UK Poverty

Mark Spencer Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I hope that the hon. Lady appreciates that people who work very hard, and who might be earning very small amounts from working 50 hours a week, have to turn up to work on time. If they are late for their employment, they might be sanctioned by their employer. It is important that those who are seeking employment learn the discipline of timekeeping, which is an important part of securing and keeping a job.

[Lisa Nandy]

I must say to the hon. Gentleman that taking that sort of patronising tone towards people is exactly why people throughout the country are so angry with the Government. While he was speaking, my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) made the point that two Conservative Members turned up minutes late for this debate, but they will still be allowed to participate if they wish to do so. I will come on to the example of a working couple who got in touch with me recently and who have had real problems with the system. Nevertheless, I am happy to give way again if the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) wants to come back on this point: what would he expect someone with learning difficulties, who cannot tell the time, to do in that situation? He has no one to turn to for help and was sanctioned for being four minutes late.

[Mr Spencer]

I think that that emphasises the importance of the education system in solving the challenges that we face as we move forward. We must try to ensure that the employees of the future are in the best place to be able to take on a career and move forward with a job.

[Lisa Nandy]

The man I am talking about is the fourth case of someone with learning disabilities being sanctioned that I have come across in my constituency office this month. The Minister’s Department holds the responsibility for people with disabilities. I hope that she has listened to the comments made by her colleague and will take the opportunity to condemn them. I also hope that she will ensure that in future no one will be sanctioned for having learning difficulties that prevent them from being able to tell the time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Spencer]

Surely the hon. Lady has to accept that in a complicated welfare system, with officers working in jobcentres, on occasion a mistake will be made. That may happen at times. The question is, how do you put that problem right? If the rules are being set by the Government, but sadly on occasion being misinterpreted or misunderstood, we have to find a system that puts that right. Accidents will happen, but it is a question of how we put them right quickly.

[Lisa Nandy]

The hon. Gentleman does not seem to be listening: the rules are the problem and make no sense. I have just quoted two examples, one from the Minister and one from the Minister’s departmental website, that contradict one another. Neither makes any sense in the context of what happened to my constituents. I have written back to the Minister to ask what on earth is going on, though I have not had a reply yet. I hope that I will get a reply, and that all the people stuck in the same situation as the one my constituents just went through will get any reply at all.

In “The Trial” by Kafka, the hero of the novel, K, said:

“But I’m not guilty…there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty?”

The priest replied:

“That is true…but that is how the guilty speak.”

That is exactly what is happening to people in the system. There is nowhere to turn; there is no way to fight their way out of the system. That is not an accident of the system; that is the system, and it is time that the Government did something about it.

The saga for the family in my constituency continued—that was not the end of it. After the sanctions were lifted, they were told that they had to sign on every day at an unpredictable time, and that for a family with two-year-old twins. One of the parents said that once her partner

“had to take our two sick, contagious children who were suffering (from hand, foot and mouth disease) with her to a job centre appointment as the adviser said you must come in, bring them on the bus with you. Even when we replied but they have a temperature of over 40 degrees his response was if you don’t come in we will have to issue a further suspension. We live in fear that our money will be stopped and this hell will never end.”

That is indeed a hell.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lisa Nandy]

That is not money out. I will explain this to the hon. Gentleman, because he obviously needs to understand but does not at present. In this country we are unique in having major structural problems in our economy, which means that poverty is higher than in most other countries even before tax and spending decisions are taken into account.

First, it is the Government’s failure not to tackle root causes such as low pay and zero-hours contracts that causes the level of poverty to be so high in the first place. Secondly, because we then need to spend so much money in income transfers to compensate for that, unfair decisions are made that benefit richer people at the expense of poorer people, which compounds the problem. That is why we have had the explosion of food banks in recent years and why, 30 years after the miners’ strike where the community in my constituency had to come together to feed and clothe our children, because of this Government we are having to do that once more.

I will tell the hon. Gentleman this as well: people are not just being caused distress, anguish and despair, but having their health and safety put at risk. On Monday, a paediatrician, Dr Colin Michie, spoke out about the increase in malnutrition-related hospital admissions in children aged under 16. Hospital admissions for malnutrition doubled between 2008 and 2012 and last year 6,520 people—a seven-year high—were admitted to hospital because of that. The Faculty of Public Health’s John Middleton said that food-related ill health was getting worse

“through extreme poverty and the use of food banks”.

People cannot afford good quality food, so malnutrition, rickets and other manifestations of extreme poor diet are becoming apparent. It is almost inconceivable that in this country in 2015 we are seeing the return of Victorian diseases. Hospital admissions for scurvy have doubled under this Government since 2010.

