Food Poverty

Robert Flello Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I share her concerns—concerns that have been raised since the start of the debate—about the bedroom tax. I reiterate that the Government want people to move into smaller properties, but in many places across the country such properties do not exist and people will be penalised as a result.

I am very concerned about the cumulative impact of people having to pay the bedroom tax and everything else. I will talk in more detail about the impact of the autumn statement—the cumulative impact of everything. Many hon. Members have called on the Government to make a proper assessment of the impacts that their changes to taxes and benefits will have on the poorest in our society and on child poverty. It is very disappointing that the Government have refused to do that.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend on the debate and on the fantastic YouTube video that she made—it is a must-watch, particularly for those on the Government Benches.

To return to the point made by the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti), in my constituency there was a clothing bank that did some food provision. The circumstances of people using that provision before 2010 were incredibly different from those in which people are now using it. Yes, food banks, clothing banks and other provisions were in place before 2010, but through the recession, people did not need to access it. It is as a direct result of this Government’s policies on things such as cuts to local authorities that 260,000-plus people need these food banks.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that intervention. I concur with all the points that he made.

I have talked in depth about the scale of the problem; now it is important to examine the causes. Many hon. Members have intervened to allude to the relevant points. I will reflect on a number of the causes. As I mentioned, rising food prices are a contributory factor. In the past five years, food prices have gone up by 12% in real terms, with the cost of essentials such as fruit, milk, cheese and eggs rising by as much as 30%. Last year, food inflation in the UK was the highest in the EU outside Hungary, putting an average of £233 a year on the average household food bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that intervention. I will come to the point about the amounts that people have to spend on emergency finance. I mentioned before that four out of five people who were struggling to eat also took out a short-term loan. That is adding to their costs, which means that they cannot spend money on food.

[Robert Flello]

My hon. Friend is being most generous with her time. I am thoroughly enjoying her speech. Before she moves on from the delays in getting benefits, I want to mention the growing problem of people who have been on employment support allowance and are told, “Sorry, you no longer qualify.” Their higher level of benefit suddenly drops and they can be waiting not months, but a year or more for the decision to be reversed, which most of the time it is.

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that important point. A number of hon. Members here will have had constituents come to see them in clear need of employment support allowance. They have to go through the whole tribunal process to get the result they were expecting in the first place. While all that is happening, months go by and they have literally nothing. If they have no support structures, family or friends, they will struggle to eat.

I reinforce the point about delays in benefit payments because people say that it is the main reason why they struggle to eat, but the issue is also about income. The incomes of low and middle-income families declined by 4.2% between 2010 and 2011 and, according to the autumn statement, people are expected to face a 1.2% reduction in their post-tax income in 2015-16. There is a cumulative effect and a negative impact on people’s income, the choices they can make and the food they can buy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) mentioned payday loans and their cost. The number of payday loans has grown by 300% in the past two years, according to figures from the debt counselling charity, StepChange Debt Charity. About 5 million people now have to rely on legal loan sharks to make ends meet. I find that staggering. Legal loan sharks make huge profits off the back of lending to people at excessive interest rates of up to 16,000%. We have all heard of Wonga. This year, it made £45 million in pure profit and its main director took home a salary of £1.6 million.

I shall give just one story: a constituent got themselves into trouble trying to make ends meet and their repayments are now more than their take-home salary. That is a tragic state of affairs. Research last month from R3, the insolvency organisation, found that 8% of consumers said that they expected to take on a short-term loan to meet their costs over the coming weeks, which is particularly significant in the run-up to Christmas. Its research also shows that over the past six months, one in 10 had prioritised paying back a payday loan over paying for food.

I spoke a little about the extent of the problem and why people are affected, and other Members have mentioned it too. I return to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth made about the kinds of people who have to access food banks; it is not only the homeless or the out-of-work, as we might expect. I am sure we all have stories about when we went to food banks and heard first hand from those who have to access emergency food aid—there are as many in work as out of work. For many, food poverty is the product of a toxic combination of low wages, austerity economics, spiralling food prices, lengthy delays to benefit payments and cuts to working tax credit.

Government figures show that lower-income households are being hit hardest by price rises. They now spend about 15.8% of their income on food, which is nearly 3% more than the average household. Jobseeker’s allowance for a single adult is currently no more than £71 a week, leaving little over £1.50 a day for food. What happens if there is an emergency and someone has to pay for something? It leaves them with little or nothing to pay for food.

The picture is not much better for those in work. Apply the same calculation to a full-time worker on the minimum wage, and, after tax, they are left with just £4.66 a day for food. It is very difficult to eat healthily and properly on such small amounts.

Hon. Members have mentioned Magic Breakfast. I want to labour this point because food poverty is hitting children at school—children are going to school without food in their stomachs. Magic Breakfast is the largest provider of free healthy breakfasts in England. Last year alone, it provided more than 1 million healthy breakfasts, in 205 schools, to children who would otherwise have started the school day hungry.

With The Guardian, Magic Breakfast surveyed 600 teachers in June on their experience of pupil hunger. The figures are so distressing: 83% of teachers said that they saw evidence of pupil hunger in their classes in the mornings and 55% of them said that they had seen an increase in hungry children in their classes. When asked why more children were arriving at school hungry, they said that they believed that the biggest factors were general poverty, pressure from the cost of living and a lack of cookery skills and nutritional knowledge.

I shall reflect a little on my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) made some points about the food bank we went to in north Liverpool. I shall look at the scale of the problem in my locality; other hon. Members will talk about areas and communities that they represent. North Liverpool food bank serves my constituency and the constituency of my hon. Friend. Until 11 December—not even the whole year—it had issued 1,644 vouchers and fed 3,470 people, 1,272 of whom were children. The most common reasons for going to the centre were delays in benefits, 32.1%, and the refusal of a crisis loan.

I have not talked about the refusal of crisis loans yet, and other hon. Members may have stories of their constituents trying to access a crisis loan because they found themselves in crisis. I have heard stories from constituents who have spent all day on the phone trying to get through to the crisis loan number—they can no longer apply at the job centre—but they could not get through, so they had no money and could not eat.

Central Liverpool food bank, in my constituency, issued 2,051 vouchers and fed 3,900 people, 1,307 of whom were children. Comparing November 2011 with November 2012, the bank has seen a 114% increase in the number of vouchers given out a month. It is striking.