Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend the Labour Front-Bench team for tabling this motion, and I commend the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) for setting out succinctly and forcefully the impact on real human beings of the failures of this Conservative Government. It was so farcical as to be really comical, if it was not so tragic, that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), who is no longer in his place, asked the Minister to agree that cutting food miles was a good idea, yet a Minster from the same Department a couple of weeks ago thought it was brilliant that we had arrived at a new trade deal with Australia and that we should be trying to cut food deals. What better vignette could there be to illustrate the inconsistency and chaos of this Government? They have torn up the best trade deal we will ever have with our nearest neighbours and replaced it with a deal with people who are literally on the other side the world, yet they have the cheek to tell us that the way to deal with food shortages in Britain is to cut food miles.

Just to put into context the scale of what we are facing here, the Bank of England has increased interest rates to try to control increasing inflation, but it is warning that it could reach 7.25% in April. Very few of our constituents will get a pay rise that comes within a mile of 7.25%, and most will be lucky to get anything. Data released by the Food Foundation charity shows that, in January this year, 4.7 million adults had experienced food insecurity, and National Energy Action estimates that 6 million households in these islands will be living in fuel poverty: that is not having to cut back slightly, but being unable to keep themselves warm enough to be safe and healthy, or to feed themselves and their families enough to keep healthy.

New analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns that the energy price cap will have the harshest impact on the poorest families. We knew that anyway, but JRF has given the evidential backing to it. The poorest families will spend 18% of their income on energy bills after April. Can hon. Members imagine spending 18% of their £80,000-a-year salary on fuel bills? This place would be in uproar if that happened. Why is it acceptable for low-paid folk to pay a bigger chunk of their income when it would not be acceptable for Members of Parliament? The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that average real wages will still be lower in 2026 than they were at the start of the financial crisis in 2008.

If all that was being said about a poor economy, a poor country or a poor collection of countries, we would think it was shameful, but it is being said about one of the richest places on the planet, as the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) mentioned earlier. Fuel poverty and food poverty—people literally living on the edge of starvation and hypothermia—are happening not because of necessity but because of a deliberate sustained political choice. It has certainly been the political choice of Conservative Governments since they were elected under the former Prime Minister David Cameron.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, remember that, in 2014, the Labour party and the Conservative party said to Scotland that, if we voted for independence, freedom of movement to Europe would end, supermarket shelves would be empty of food and energy prices would go through the roof? Does he agree that they have quite a bit of explaining to do?

[Peter Grant]

It is a valid point. Every so often, I go back through all the scare stories that have been pushed through my letterbox—mainly from the Labour party, because we do not really have a Tory presence in my constituency, or certainly not in my part of it. When we go through all the horrible things that they say will happen if Scotland becomes independent and leave them for two or three years, we find them happening anyway. It started with the closure of the naval base in Rosyth and it is still happening today with the end of freedom of movement and increasing food prices.

It is estimated that 1 million adults, equivalent to more than 3.5% of the UK population, are having to go without food at least once a month because they cannot afford to eat. About 640,000 people in Scotland cannot afford their energy bills, and that is before they got put up by 50%. That is in a country that has more energy than it needs and that, most years, exports energy to England and other countries because it cannot use all the energy it produces.

Where else in the world would we find any commodity in surplus that is, at the same time, priced beyond the affordability of its own citizens? What on earth is wrong with the way that Scotland is run that means that the people who produce almost more energy per head of population than anywhere else in the world cannot afford to pay their bills, keep their homes heated and keep their families healthy?

The Chancellor’s response is better than nothing but it is woefully inadequate. He is basically offering a payday loan: “We’ll give you the money just now to pay off your fuel bills and we’re going to hope and pray that they come back down again in the next few years.” If they do not, what on earth happens? The Scottish TUC has said that the Treasury’s buy now, pay later loan

“comes nowhere near tackling the problem…It is nothing short of shameful that people are being forced to choose between food and heat.”

If emergency loans are such a good idea to tackle the problem of increasing energy prices, why not go to the source of the problem and give them to the energy companies? They are struggling because of many global factors that have been covered in other debates. At least that way, the Government would be giving the loans to people whose shareholders should be able to meet the cost. Why give the loan to somebody who will not be able to afford to pay it back next year, the year after or the year after that?