[Mr Spencer]

I wonder whether the hon. Lady could help us by giving a definition of the types of food that she means. Products such as potatoes and fresh carrots are actually the cheapest sources of food available.

[Lisa Nandy]

I am sure that if the hon. Gentleman went down to a local food bank in his constituency and explained to his constituents that they should be buying carrots and potatoes, they would thank him for that in May. That is the sort of attitude to people whose poverty has been caused by the Government that does his party so much harm, and deservedly so.

I will say this to the hon. Gentleman: food prices have increased by 12% in the past few years, but wages have fallen by 7.6%. Those are the facts and that is why families do not have enough to feed and clothe their children. The British Red Cross is more used to working in countries torn apart by war, famine and disaster, yet, because of the Government’s actions, a couple of years ago it had to launch an emergency appeal to feed and clothe our children.

It was Nelson Mandela who said:

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”,

yet here we are, forcing parents to drag ill two-year-olds across town on buses. Children have to grow up in cold, damp conditions without gas, electricity and enough to eat. Children are admitted to hospital because of hunger. Schools, vicars and charities are stepping in to help and finding themselves overwhelmed. If that is the measure of our soul as a country, what sort of society have we become under the Government?

The truth is that it could be so different. I tried to explain that to the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) a moment ago, but I will try again—perhaps he will understand. We have got one of the highest child poverty rates in Europe—second only to Ireland—because of factors such as low pay and that is before anything is done through the state to try to tackle that. Once decisions on tax and welfare such as those that the Government have made are taken into account, child poverty goes through the roof.

The IFS shows that tax and benefit changes made by the coalition have hit the poor and families with young children hardest and reduced household incomes by £1,127 a year. Professor John Hills from the London School of Economics said it was true that the very rich, with incomes of more than £100,000, had lost out more than the average, but, when viewed as a proportion of their income, it was the poorest—those who could least afford it—who had lost the most.

It is the abject failure to tackle the root causes of these problems—low pay, under-employment and insecure work—as well as tax and benefit decisions that hit the poor hardest that is pushing more and more children into poverty. I say this to the Minister: even those flagship measures that are held up—usually by the Liberal Democrats, who are not here today—as ways of tackling poverty, such as raising the personal tax allowance, do little for the lowest paid. Many of those people do not pay tax anyway, so those measures do not help them at all. Others keep just 15p in every extra pound, because in-work benefits such as housing benefit get withdrawn.

The director of the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland has said:

“All the EU countries with much lower child poverty rates than us use income transfers for poverty prevention. If they can do so much better for their children, then so can we.”

The legacy this Government are set to leave is one of rising child poverty and Budgets that have made the poor much poorer and many wealthy people wealthier still. As a country, we used to know about these things. The previous Government got more lone parents back into work. Like many other countries, we used the tax and benefit system to give families a basic income. Under this Government, however, real spending per child on early education, child care and Sure Start fell by a quarter in just three years. If the Government do not want to use the tax and benefit system to tackle child poverty, they could tackle the root causes. They could learn from Denmark or Slovenia—countries where child poverty is already relatively low, so the state has to do less heavy lifting through the tax and welfare system.

It is typical of this Government that, instead of seeking to deal with the causes, they attack the symptoms: they attack the people, not the problems. Instead of tackling child poverty, they get tough on children in poverty—and not just children, but those who try to help them. The Work and Pensions Secretary accused the Trussell Trust of publicity-seeking and scaremongering for daring to tell the public how many people it was having to feed in 21st-century Britain. The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 gags charities and campaigners and prevents them from speaking out, but it does nothing to tackle the problems in the lobbying industry and in politics. Special advisers threaten charities. The Justice Secretary takes to the Daily Mail—that bastion of social justice—to attack charities as left-wing single-issue groups, and he restricts their right to challenge the Government’s appalling actions.

That sums up exactly what this Government is all about: if you have a problem with unemployment, attack the unemployed; if you do not know what to do about immigration, attack immigrants. Bobby Kennedy once said:

“there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men…This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

That will be the Government’s legacy: an attempt to loosen the bonds that bind us, through indifference, inaction and slow decay.

Five years ago, Conservative Members talked about broken Britain. I used to think that was an analysis; now, five years on, I have come to realise that it was actually a manifesto. This is the broken Britain they talked about, and they created it. I say this to the Minister: in the end, this will not work. It started as an attack on just the poor, but it is pulling in more and more people, and it is tearing apart communities.

The situation was summed up for me by a woman of 60. She has never been in debt in her life, but she got into arrears after her daughter moved out and she was hit by the bedroom tax. She simply cannot afford the extra rent, so she is trying to move, but she has nowhere to move to, because there are no one-bedroom properties spare in my borough. My local reverend, Denise Hayes, told me, “She has all her friends and community here. She is someone we need on the estate. She is a good example for others.”

