Autumn Statement Resolutions

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I want to talk about some of the massive challenges we face in Newham, because frankly the autumn statement offers precious little to solve them.

I will start with the scourge of knife crime. In Newham, our communities have been brutalised by knife attacks over many years. August alone saw 38 attacks that caused injury—the highest number for five years—leaving many young lives destroyed, families devastated and communities broken by fear and struggling to heal. The truth is that social problems make young people vulnerable to the gang grooming that leads to that violence. Many young people are growing up with little stability, without even a safe place to call home and with parents racked by the stress of unpayable bills and insecure work.

Far from inspiring confidence, the autumn statement confirmed that the average household is set to be almost two grand worse off by the next election than they were at the last. Those households will know that 40% of the benefits coming from the autumn statement are going to the wealthiest 20% of the population. That unfairness weakens our entire society, because poverty creates vulnerability to grooming. It destroys a young person’s trust that our society can provide a decent chance and a future for them.

My community tries to work its way out of poverty, yet it is nigh-on impossible. The lower quartile of earnings in Newham is £1,792 a month, but paying the lower quartile of private rents leaves just £492, before food, energy or transport costs, or the costs of raising a family, are even considered. Our children know it. They see their parents struggling. Gangs are using fake job ads to target children on the social media sites they use, clearly aimed at children who know their parents are up against it—children who want to help make ends meet. When mum and dad are having to take on more hours to pay the bills, meaning there is no one in the house in the evening or at weekends, that is the impact.

Those pressures are huge, but Newham’s housing crisis is truly brutal. Tens of thousands of families simply cannot afford private rents, and social housing supply remains minuscule compared with the level of need. The consequence is that 8,363 children are estimated to be homeless in Newham alone. There are more children trapped in temporary accommodation in those 14 square miles than there are in entire regions of the country combined—more than in the east midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the north-east put together. That temporary accommodation is unsuitable for families, or frankly for anyone, with mould, damp and terrible overcrowding.

All that causes chaos in young lives. It massively disrupts education and makes it harder for teachers, social workers or GPs to spot the signs that a young life is going off the rails so that they can intervene. It creates added costs for our stretched public services, which are scrambling to keep up, and enormous and rapidly increasing costs to the council. The council is spending more than £20 million a year on temporary accommodation costs alone. That is money that it cannot spend on improving children’s lives or on youth work to help to make children at risk of involvement in knife crime more resilient. It cannot spend it on keeping the streets clean or on supporting our schools so that they can deal with difficult behaviour without excluding children and practically handing them over to the gangs.

I welcome the Government’s boost to the local housing allowance—I really do. It will do something to slow down the rate at which homelessness is getting worse. But, frankly, it is not a solution. Far more strategic action is necessary, and so is more recognition that those problems are interconnected and that our councils and our public services are best placed to solve them. As we know, the Tory pre-election Budget is balanced on massive future cuts to our public services and our councils. The Tories are robbing the next Government in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves. I honestly do not know how Tory Members can look their constituents in the face and tell them that they think the planned cuts are practical or achievable.

Let us face it: our NHS and many other services are on the verge of collapse and utterly failing to deliver for our communities. What we are hearing from the Government does not match the reality that my constituents see all around them. Surely to heavens we must repair our public services and give all our young people a future, with genuinely accessible opportunities in education and in work. We need to restore our children’s trust in a future where they are truly rewarded for their contributions to our society and for their massive potential. After 13 years of Tory failure, that will only come about with a Labour Government.