Given that the decision has been made to give that money directly to citizens, the SNP says that it should be turned into a grant. People should not be made to choose between taking the money now and not being able to pay it back later. The Chancellor must also cut VAT on energy bills, which is within his gift. Why has he not done it?

As well as giving emergency loans to the energy companies, the Chancellor should have ruled out a rise to the energy price cap—he simply should not have allowed it, or Ofgem should not have allowed it. He could also reintroduce the £20-a-week universal credit uplift that the Tories cancelled recently. None of that by itself will solve the problem completely, but at least it would give an indication that we are dealing with a Government who care, whereas, quite clearly, we are dealing with a Government who could hardly care less.

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

Single young parents under the age of 25 face lower universal credit payments despite being the sole breadwinner for their child and despite, naturally, facing more barriers to work. Does the hon. Member agree that it is unacceptable for the Government to allow children to live in poverty based only on the age of their single mother or father?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend—I hope that I can continue to call her a good friend and colleague—has, as always, made a very valid point.

One of the most iniquitous and downright evil things about the crisis that we are now facing is that the people who get the hardest hit will be those who are least able to afford it. If we all had to take a 20% hit to our living standards, none of us would enjoy it, but all of us would manage. Most of my constituents cannot afford to take that scale of hit to their standards of living and they are the ones who are being hit the worst.

I want to look briefly at some of the things that have been done by the Scottish Government, using their limited powers to mitigate this crisis. The Scottish Government have a much more progressive income tax system than the rest of the UK. It is often attacked by Tory Back Benchers who are interested only in the wellbeing of high earners, but the fact is that, in 2021-22, 54% of people in Scotland—the lower paid 54% of people in Scotland—are paying less income tax than they would if they lived in England. There is also fact that Members of Parliament for Scotland pay a bit more income tax than our colleagues in England. I do not mind that if the money is going into essential services.

Last year, the Scottish Government invested around £2.5 billion to support low-income households, nearly £1 billion of which went directly to children living in low-income households. They have committed more than £3.9 billion to benefit expenditure in 2022-23, providing support to more than 1 million people. That figure of £3.9 billion is £361 million above the level of funding that we get from the UK Government, so while again the Tories will demand guarantees that all of the money that comes to Scotland be used for its intended purpose, the Scottish Government are spending almost 10% more than they are receiving for that purpose.

The reaction of the Child Poverty Action Group was that this was

“a hugely welcome development on the path to meeting Scotland’s child poverty targets... a real lifeline for the families across Scotland who are facing a perfect storm of financial insecurity as the UK cut to universal credit bites, energy prices soar and the wider costs of living rise.”

It said that on 29 November 2021. The British Government did not seem to wake up to the problem until about 29 January 2022.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow—

[Patrick Grady]

North.

[Peter Grant]

Glasgow North. I do beg my hon. Friend’s pardon. I love the city of Glasgow, but I can never remember the constituency boundaries.

My hon. Friend has raised the impact that Brexit is having. Brexit has had a disastrous effect on our economy, and it has not finished. The OBR estimates that we still have three fifths of the way to go. Most of the damage from Brexit has still to be done. Every single person on these islands faces a cost of around £1,200 as a result of Brexit, and we know who will be hit the hardest. Make UK, the organisation that represents 20,000 manufacturers, has said that Brexit changes will undoubtedly add to soaring consumer costs in 2022.

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s argument. I believe that he is making the point that Brexit is leading to some other cost of living issues. If that is the case, why are we seeing even greater levels of inflation and unemployment in other countries inside the EU? Rising costs and rising inflation are clearly a global issue, and nothing to do with Brexit.

[Peter Grant]

Is it not remarkable how—in this great global superpower, this global leader of the free world, this super global economy—every time that anything goes wrong it is global’s fault? “It was not me. A big global done it and ran away.”

