Social Security Support for Children

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Ms Anum Qaisar (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered social security support for children.

This is the first Westminster Hall debate that I have successfully secured, and I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am also delighted to see my friend, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), next to me; it would not be a Westminster Hall debate if he was not here.

I am here to be the voice of the voiceless. This is a debate on social security support for children. The Tory Government came into power at Westminster in 2010, and at that point the use of food banks across all four nations was negligible. The Trussell Trust had around 35 food banks at that point, but in 2022 it estimates that it has around 1,400. That is an increase of almost 4,000%.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

In the last six months, 320,000 people have had to use a food bank in the Trussell Trust network for the first time. Research found that one in five referrals was for working households. Does the hon. Member share my concern that the lack of support for working families is pushing the burden away from the Government and on to charities?

[Ms Qaisar]

It is as if the hon. Member has seen my speech; I will come to that point later.

Of course, it is not only the Trussell Trust; there are a number of independent and locally run food poverty groups. In my constituency, for example, we have Paul’s Parcels, which serves Shotts and the surrounding villages. We are living in food bank Britain, where almost 1 million children receive some sort of help from food banks. The Food Foundation also found that around 4 million children have experienced food insecurity in the past month. Some people will argue that there has been an increase in food bank use due to wider awareness, but I would argue that consecutive Conservative Governments are the reason for that increase. It is their financial mismanagement of the economy, and now austerity 2.0, as set out in the Chancellor’s autumn statement, that are pushing people further and further into poverty.

We face the reality that there are more food banks than McDonald’s in the UK. The richest MP in the House of Commons double-jobs as the Prime Minister. Rather than extending a lifeline to the average punter in the street, the Government are handing out bankers’ bonuses. Who benefits and, crucially, who are the losers? Many groups are victims of the financial mismanagement of the three Prime Ministers and four Chancellors just this year. My concern is for children and young people. They are largely voiceless and are rarely actively involved in the decision-making process.

In Scotland, we have a completely different approach to target help for children. It starts from the basic notion of referring to benefits as social security. In 2021, the SNP Scottish Government introduced the Scottish child payment, which is a groundbreaking piece of policy. Since then, the payment has doubled in value to £20, and on 14 November 2022 it automatically increased to £25 per week for those already in receipt of it. Based on March 2022 modelling, that increased payment is estimated to lift 50,000 children out of poverty and reduce relative child poverty by 5 percentage points.

That is a phenomenal piece of legislation, and I am so proud of it. Many Members here might argue, “Anum, you’re biased; you’re an SNP MP, and that’s the SNP Scottish Government.” However, that is not just my belief. Chris Birt, associate director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said:

“The full rollout of the Scottish Child Payment is a watershed moment for tackling poverty in Scotland, and the rest of the UK should take notice.”

Will the UK Government do so? In fact, would the Minister care to intervene and announce that they are following the Scottish Government’s lead? No, he is furiously writing away. When he replies, I hope he will announce that the Scottish child payment is being implemented across the UK.

That is where the issue lies: the SNP Scottish Government consider social security as an investment in people that is key to their national mission to tackle child poverty. We do that with the limited economic levers that the Scottish Parliament holds.

The Scottish Government have implemented a number of other policies. I will go through them and ask whether the UK Government will commit to follow suit. The Scottish Government are offering free school lunches in term time to all 281,865 pupils in primary 1 to 5 and in additional support needs schools. That saves families an average of £400 per child per year. That will be extended to primary 6 and 7 during the Parliament. Will the UK Government follow suit?

The Scottish Government are massively expanding the provision of fully funded high-quality early learning in childcare. They are providing 1,140 hours per year for eligible children aged two, three and four. In fact, if eligible families were to purchase the funded childcare provided by the Scottish Government, it would cost them about £5,000 per eligible child per year. Again, will the UK Government follow suit?

The Scottish Government have increased the school clothing grant to at least £128 for every eligible primary school pupil and £150 for every eligible secondary school pupil from the start of the 2021-22 academic year. Again, will the UK Government follow suit?

