Regional Inequalities: Child Poverty

Rebecca Long Bailey Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) for securing this important debate and for her articulate and passionate speech.

As we have already heard, recent End Child Poverty coalition research indicated that there were 4.3 million children living in poverty in the UK between 2019 and 2020, and now it is set to be much worse. The Government might wax lyrical about the route out of poverty being work, but staggeringly, 75% of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works—work that is often insecure and simply does not pay enough to sustain a decent standard of living.

In my constituency of Salford and Eccles, 23% of children lived in relative poverty, whereas the national average was 19%; 19% lived in absolute poverty, and the national average was 16%. Poverty, whatever we call it, relative or absolute, is still poverty, and 42% of children in Salford and Eccles live in poverty. In one of the richest economies in the world, those statistics are a disgrace.

Amid this scandal, the Government are quietly passing their benefits uplift legislation today. Even with inflation expected to hit 7.25% in April, the Government are uprating benefits by just 3.1%. Let us be clear: that is a real-terms benefit cut. With rising living costs, it will push families already stretched past breaking point.

More than 30 charities and organisations have called on the Government to increase benefits in line with rising inflation, so I hope the Minister will heed those calls today. I hope he will also recognise that the two-child limit and benefit cap should be abolished. Although most households will see their benefits increased by a paltry 3.1% in April, capped households will see no increase, just as inflation is set to peak and energy bills soar. That will be catastrophic for those families.

Further energy prices are expected to rise by a whopping 50%, which will cripple many families. In response to the calls to increase benefits, the Government have offered paltry support in the form of a £200 discount that consumers must pay back over the next five years, essentially loading even more debt on to the backs of cash-strapped families. At the very least, the rate of VAT for household energy bills must be cut by the Government as soon as possible, and they must levy a windfall tax on oil and gas companies. They must also expand and increase the warm home discount, not load the cost of supplier failure on to household bills, and must increase universal credit to match inflation, as well as increasing public sector pay to a real living wage.

I say to the Minister: let us not wring our hands today about how much we empathise with those who are struggling. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said:

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

We have the means and the policy ideas to tackle this national scandal, so let us act on that today.