Child Poverty

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I am reminded of my maiden speech, when you were in the Chair as Deputy Speaker, although I hope I will not have as short a time to speak as I did then.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) on securing this important debate. I also congratulate other Members, who have made valuable contributions. I want briefly to reflect on some of the global dimensions of child poverty, which the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) touched on.

As is clear from all the speeches that have been made, poverty is a scandal wherever it exists. Too many children, in the UK and elsewhere, are born into, and grow up in, poverty. We have heard the statistics from other hon. Members. In my constituency, 25% of children live in poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) compared constituencies, and Glasgow North is ranked 110 out of 650 constituencies for child poverty. That means that there are 109 other seats in this country where more than 25% of the child population lives in poverty. That is a complete scandal, but, sadly, that scandal is only exacerbated around the world.

UNICEF estimates that, by 2030, 119 million children will still be chronically undernourished. Even today, entirely preventable diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria are leading causes of child deaths, with more than 5,000 children dying from them each day. Despite all the progress that has been made in the lowest-income countries since 1990, the proportion of children under five living in poverty rose from 13% in 1990 to 19% in 2014.

The saddest and perhaps most frustrating thing about all this is that none of it is necessary, because structures exist to prevent it from happening in the first place. The rights of children are protected by the UN convention on the rights of the child, which has been ratified by 194 states, including—more than 25 years ago, in 1989—by the United Kingdom. UNICEF described the convention as

“the first international instrument to articulate the entire complement of rights relevant to children—economic, social, cultural, civil and political. It is also the first international instrument to explicitly recognise children as active holders of their own rights.”

Living in poverty is perhaps the greatest denial of those human rights. Article 6 of the convention provides:

“States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child”.

The “maximum extent possible”—that is the responsibility of the Government. Yet we have repeatedly heard from Members that the Government want to roll back their responsibilities to tackle child poverty, and the relevant measurements. However, the global frameworks exist to tackle poverty here and around the world.

Last Thursday there was a debate in the Chamber on the sustainable development goals, a new global framework aimed at eradicating poverty in all its forms, everywhere. That means at home as well as elsewhere in the world. In Scotland there was a working group drawn from civil society, the Government and the academic and business world—I declare an interest as I was a member of it—on the sustainable development goals. It was innovative not only for the way such different organisations worked together towards ending poverty overseas, but for what we could do domestically. There is an interesting and continuing collaboration between global and domestic anti-poverty organisations, and it would be interesting to know from the Minister whether he is prepared to work with his colleagues in the Department for International Development, and across the Government, to consider how the new global goals aimed at ending all forms of poverty, including child poverty, everywhere, might be applied in the United Kingdom.

As so often with such issues, we are the generation with the knowledge, means and resources to end poverty, and all that seems to be lacking is the political will.