The Scottish Government are bringing forward those policies with the limited economic levers that they hold.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar) on securing this important debate.

At this time of year it is natural for people’s minds to turn towards Christmas. I am sure that the Minister, like many of us, is looking forward to a well-earned break, the company of family and friends, and all the comforts and trappings of the season. But I must warn him that, for the more than one in five children in my constituency who live in poverty, the coming festive season holds none of the joy that he surely takes for granted. Indeed, for many of the children that I represent, 25 December threatens to be a day like any other—plagued by cold, hunger and fear.

Our multimillionaire Prime Minister has at least had the sense to look beyond the walls of his country mansion and acknowledge the crisis facing millions of ordinary people this winter. Addressing the Cabinet yesterday, he is reported to have said that we are entering

“a challenging period for the country, caused by the aftershocks of the global pandemic and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.”

But he is deluding himself if he believes that he can ignore the central role that the Conservative party has played in making this crisis. Even before the pandemic began, nearly 4 million British children were growing up in poverty, 75% of whom live in a household with at least one working parent. While the fallout of Putin’s war is hitting all of Europe’s major economies hard, none is being forced to grapple with the depth of deprivation we now see in the UK. That is a distinctly British ailment.

A quarter of a century ago, a Labour Government set out on a moral crusade to end poverty. They recognised that spending formative years in poverty is the single most important determinant of life chances in everything from educational outcomes to life expectancy. That is why, when Labour was in power, we lifted 1 million children out of poverty, which is an historic achievement. However, today we bear witness to scenes of destitution and misery that we thought were a thing of the past. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently said that he is now seeing more children going hungry than at any time in his 40 years in public life.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Many of the support measures announced in last week’s Budget were temporary, but long-term support is required if we are going to provide all children with the best start in life. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government need to review this urgently?

[Mick Whitley]

The hon. Member makes a good point. We hope that the Government will take cognisance of what we are saying today.

What the former Prime Minister has said is a stark indictment of 12 years of Tory failures. When the Minister launches his inevitable feeble defence of the Government’s record in a few moments’ time, he will undoubtedly point to the measures contained in last week’s Budget. It is true that after weeks of equivocation, the Chancellor has at last bowed to pressure and agreed to an uplift in the benefit cap and benefit payments, but for the thousands of young people in my constituency for whom poverty has become a fact of life, it is nowhere near enough. After 12 years of real-terms cuts to benefits and punitive sanctions, the idea that they should be in any way grateful to the Chancellor for the limited action he has taken is an insult.

The Child Poverty Action Group has estimated that while benefits will be 14% higher in the next fiscal year, prices will be 21% higher for the poorest families in towns such as mine, and although a lifting of the benefit cap is long overdue it fails to even begin to undo the damage that has been wrought as a result of it being frozen in 2016. In fact, in communities such as Birkenhead, it would need to increase by a further £942 a month just to erase what has been lost since 2013, but still the Chancellor has the temerity to patronise hard-working families by saying that the best way out of poverty is through work. I want the Minister to know that most of the struggling families that I meet work harder and longer hours than either of us; the reason they are claiming benefits at all is the scourge of poverty pay.

Last week, the Chancellor spoke of the need to treat the vulnerable with compassion, but a truly compassionate Government would recognise that the benefit cap, the two-child limit and the pernicious sanctions are just not working. They are trapping millions of our most vulnerable citizens—our young people—in poverty. Things cannot go on like this. For 12 long years, this Government have pursued a policy of slashing benefits, squeezing families, and inflicting punitive sanctions that drive people past the point of desperation. The result is that the hard-won progress we made in tackling child poverty between 1997 and 2010 has been almost entirely undone. That is a public policy failure almost without precedent. An entire generation of young people who have known only poverty and misery under a Tory Government is about to come of age; we cannot allow more to follow.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to respond for the Opposition under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar) on securing this debate. We have heard a small number of contributions, but powerful ones, in which people have reflected not just on the strategic issues of poverty but on the impact of hardship on their constituents. Everybody has said that we are going into a hard winter; for millions, it will be the hardest winter in my 30 years in politics. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for making the point that we are going into the festive season, which many look forward to, but this year people will dread it because of the hardship that they face.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Even with the energy cap announced by the Government, all families will be spending a significant amount on their energy bills. It will be a cold and grim Christmas for many. Does the shadow Minister agree that support for families—and therefore for children—needs to be reviewed as a whole, not just single benefits?