I did see one figure at the weekend—that the price of energy in France is going up by about 4%. Here it is going up by 10 times that, even more than 10 times that for many people. Going back to the hon. Gentleman, I am only quoting figures from the Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility. If the Government do not trust the OBR, perhaps it is because the number of people trusted by the Government is as few as those who trust the Government.

Let us not forget what promises were made before the Brexit referendum—I know that some people want to say that that is all water under the bridge and that we can forget about it. The present Prime Minister told us in 2016 that an upside of Brexit would be the freedom to scrap the unfair VAT on fuels. Now he says that removing VAT would be a “blunt instrument” that would not direct help towards those in most dire need. The Leader of the House, who I gather has just been promoted to the Cabinet, promised us in 2016 that the price of food would go down if we left the European Union. What has happened to those promises now, and where are the people who made them? Why are they not here to explain themselves to us and more importantly to our constituents?

[Hywel Williams]

Earlier the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) seemed at least to imply that the policy after Brexit was self-sufficiency in home-produced foods, whereas I had thought that, bestriding the world stage, we would import whatever we needed.

[Peter Grant]

Again, the hon. Member has got it absolutely spot on. Tory Back Benchers have been given quotes to read out by their Whips, and they routinely read them out regardless of whether they bear any relation to reality or whether they completely cut the feet from the argument presented in an earlier quote. They sometimes forget, especially these days, that what the Whips tell them to say today might well contradict what they told them to say yesterday, because the truth may have had to change.

Labour is absolutely right to condemn the record of this Tory Government, but Scotland will not forget that in previous incarnations the Labour party has played its part in creating this crisis. I know that it will not make comfortable listening for Labour Members to be reminded of that. One of the reasons we have been worse hit than a lot of other European countries is that even before the pandemic we were already one of the most unequal societies in Europe. The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton mentioned that in his speech, but previous Labour Governments did nothing to address it. The Blair-Brown Government managed to preside over an increase in inequalities in Fife, Gordon Brown’s home county, during a period of economic growth.

Although I have no doubt that Labour in Scotland will demand that the SNP Scottish Government fix the whole problem, Labour has repeatedly voted against giving Scotland the powers to allow us to do just that. Employment law, minimum wage legislation, banning exploitative zero-hours contracts, banning fire and rehire, and the proper provision of sick pay could all have been put into the Scotland Act in 2015. Labour voted to keep all that within the hands of the Tories. Energy; the energy price cap; discriminatory charges for access to the national grid for Scottish producers; a decades-long obsession with nuclear power, whose true costs the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy admitted to the Public Accounts Committee yesterday we still do not even know—Labour’s policy on all these has been almost identical to the Tories’. Labour’s policy has been that Scotland should trust this Government on all of them.

Pensions—reserved to Westminster; income-related benefits—almost entirely reserved to Westminster; the national insurance increase, which everybody in this House opposes—reserved to Westminster. In fact, on pensions, during my time as an MP we have seen this British Government betray their promises to millions of WASPI women, betray their promises on the pensions triple lock and free TV licences, and underpay more than £1 billion in pensions to over 130,000 pensioners. Last year they also failed to pay tens of thousands of pensioners their pensions at all after they had reached state pension age.

It is quite clear that we cannot trust this Government with pensions, any more than we can trust them to look after anyone else living on a low income, but Scotland will never forget who did a tour of pensioners clubs in 2014 and told the people of Scotland: “Your pensions will be safe under a British Government.” My message to Gordon Brown is this: our pensions will never be safe under any British Government. If he thinks that the people of Scotland will be fooled by the same myth next time, as they were in 2014, he has another think coming.

Although we will support the motion if it is put to a vote, and although the recent crisis has been made infinitely worse by the British Conservative party, we will not allow the Scottish Labour party, or the UK Labour party, to forget that the reason why Scotland is still part of this mess is the unholy coalition that Labour chose to enter into with the Conservative party at the last independence referendum. I urge Labour Members to consider very seriously indeed whether it is in the interests of their voters in Scotland or the rest of the UK for them to form a similar coalition with the Tories at the next independence referendum.

Royal Assent

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that Her Majesty has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

Leasehold Reform (Ground Rent) Act 2022

Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Act 2022.