People can be in work or out of work—half the children living in poverty today are from working households. This is not about just the poor any more—it is about children, cancer patients and pensioners. Let me tell the Minister this though: the Government should be worried. New bonds of solidarity are forming, just as they did in the 1980s, when these things happened before. Those bonds are forming in communities such as mine, as more and more people are affected and more and more refuse to give in. They can see that what is happening is an attack not just on the poor, but on our basic decency as a society. Like me, they know that Britain can do so much better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) for calling the debate and for the passion with which she delivered her speech. Interestingly, in the 45 minutes she took to do so, she did not give us a single indication of what a future Labour Government might do to address some of the concerns she raised. She did not even look at how she might solve the challenges we face.

It seems fairly straightforward to me that the best way to solve an individual’s financial difficulties is to get them into work—to give them a job and let them earn their own money, so that they can provide for their family. That gives them not only the cash to improve their lives, but the self-esteem and quality of life they deserve. We should do that as a Government. If we do, we get a double whammy. If we take an individual out of the welfare system and they succeed in the workplace, more of the pie is left for those who are genuinely in difficulty and who need the support of the welfare state.

Let us look at what the Government have done over the past four and a half years. Some 1.7 million more people are in work. We have tried to get people out of the welfare system and into the workplace, so that they can improve their own lives.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

It is all well and good saying another 1.7 million people are in work, but what type of employment is it? Some of the statistics that have been published show that up to 1.4 million people are on zero-hours contracts, which, in effect, provide less than benefits.

[Mr Spencer]

Zero-hours contracts are not something that happened under this Government; they existed before we came to power. The Labour Government did nothing about them when they were in power.

I have met individuals in my constituency who have been offered a zero-hours contract. They took it up, went to work and became very successful. They were then offered a full-time career; they progressed through the management structure; and they are now earning a substantial salary. Zero-hours contracts can therefore sometimes be a gateway to a career.

The Government have to find a way to create such gateways, so that individuals can aspire to make their way through the system. One way of doing that is to create apprenticeships, and 2 million have been created under this Government. That is a way to give the next generation the skills they require to take up a career in the future.

[Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)]

I missed all the heat about part-time working. Does my hon. Friend recognise the official statistics showing that 74% of the new jobs created under this Government have been full time? The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has shown that job satisfaction among those who are on zero-hours contracts is the same as for any other employee.

[Mr Spencer]

Absolutely. Those statistics stand on their own.

The second way to help people, once they have succeeded in getting a job, is to cut taxes for those at the bottom of the pay structure, so that they pay no tax at all. The Government have been very successful in lifting those people completely out of the tax system.

The hon. Member for Wigan mentioned the friction between wages and inflation. Following the enormous crash under the previous Government, it is fair to say there were some severe challenges in terms of how inflation was moving forward and the ability of the economy to recover. We are now in a position where, of course, inflation is below the rate of increase in wages, so we have turned that corner and we are going in the right direction.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Why did the Conservative party support the Labour Government spending plans up to 2007, and never, as I recall, suggest that changes should be made to avoid a recession?

[Mr Spencer]

Of course, the Labour party now supports our funding pledges, so there is friction between what is being said about reversing some of our changes and other statements about supporting our spending regime. It will be interesting to hear the Labour Front-Bench justification of that.

In another life, I was a farmer, involved in food production and supply. Interestingly, the OECD says that 9.8% of people had difficulty affording food in 2006-07, but the figure had fallen to 8.1% in 2011-12. That shows we are going in the right direction. There will always be individuals who get themselves into difficult circumstances and where the system has frankly gone wrong. The hon. Member for Wigan raised several such cases and I have encountered some in my constituency office, when clearly the system has broken down and some incorrect decisions have been made. It is my job as a Member of Parliament to try to help people through the system and solve their ills, and we have succeeded on a number of occasions in helping individuals in difficult circumstances to work their way through the system to the right point.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Spencer]

I will not give way any more, because other people want to speak.

I want the Government to continue to reduce the deficit, and to make sure that the economy continues to grow and that we generate more jobs and help people out of poverty through employment. I want them to continue to cut taxes at the lowest end, so that we can raise more people out of tax altogether. I want them to create more jobs and back businesses—particularly small businesses that create real-life careers for people. I want a continuation of the welfare cap, so that we can control immigration and make sure people in work are better off and so that people who decide to go into work and get a career and who can move forward aspire to overcome their difficulties. I want better schools, to make sure that the next generation have the education that will deliver them a future, make them ready for the workplace and enable them to take careers and move forward. The only way to solve the problem is to give people the aspiration and ability, so that they can aspire out of their difficulties.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—