[Ms Buck]

I will come to that later, but it is obvious that we need to look at the system as a whole. Indeed, we have to look at the issue of hardship and poverty not just in terms of the social security system, although that is the subject of today’s debate and money is crucial, and lies at the heart of tackling poverty; I have never had any doubt about that. We also know that the conditions in which people live and the conditions in which children are brought up reflect poverty in a wider sense.

Only this week, we have been discussing in particular the terrible tragedy of Awaab Ishak, who died in a cold and mouldy flat. That coroner’s report should be mandatory reading for anybody with an interest in poverty, because the issue of growing up in a damp and cold home is an issue of poverty. If people are not able to heat their homes or access half-decent accommodation in which to live, that is a matter of poverty, as is not being able to secure food and not being able to go to school in a uniform—not being properly clothed, shod and so forth.

I do not think that this is a theme that has particularly emerged in this debate, but all of these issues of poverty cost money—they cost the state billions and billions of pounds. Bad housing alone, which is a condition of poverty, costs the national health service at least £1.4 billion.

The issue of mental health has been referred to. Poverty drives poor mental health; worry and anxiety about money is known to do that. It costs the national health service millions and millions of pounds to respond to it. It also feeds into educational underachievement and impacts on our criminal justice system. We could go right across the issue of state spending, at a local level and a national level, and we would see that money is poured into the costs of poverty. Therefore, when we consider how much we spend on social security, we also need to consider what we will save in the medium and longer term.

The debate is timely, because this time last week we were waiting anxiously to see whether the Government would do the right thing in the middle of a cost of living crisis—something that would, only a few years ago, have gone without saying—which is to uprate social security benefits in line with inflation. As much as we all welcome what happened last week, because we were all very anxious to know what the Government were going to do about uprating, we should not allow the Government to normalise the idea that simply maintaining the real-terms value of social security benefits is an optional extra. If routine uprating of benefits with inflation is evidence of a turn towards compassionate Conservatism, I fear that the bar for compassion has been set very low indeed.

We have been through 12 years in which the Government, as a matter of policy, have repeatedly and permanently reduced the value of social security for working-age adults and children—and, yes, it is a permanent reduction, because the impact of below-inflation uprating in one year does not wash away if benefits are uprated from a reduced baseline the following year. The period of austerity for social security did not end with George Osborne’s four-year benefit freeze in 2019 and it did not end last week.

Let us take child benefit alone. It has been uprated this week—again, that is welcome—but it has lost 30% of its real-terms value since 2010. All the Government did last week, welcome though it is, was to decide not to erode the social minimum even further than they already have, and that is before we consider the many ways in which Governments since 2010 have sought to reduce payments even below the social minimum.

The social security infrastructure around children who live in families—whatever shape those families come in—is tough and has been getting tougher. We have heard about debt and deductions for debt repayments being built into the universal credit system through the five-week wait for the first payment. On top of that, we have benefit caps, the bedroom tax and the two-child limit, and crucially, let us not forget, we have a system of support for housing costs that has been frozen since 2020 and remained frozen in the autumn statement. The failure to uprate the local housing allowance with inflation undoes a great deal of the good that the uprating of social security payments elsewhere achieves, because people live in homes and they have to pay for those homes.

Let me give an indication of how far entitlements can fall below what might be expected to be the social minimum. There are 325,000 households in the private rented sector alone that face a shortfall between their rent and their universal credit housing support and also have a deduction for an advance payment or an overpayment. The median rent shortfall that they have to make up is £100 a month and the median deduction is £65 a month. We congratulate ourselves on the rate of payment of social security, but hundreds of thousands of people are trying to survive on less than even that minimum.

