Finance Bill

Ruth Jones Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting & Report: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) on his maiden speech and on taking his place in the House.

I am honoured to be able to give a speech today that will be arguing for the correct place of focusing on child poverty in all our legislation. If we do otherwise, we will fail the very people we should be serving. I stand here to represent a mother whom I met last year. I went to her house to support her children and she told me in passing about the one lightbulb they have in their house. I asked, “One lightbulb, why is that?”. They moved it around from room to room so that her children would not inadvertently be able to switch on and use more electricity, because they could not afford to light up more than one room at a time. That was a stark reminder to me about the child poverty levels we have in this country.

New clause 29 would mandate the Government to look at the effect of this Finance Bill on the basis of its impact on poverty and on inequalities—on relative poverty. To measure the success of the Bill, we need to carry out a review within six months and consider whether future studies should be carried out regularly by the OBR. I may be able to pre-empt the Minister’s response to this new clause. He may well say that it is unnecessary and that impact assessments will be carried out, but if those are not public and are not regularly carried out, the Government are marking their own homework on this. When it comes to measures that may make people poorer, that is not acceptable and we need a public report. The Government’s own Social Mobility Commission says in its “Monitoring social mobility” report, published this year:

“Too often also there is little transparency concerning the impact spending decisions have on poverty. The Treasury has made some efforts in this direction, but has so far declined to give the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) a proper role to monitor this. There should be more independent scrutiny to help ensure policy interventions across Whitehall genuinely support the most disadvantaged groups.”

The Government must be more strategic in their recovery from coronavirus than they have been in handling the crisis. They cannot take a hands-off approach, as they have done in the past decade towards child poverty. The cost of inaction, in terms of supporting the economy and reversing growing poverty levels, will be far greater than the cost of action. This really matters in London, which has the highest rate of child poverty of any English region, with 700,000 children—37% of all children in London—living in relative poverty, after housing costs are taken into account. In my borough of Wandsworth, 36% of children live in poverty. Although poverty rates are higher for everyone in London than they are nationally, this gap is larger for children than for any other group. Two thirds of children living in poverty in the UK are in working households or where at least one adult is in work, and they will be very impacted by the measures in this Bill, so we should record it.

When the UN’s special rapporteur Philip Alston produced his report on extreme poverty and human rights in Britain in 2018, long before coronavirus came along, he found that the UK Government’s policies had led to

“the systematic immiseration of millions across Great Britain”.

He also saw the disproportionate impact on women, saying:

“If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place”.

We cannot continue with this kind of policy making.

Following drastic changes in Government economic policy beginning in 2010, the two preceding decades of progress in tackling child and pensioner poverty have begun to unravel, and poverty is on the rise. This Bill must not add to that. Under the previous Labour Government, child poverty was going down, but the latest figures from the Child Poverty Action Group show that 4.1 million children live in poverty in the UK; 47% of children living in lone parent families are in poverty; and 70% of children growing up in poverty live in working families. This is going in the wrong direction, as 5.2 million children are expected to be in poverty by 2022. Under this Government, we are heading towards having half of our children being poor in 21st century Britain. That would be not only a disgrace but a social calamity and economic disaster rolled into one.

On Tuesday, the regional director of Public Health England, Professor Kevin Fenton, warned a meeting of the London health board that the coronavirus has worsened stark and pervasive inequalities in London. A growing bank of national evidence shows that the virus has hit older people, poorer communities, men, and black, Asian, and minority ethnic Londoners the hardest. Some of those groups are also likely to be impacted by the wider social and economic consequences of the outbreak. According to Professor Fenton:

“These inequalities are stark, they’re pervasive and they are a call to action for the system moving forward to ensure that we do not go back to where we were…but we redouble and enhance our efforts to address these widening inequalities.”

Given those shocking figures, the worrying direction of travel, and the limiting daily impact on so many people’s lives, any new Bill that does not bake in an assessment of its impact on the lives of the poorest people in our country is set up to fail, and it will fail all those people and children in this country who we should be serving the most.

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to bring up the rear in this important debate—last, but hopefully not least—and I commend the hon. Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson) for his maiden speech. Labour Members obviously mourn the loss of his predecessor, but we trust that the hon. Gentleman will speak up for Cumbria as strongly as she did.

I wish to touch on three important areas that I think the Government should keep in mind as we look to rebuild our economy, and as communities across the UK get used to our new normal. We must remember that this is a recovery from the first wave of covid-19, and events in Leicester and elsewhere in England show how sensitive the evolving situation continues to be. A key component of any recovery effort is public sector pay, and the way we treat those who go above and beyond for us. Our workers deserve to be paid properly, and we must pledge to do that now. Last week there was a debate in this House about how we can acknowledge and support those workers in the NHS who give their lives to keep us, our families and our constituents alive and healthy. The answer to how we show our appreciation, and when we do it, is simple: we should pay people what they deserve. I hope that the Chancellor’s statement next week will lay out the building blocks to enable that to happen.

Newport is one of the most diverse parts of Wales, and I am proud of our city and its diversity. It is, however, a matter of deep regret that our cherished diversity has seen us on the frontline in the fight against the devastating impact of covid-19 on black and minority ethnic communities. A report commissioned by the Welsh Labour Government under First Minister Mark Drakeford was published recently, and it rightly calls for action to tackle the structural and systematic racism that may have contributed to the higher than average death rate in BME communities. Addressing those structural inequalities must be integral to the economic recovery for which our city is crying out.

In a city such as Newport—it will be the same in many other cities across the UK—we know at first hand how vital BME communities are for our collective prosperity. It really is as simple as that. We know that BME workers are more likely to be in low-paid jobs with little of the protection needed to stay safe and secure, and so the funding and delivery of PPE, and other protection, must be a priority for this Conservative Government.

One real, tangible thing that Ministers could do is follow the lead of the Welsh Labour Government, who have made provision for a comprehensive risk assessment that supports people from BME backgrounds in the NHS and social care sector in Wales. That works for my constituents in Newport West, and it should be rolled out in England too. For our welfare system, there is a need for common sense and decency to be at the heart of our economic recovery. That is vital to ensure that we do what the Blair and Brown Labour Governments did, which was to take millions of children out of poverty.

A few weeks ago, we saw a Manchester United player shame this Tory Prime Minister and his Ministers into ensuring that free school meals would be provided throughout the summer in England. I say to new Tory Back Benchers, many of whom are auditioning for places on the Treasury Bench: we will not forget the tweets, the press releases and the speeches in this Chamber explaining why free school meals for children in England were not possible, and neither will the people who were affected. I am proud to say that, in Wales, we take our responsibility to our children seriously. We did not need to be shamed into action; the Welsh Labour Government know how crucial it is that we give our children nutritional and accessible meals. As such, we guaranteed that free school meals will be available to Welsh children throughout the summer, because it is the right thing to do.