Stephen Timms
Main Page: Stephen Timms (Labour - East Ham)Department Debates - View all Stephen Timms's debates with the Department for Education
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab) [V]
I welcome this opportunity to highlight rising food insecurity among children. Relative child poverty has risen sharply. The Resolution Foundation found that nearly half of families with three or more children were in relative poverty after housing costs in 2019-20, and the family resources survey, which covered food security for the first time this March, shows that 43% of universal credit claimants have low or very low food security, so we have a big problem. In the year to last March, the Trussell Trust distributed 1 million emergency food parcels to children. The Independent Food Aid Network, with food banks outside the Trussell Trust, told the Work and Pensions Committee this month that demand last year was more than double that of the year before.
Troubled by those developments, the Work and Pensions Committee set up an inquiry on children in poverty. Our next public evidence session will be on Wednesday. Last December, Ben Levinson, headteacher of Kensington Primary School in my constituency, told the Committee that the plight of families with no recourse to public funds and other pressures compelled the school to set up a trust to provide food packages and parcels for the needy. Kellogg’s has told us that 18% of schools have started a food bank since the pandemic began.
These problems in childhood lead to attainment and health problems later. The University of Liverpool health inequalities team told our inquiry that it has repeatedly found strong evidence of a causal relationship between child poverty and
“mental health problems, cognitive disability, overweight and obesity, and longstanding illness.”
In 2014, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission reported that poorer children were far less likely to achieve high levels of educational attainment. Dr Kitty Stewart from the London School of Economics recently told our Committee that
“money itself makes a difference to children’s outcomes”,
partly because poverty causes stress and anxiety among parents, making it harder for them
“to focus on children’s needs, listen to them, help with homework and so on.”
I support the Sutton Trust’s call for universities to have access to free school meals information, so that they can take account of these issues in admissions decisions. Anne Longfield, the former Children’s Commissioner, who is due to give evidence to the Committee again on Wednesday, has called for a return to better joined-up working between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. We need a clear Government focus on tackling the growing problem of child poverty.
The extension of free school meals at the start of the pandemic to families with no recourse to public funds was exactly the right thing to do. I hope that will be made permanent. I know that the Minister’s Department is looking at that, together with the Home Office. It would be very helpful if she could let us know today where that review has reached.