We have a permanently reduced baseline for the social minimum and a policy-driven multiplication of ways in which families can receive even less, and the Government expect to be praised for deciding not to drive down the minimum even further. They like to point to international factors beyond their control as drivers of the cost of living crisis, but they come on top of 12 years in which the social security system for working-age adults and children has been undermined not by the Ukraine war, not by the pandemic, not by international energy prices, but by domestic policy choices.

It suits the Government to pretend that social security policy affects only a minority of families. In fact, the family resources survey shows that, as of 2019-20, nearly 40%—four in 10—of all children in the UK were in families receiving universal credit or one of its legacy equivalents. The great majority—almost three quarters, at 72%—were in working families, and that is just at one point in time. The share of children whose families receive those benefits at some point during their childhood is now higher again.

It is, then, unrealistic to see universal credit and legacy benefits simply as a safety net for the most vulnerable. Of course, that is one of the purposes they serve, and they can serve it considerably less well now than they did before the Government embarked on permanently reducing the value of the safety net. They are also one of the instruments by which our society redistributes resources to families with dependent children, as any modern society needs to do under any economic circumstances.

It is only through social security that we can provide support on a basis that fully takes account of need by basing payment on family size and composition. That basic principle represents yet another way in which Governments since 2010 have broken with the approach of all modern UK Governments since the social security system was established in 1946. As the Child Poverty Action Group points out, the two-child limit already affects 1.3 million children, and cuts income by up to £2,935 a year.

Of course, it is welcome that flat-rate payments are addressing the energy crisis, but by definition they do not take account of family size and circumstances, so they are not a substitute for an adequate social security system. When YouGov surveyed universal credit claimants for the Trussell Trust this summer, it found that was exactly what was happening. Despite the survey being conducted in mid-August, almost 70% of people surveyed who had received a cost of living payment said that they had already had to spend all the £326 they received from the Government in mid to late July, and 64% had had to use the money to buy food.

We have entered into a cost of living crisis with a weakened social minimum, a system that seems designed to leave hundreds of thousands of families with even less than the minimum, and the principle of matching support to needs in shreds. However welcome the uprating was last year—sighs of relief were heard right across the country—families in their millions are dreading this winter because they will have to choose between feeding their children or heating their homes. It is well past time for the Government to recognise the damage that has been done since 2010 and set it right on a sustainable and permanent basis.

[The Minister for Employment (Guy Opperman)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Ms Qaisar) on her first ever Westminster Hall debate. I confess that it is my first ever Westminster Hall debate in my new role, which I have been doing for just over three weeks. I have not had an opportunity to congratulate her on winning her by-election; it was a worthy win. I send my best wishes to her predecessor, with whom I did huge amounts of work when I was in the pensions brief at the Department for Work and Pensions for five years. I was battle-scarred after five years of working at the DWP. I had a brief sabbatical in the summer when I returned to the Back Benches before the Prime Minister asked me to take on this role. By my count, I have approximately 20 issues to respond to; I will do my best over the next 15 to 20 minutes.

Although the debate was introduced by a Scottish Member of Parliament, it is about social security support throughout the country, and it is timely, given the context of the illegal invasion by Mr Putin of Ukraine, the consequences of the aftershocks of covid, the rise in energy prices, the inflationary impacts that are clearly happening, and last week’s autumn statement. Although the autumn statement, which I am sure we will discuss, tried to address many of the issues that have been raised today, it would be naive not to accept and acknowledge that all countries in the western world are attempting to deal with difficulties in respect of the war in Ukraine, the energy price hikes, the fact that we are effectively in an energy war, the consequential impacts on national income, and the impacts of inflation.

The Government are responding to the challenges we face, and in last week’s autumn statement we showed a clear commitment to helping families and the most vulnerable. That includes a further £26 billion of cost of living support, on top of the £37 billion set out in spring last year by the then Chancellor. I will try to address the relevant points in a variety of ways. I have been in this role for only approximately three and a half weeks, but I have had the opportunity to go to jobcentres and meet DWP staff at locations ranging from Canvey Island and Birmingham to Hackney earlier this week.

