts man on the moon and speeds us in five hours from London to Edinburgh, while millions of our fellow citizens live in homes where daily payment and warmth are for ever in consideration.

An Englishwoman’s home is her castle and it should not be a bone-chillingly cold castle. We do not convincingly enable the young single mother, with her several youngsters, to face those six or so draughty, cold months surrounded by warmth. She and they may well be on benefits and, at the grass roots, it is a daily life of difficult decisions and stress. It is wrong, unjust and hurtful to the young ones. How many such households exist? Is it in the tens of thousands? Perhaps it is hundreds of thousands in our nation of 60 million-plus—a nation still fissured by wealth and poverty, class and expectations. Will the Minister make an estimate? If he can, our debate should then have better context.

These households exist in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland as well as in England. As a one-time Prince of Wales said, in the lovely land of Wales—one’s own homeland—something must be done. It is still a truism. Some homes today have had their gas and electricity turned off. Does the Minister have any idea of the numbers? It is a fact that the household budget of even the comfortably off is dominated by major day-to-day outgoings: first, of course, the gas and electricity bills; then the council tax; then the filling of the tank of the still-ubiquitous petrol and diesel cars; and then all those other necessitous direct debits to the public utilities and the ever-growing number of insurers. It is getting harder and harder.

Over many decades, successive differing Governments have offered up bureaucratic, credible alibis on energy, but still the problem remains. The bald, cunning, devious Kremlin gangster has not even started yet. In all this, what of the high-energy-demanding British steel industry? What, indeed, of manufacturing generally?