The Economy and Living Standards

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to speak in support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) and the Opposition amendment and on behalf of thousands of constituents in Liverpool who were looking to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister to offer them some relief from the cost of living crisis but received no such thing in the Gracious Speech.

Not a week goes by in which I do not meet constituents on the doorstep or in my surgery who are struggling to get by. More often than not, they are in work. They are juggling jobs, they are in precarious employment and they do not know whether they can put food on the table from week to week. I listened carefully to the Chancellor and his comments on zero-hour contracts and was disappointed that he did not know the figures, but I can tell him that a conservative estimate of the number of people on zero-hour contracts is 1.4 million. What is the Government’s plan to deal with this problem, which has exploded on his watch? He refuses to ensure that those working regular hours month after month will get a regular contract of employment. That is totally unacceptable.

There are so many things that the Government could have brought forward to help millions of people in our country. In particular—this issue was raised with the Prime Minister yesterday—the coalition agreement pledged to maintain Labour’s goal of ending child poverty by 2020. The Government said that they would develop better measures for child poverty in this Parliament, but there was nothing. Only this week, we learned that a shocking 3.5 million youngsters in our country are living in poverty and the figure is predicted to soar to 5 million by 2020. We have the highest ever recorded numbers of adults with children in poverty. I have met too many parents in my constituency who are devastated that they are struggling to provide for themselves and their children. This Government have no answer to a problem that I believe—I have written in my speech the same words as those used by my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan)—is a stain on our national conscience. We are the seventh richest nation in the world, but we have more than 1,000 food banks and more than 900,000 people who have had to access emergency food aid on behalf of themselves or their families.

We could have had a make work pay Bill to reward hard work with a higher minimum wage. We could have had a consumers Bill to freeze energy bills. In my constituency, where we have the third highest level of fuel poverty, that would have helped hundreds of my constituents. We could have had a housing Bill with long-term reforms to increase the supply of homes by 2020, a communities Bill to give people a say over payday lenders and betting shops in their high streets, and an immigration Bill to stop workers being undercut, through enforcement of the national minimum wage and banning recruitment agencies that use only overseas labour.

I wanted to talk about long-term youth unemployment, which has gone up in my constituency by more than 50% since 2010, but there is not time so I shall conclude by saying that we need a race to the top, not to the bottom and an economy that works for us all, not just for the very few rich.