I have previously visited a variety of jobcentres from Banff to Belfast, from Hastings to Amlwch in north Wales, and from Redcar to Blackpool, and I put on the record my desire to return to some of those locations. The hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) has headed off, but I well remember visiting Shettleston and the Tollcross advice centre in his patch in 2019, and I deeply enjoyed the famous visit to the constituency of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). It is not a good thing to advertise the fact that I have been ambushed by a cake, but when I walked into his constituency office his staff literally ambushed me with a lemon drizzle. Obviously, that did not endear me to the previous Prime Minister bar one, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), but I hope to be back in Northern Ireland soon and I take on board the points raised by the hon. Gentleman. I will endeavour to look into the matter when he gets back to me on it.

As the Minister for Employment I cover this brief and others, although not all the matters that have been raised today, and it is certainly my intention to try to visit all parts of the UK shortly. I hope to visit Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland within the next three or four months, depending on parliamentary diaries, negotiations with my good lady wife and various other things, as well as visiting a variety of locations up and down the country, to enable me better to understand the issues that have been raised.

In respect of support for children, the fundamental starting point should surely be the fact that the UK supports children and families throughout the country through child benefit. We need to begin with an assessment of that. It has continued under successive Governments, and as of August 2021 there were 8 million families claiming child benefit and 12 million children in receipt of child benefit. In Scotland alone, 532,000 families and 878,000 children were in receipt of child benefit.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Will the Minister give way?

[Guy Opperman]

I have a lot to try to address. Let me make a little progress, then I will give way.

Child benefit is available to anyone responsible for bringing up a child aged 16 or under, or 20 if they are in approved education or training. From April 2023, the weekly rate will increase by 10.1%, from £21.80 to £24 for the eldest or only child and from £14.45 to £15.90 for every other child. The UK child benefit bill for 2022-23 is almost £12 billion, and obviously there are other benefits with respect to claiming child benefit, such as national insurance credits, which protect future entitlement to the state pension and can be transferred to grandparents who provide childcare. Claiming also enables children to get their national insurance number automatically at 16.

[Margaret Ferrier]

The Minister knows that I have a lot of time for him because he sat through proceedings in the Chamber on my private Member’s Bill when he was pensions Minister. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, last year a couple working full-time on the minimum wage and a lone parent working full-time on the median wage were able to reach a minimum standard of living. That is not the case today, although the report was published before the autumn statement. What reassurance can the Minister offer lone parents for whom the cost of raising a child is already higher than it is for couples?

[Guy Opperman]

The hon. Lady and I spent nearly six months campaigning to ensure that there was a serious and legitimate change to women’s pensions entitlements in certain private sector pensions. I thank her for her work on the private Member’s Bill that she brought forward and that is now in law, having been signed by Her Majesty the Queen. I welcome the fact that she worked on a cross-party basis to ensure that happened. I will try to address the child poverty issue that was raised by several colleagues. I want to deal with it in a variety of ways. I will then segue on to the in-work progression point—namely, people who are working but also suffering from poverty.

Let me start with the background. The fundamental point is that the Government are committed to a sustainable, long-term approach to tackle child poverty in supporting low-income families. We spent £242 billion through the welfare system in the United Kingdom in 2022-23, including £108 billion on people of working age. We have made permanent changes to universal credit worth £1,000 a year on average to 1.7 million claimants, and have given the lowest earners a pay rise by increasing the national living wage by 6.6% to £9.50 from April 2022. From 1 April 2023, the national living wage will increase by 9.7% to £10.42 an hour for workers aged 23 and over. That is the largest ever cash increase to the national living wage. It represents an increase of more than £1,600 to the annual earnings of full-time workers on the national living wage, and is expected to benefit more than 2 million low-paid workers.

I will address the poverty statistics. The latest statistics show that poverty fell for nearly all measures in 2020-21 compared with 2019-20. In 2021 there were 1.2 million fewer people in absolute poverty, before housing costs, than in 2009-10, including 200,000 fewer children. We will come to workless households in a second, but since 2010 there are nearly 1 million fewer workless households in the United Kingdom. The number of children growing up in homes where no one works has fallen by 590,000 since 2010—