In-work Poverty

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) on securing this important debate. This debate takes place in the context of a sustained attack on the living standards of ordinary people in this country. Energy bills are rocketing. There are tax rises and real-terms pay cuts for millions of people, as well as cuts to universal credit, benefits and pensions. That does not happen in a vacuum; it comes after a decade of austerity, cuts to public services and the tightest squeeze on wages in 200 years. Experts warn that this could be the biggest drop in living standards in many decades.

What does that mean in reality? The daily reality of this crisis for families in my constituency of Leeds East and throughout the country is grim. How, in the fifth-biggest economy on Earth, can we have families who cannot turn the heating on? How, in the fifth-biggest economy on Earth, can we have a situation where parents are missing meals to make sure that their children can eat? How, in the fifth-biggest economy on Earth, do we have more food banks than branches of McDonald’s? I recently met staff at the Chapeltown Citizens Advice in Leeds; their data shows that already, more than one in seven people in my constituency cannot pay their energy bills without cutting back on essential spending.

At the same time, the richest are getting richer. While millions suffer, the millionaires are doing very well. British billionaires have increased their wealth by £290 million per day. The Government have been slashing the taxes of bankers and the gas and oil giants that make £900 profit every single second. Let us be clear: the right to be warm is more important than the right to make super-profits. It is a rigged economic system, which is failing ordinary people. It is a crisis made in Downing Street—let us not be scared to say that.

The Government are trying to shift the blame; they are trying to say that the cost of living crisis is due to the horrific war on Ukraine. It is not. The Government’s plan is to make working people pay the costs of the pandemic, just like they made ordinary people pay for the bankers’ crisis. Poverty is a political choice, and the Tories are choosing to push people into poverty through the cost of living crisis.

What do we do about it? We need an emergency plan to tackle the situation. I will make five suggestions. First, the Government must scrap the national insurance hike that is coming in next month and replace it with a wealth tax on the richest 1%. Secondly, we need a windfall tax on energy profits, to be immediately used to lower energy bills, and a huge home insulation programme to save people hundreds of pounds a year. Thirdly, we need a national minimum wage of £15 per hour. Fourthly, we need the restoration of the universal credit uplift, and its expansion to those who are denied it. We need to uplift benefits by the 8% that the Resolution Foundation and others are calling for to meet inflation pressures. Finally, we need to tackle child hunger, with free school meals for all schoolchildren—learning from what Labour is doing in power in Wales.

We cannot allow the Government to yet again force working people to pay for a crisis. They have made a political choice; our political choice is to fight back with a set of proposals that will make a real difference.