Food Banks
Max Wilkinson Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) on securing this important debate.
Most people assume that Cheltenham, the town I represent, is a well-heeled sort of place. The impression many people have is of grand Regency terraces, beautiful architecture and the prosperity that comes with excellent schools and a thriving cyber-security sector, but I regret to tell hon. Members that that is not the whole story.
Large sections of our population struggle. In swathes of Cheltenham, people live in poverty, providing demand for six food banks. I am told that every week in Cheltenham about 550 households access a food bank or food pantry. That is thousands of people. In 2023-24 there were 1,068 households accessing a food bank or food pantry for the first time ever. During that year, more than 8,000 people were, at one point or another, in receipt of a food parcel. That is in Cheltenham, a prosperous town.
In the current financial year, the local council has allocated £45,240 to support those food banks, supported by charitable donations made by generous Cheltenham people. When I visited the food pantries and spoke to staff and customers, the picture I found was one of people who simply want to get on in life. None of them wants to be at a food bank, but circumstances—nearly always beyond their control—have led them to that point. They are united in wanting nothing more than fairness.
There are some very practical steps that could be taken to achieve that fairness. First, lifting the two-child benefit cap would remove hundreds of thousands of children from poverty at a single stroke. If that were done alongside the expansion of free school meals to all children in poverty, the impact could be extremely powerful. We also need reform of universal credit. All those measures would mean fewer children turning up at school hungry. They would mean fewer children arriving home from school hungry. They would mean fewer families desperately trying to make ends meet by using food banks, and fewer pensioners being forced to do the same.
This is all very achievable. All we need to do is work within the systems that already exist and show the kindness and compassion that lies within all of us. On the subject of kindness and compassion, I will finish by paying tribute to the brilliant local people in Cheltenham working at facilities that help people who cannot pay their bills. There are too many to name them all, but I will mention two: Faith Rooke-Matthews in Springbank and Alison Hutson at the Cornerstone centre. We thank them and their colleagues for all they do.
Income Tax (Charge)
Max Wilkinson Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for saving the best till last, as Cheltenham is always.
Because I am a liberal of generous spirit, I will begin by thanking Ministers. I thank them for listening to the many appeals I have made since my election that they study the case study for investment in Cheltenham’s cyber-security industry. After a lot of talk and being led a merry dance by the previous Government, we finally have guaranteed funding of £20 million for the Golden Valley development. My wholehearted thanks go to Ministers. On a broader point about cyber-security, I look forward to hearing more about the future cyber resilience funding in due course. Ministers know that the growth in our economy will stick much more easily if it is underpinned by cyber-security.
Alongside being a cyber-security hub, my constituency also benefits from a thriving hospitality industry. Sadly—and this is not such good news for Ministers—many of those businesses are now fearing the impact of changes to national insurance. They fear becoming a vessel for money to make its way from customers to the Exchequer, with little left over to pay their own wages.
The £22 billion of investment for the NHS is to be welcomed, and I hope that in Cheltenham it will ensure the reopening of our birth unit and a reduction in A&E waiting times at Cheltenham General and Gloucestershire Royal hospitals. Representatives of the care sector have been in touch with me over the weekend: local authority fees, they tell me, are expected to rise by less than 5% —below the minimum wage increase, and that is before national insurance rises are accounted for. One chief executive told me that
“providers will close down and reduce residential and nursing capacity”
at a time when we need exactly the opposite to happen.
There are also concerns from the primary care sector. I heard this weekend from Dr Bob Hodges, the chair of the Gloucestershire local medical committee, who said that the most likely result of the Budget changes to national insurance was that the money to fund increased national insurance costs was likely to come
“straight out of the pot from which GPs are paid”.
He said that risked burning good will, with knock-on impacts on morale and working practices, and he feared that over time it would reduce the number of working GPs.
I started with thanks. Let me end by urging Ministers to reconsider some of those points.