Tonia Antoniazzi
Main Page: Tonia Antoniazzi (Labour - Gower)
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
Some of the measures that the Chancellor has outlined today will go a tiny way to alleviating the stresses of many families in Gower and across the UK, but there is so much more that he should have done. Instead, he decided to put a proverbial sticking plaster on things.
Universal credit has been mentioned, and I I, too, want to talk about it. There is such an in-built unfairness to the whole system—a system that continues to have problems, that is responsible for a surge in food bank usage and that is driving up levels of anxiety and mental health issues for many recipients. When we consider that £12 billion was cut in 2015, £1 billion for work allowances is an insult.
When I recently visited my local food bank, I was immediately informed that demand has gone up by 50% since universal credit was rolled out in Swansea last December. Stock was running low, and the people there were desperate for donations from the harvest festival. Feelings run high in the food bank. The volunteers and the local area co-ordinators provide a comfort blanket for the most vulnerable people in our communities, and I want to thank them—especially Tony, Dave and Ronan—and the others who give their time day in, day out, not just in Swansea, but across Wales and the rest of the UK. That is the harsh reality of austerity in my constituency. From my first visit to a food bank in the summer of 2017, the rise in users by the summer of 2018 following the roll-out of universal credit was striking.
This summer, I was approached by a constituent and thanked for my hard work. I was a little taken aback by her gratefulness. As she got back in the car, I saw her children patiently waiting. Then I was told that this was a term-time working single mother who needed the help of the food bank during the school holidays. She is just another victim of austerity—another working mother and another single mother struggling to make ends meet.
What will it be like next year? What can I tell my constituents about how much poorer they will be when we leave the European Union? What will the post-Brexit reality of working poverty be? Let us be honest: it is not the Boris and Farage utopian dream because when we leave, this is going to be absolutely horrendous. When the vote to leave appears to have weakened the economy, it is time for us to have a people’s vote.
This Budget does nothing to reverse the two-child limit, the abolition of the basic family element worth £545 a year or the freeze on benefits until 2020, including most of the elements of universal credit. There are so many problems with universal credit that it is time for the Chancellor properly to fund this lifeline for hard-working families who are struggling and for those who face illness or a change of circumstance. I spoke to members of a Macmillan Cancer care team this week, and they explained how not having a fast-track application process for those who are terminally ill is having a serious impact on people’s last months. How can the Chancellor live with the knowledge that by not putting in place such a simple fix, he is causing untold worry and hardship for people with less than six months to live? When those people do unfortunately die, their families, on top of coping with their loss, have to deal with the indignity of losing that month’s universal credit payment and have to struggle at a time of huge stress. The Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions should be ashamed of themselves.
It was disappointing today that the Chancellor failed to recognise the centenary of the first women getting the vote and did not listen to the 1950s women, some of whom were up in the Galley today. It is disconcerting that the 1950s women are being brushed under the carpet and that this is being hushed up in the hope that they are going to go away. We have seen today that they are not going to go away. Only a few weeks ago, the WASPI women stopped the traffic in Parliament Square, but who was listening? The Government certainly are not listening. While there is a spike in pensioner poverty as well as in child poverty, what sticks in my gut as a woman is that the wives, the partners, the mothers and the grandmothers who gel families and communities together are the hardest hit since this Government steered the country on a downward spiral into working poverty.
I want to conclude by saying that eight years in a job is long enough to bed in. It is rather churlish of the Government to blame their predecessors to hide their own ineptness. I have been in this job for 18 months, and I have smashed my Tory predecessor’s poor record in Gower. Why can this Conservative Government not take responsibility and admit to failing on their promise of delivering an economy that is working for everyone? I can see at first hand in my constituency that it works for the haves and not for the have-nots.