Food Banks

Debate between Maria Eagle and Bill Esterson

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

I cannot disagree with my hon. Friend. There is a deliberate attempt by DWP Ministers in this Government to sanction and stigmatise people who are on benefit.

The cost of living crisis means that people are more than £1,600 a year worse off since 2010. Living standards will be lower at the end of this Parliament than they were at its beginning. Prices have risen faster than wages for 52 of the 54 months that our Prime Minister has been in office. There are more working families living in poverty in the UK today than families with nobody in work—for the first time since records began. The cost of some food essentials has gone up in the past six years by as much as 20%. Families on the lowest incomes spent almost a quarter more on food last year than they did six years ago—they were already the families who spent the largest share of their income on food. People are now buying fewer, cheaper calories; they have been forced to trade down to less healthy, less nutritious, more processed foods.

It is not just food that has been going up in price: since 2010, people have been paying £300 more on average for energy to heat their homes and keep their lights on; water bills have gone up, with one in five people struggling to pay them; the cost of housing keeps rising, with renters now paying on average over £1,000 a year more than in 2010; and for those with children, the rising price of child care is making it harder and harder to take on work.

Yet during this time the Government have done nothing to address the cost of living crisis—and they plan much worse. Robert Chote, chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, said plans in the autumn statement now take

“total public spending to its lowest share of GDP in 80 years.”

The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the Government’s plans would take

“total government spending to its lowest level as a proportion of national income since before the last war”.

This Tory plan to recreate 1930s Britain, along with its hunger, low pay and non-existent rights at work, coincides with changes to the labour market making it tougher to make ends meet, even for someone who is in work. The “Feeding Britain” report says that 25% of food bank users are in work and the Trussell Trust says that 22% are: increasingly, being in work is no longer a guarantee against going hungry in Britain today. David McAuley, the Trussell Trust chief executive, said that

“we’re…seeing a marked rise in numbers of people coming to us with ‘low income’ as the primary cause of their crisis. Incomes for the poorest have not been increasing in line with inflation and many, whether in low paid work or on welfare, are not yet seeing the benefits of economic recovery.”

He is correct.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned that the Government have done nothing to address the cost of living crisis that so many people face, and she rightly talks about low pay. Does she agree that the effect of the Government’s policies has been to encourage zero-hours contracts, insecurity in the workplace and low pay? That has been the consequence of their policies, leading to more use of food banks.

[Maria Eagle]

I agree completely with my hon. Friend. The number of people in precarious, low-paid employment is increasing. According to the TUC, since the financial crisis hit only one in 40 new jobs is full-time, 36% are part-time and 60% involve self-employment. Only a quarter of those on zero-hours contracts work a full-time week, and one in three reports having no regular, reliable income. No wonder many of them end up at food banks, despite being in work. This is happening in Britain—the sixth richest country on the planet—in the 21st century. It is a scandal that is only made worse by the fact that our economy is growing again and the number of people in work is increasing. The Conservative party never stops telling us that this is what success looks like—I would hate to see its version of failure.

Rising Cost of Transport

Debate between Maria Eagle and Bill Esterson

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

My hon. Friend is right. The Government’s own statistics also reveal the truth on lost services. Directly contradicting the Minister’s claims, they show that between 2010-11 and 2011-12, mileage on supported services dropped by 10% in non-metropolitan areas in England and by 7% in metropolitan areas.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend’s point about lost services is crucial to those who live in villages in my constituency, particularly older people who do not have another option for transport. They face higher transport costs because there is no bus service any more. I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that that is a consequence of what she is saying.

[Maria Eagle]

My hon. Friend is correct in explaining the experience that his constituents are living through. These are not just statistics, but the loss of actual services. Research by the Campaign for Better Transport has found that 41% of local authorities have been forced to cut services that are socially necessary and the support that they give them. That is on top of the cuts from the previous year, when one in five local council-supported bus services were cut or cut back. A tenth of councils have had to cut more than £1 million from support for bus services.

The Government’s own watchdog, Passenger Focus, has warned that the reduction in those services will impact disproportionately on

“older people, less affluent households, those with health related issues, or households containing teenagers”.

I hope that Ministers will accept that they cannot remain in denial any longer about the impact of the cuts to bus services—cuts that could have been avoided in their entirety just by using the Department’s underspend from last year, which Ministers handed back to the Treasury. Ministers need to explain to parents why they are having to struggle with the extra costs of getting their teenagers to college. They should explain to pensioners why the Prime Minister’s election pledge to protect their bus pass did not extend to protecting their local bus services, leaving many with a bus pass but no bus on which to use it, thereby reducing their access to shops and vital services and increasing their isolation.

Fire Service (Metropolitan Areas)

Debate between Maria Eagle and Bill Esterson

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) on securing it.

I want to talk about the impact on Merseyside of cuts that are running at twice the national average—up to 12% over two years. As colleagues have said, Merseyside already has a highly efficient service. My question to the Minister is how on earth does it make sense to make cuts at double the national average in Merseyside, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, Nottinghamshire, Cleveland, Cambridgeshire and Shropshire, with Greater Manchester only a fraction below the figure of those other mainly metropolitan areas, while making real-terms increases in funding for Devon and Somerset, Dorset, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Essex and Hampshire? Is there not a pattern emerging about the nature of the authorities that are facing these double-national-average cuts and the authorities that are seeing real-term increases? I will leave it to Members to draw their own conclusions.

How can authorities such as Merseyside deal with that 12% cut when they have already made the savings over a number of years? Perhaps the Minister can also answer the point about why they have had that cut, while others have had increases at the same time. Merseyside has made the back-office and management savings, put in place a three-year pay freeze and taken money from the dynamic reserve.

The issues of resilience capacity and heavy industry that we talked about in Greater Manchester are also true of Merseyside. Just down the road from my constituency are the docks, which are surrounded by residential areas. Therefore, in the event of a major incident, not just the industrial areas but the nearby residential areas would suffer. Without the necessary back-up, how can those areas be protected?

The plans for future years make various assumptions. The chief fire officer has already assumed the pay freeze, a 4% council tax increase and the fact that no additional contributions will be made to the pension, yet he is still short by £8.5 million. Merseyside has made the savings that it can. If further cuts are double the national average, as they have been so far—the national average is £8.5 million—goodness only knows where he would go to make those savings.

[Maria Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the chief fire officer would be in the invidious position of not being able to meet his statutory obligations to keep the people of Merseyside safe?

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course the question that arises for the Minister is, exactly how does he define what the statutory obligations are for the metropolitan authorities, such as Merseyside? What level of service does he deem to be necessary to protect the people of Merseyside and the other metropolitan areas?

In the Minister’s written answer to my parliamentary question, which I received only this week, he said:

“It is for elected members of each authority to determine such matters, acting on the professional advice of their principal officers and following full consultation with the local community.”—[Official Report, 5 March 2012; Vol. 541, c. 485W.]

May I tell him that the professional advice of the chief fire officer of Merseyside and his colleagues is that it is not possible for them to maintain the current service on the funding settlement that the chief officer has already received, and it will be even more impossible for them to protect the community that they serve given the proposed future cuts? In addition, I can tell the Minister that the local community do not accept that these cuts should be made at all. In fact, they say that none of the cuts should be happening and that they want to be protected by the fire service. However, they are also aware that, with cuts of this nature, it is impossible for the chief fire officer to maintain the level of service that is needed.