Food Banks (Scotland)

William Bain Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Mr Betts.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy) on securing this timely debate and on speaking with such eloquence and passion about the real picture affecting his constituents in Fife. I also praise the contributions of my hon. Friends the Members for Livingston (Graeme Morrice), for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Cathy Jamieson), for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie), for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown), and I commend the contribution of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford).

As people across the country prepare to celebrate the festive season, it is right that we all consider the effects of policy on those who are struggling to make ends meet. Sadly, this year the number of people struggling in food poverty has risen dramatically. I hope the Minister, unlike the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) in a debate in this Chamber last week, will acknowledge that food poverty is a growing and distinct social problem and will work to produce a strategy across Government to overcome it.

We should also remember the work of the Trussell Trust and other organisations that are filling the gap in society that this Government are so shamefully leaving behind. The Library of the House informed me on Monday that 6,196 people, including nearly 2,000 children, have been fed by Trussell Trust food banks in Scotland since April 2012. The difficulty in putting together the whole picture is caused by the Government failing to keep proper data on the prevalence of food banks, and I hope the Minister will at least remedy that following this debate.

The Scottish Government are not helping with the cuts they are making to the fuel poverty budgets, which threaten to abandon 800,000 people in Scotland to the scourge of fuel poverty. In addition, progress on child and family poverty has stalled under the present Scottish Government. I do not regard the investment made by the previous Labour Government in the tax credit system, which the Resolution Foundation has established was the principal driver of living standards being sustained to any extent beyond 2003, as throwing money at a problem; it was important as a means of keeping families in good living standards through a difficult period. However, I will focus my remarks on the current Government’s policies, which are causing the surge in the use of food banks.

Yesterday’s inflation figures were striking in pointing to the 3.9% rise in the cost of food compared with a year ago, whereas the consumer prices index measure of inflation is 2.7%.

[Cathy Jamieson]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that important point. Does he agree that it is significant that, within food pricing, bread and vegetables are the items that are most affected?

[Mr Bain]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The price of fruit and vegetables is rising particularly strongly. Fruit is up 3.9% in the past year, and vegetables are up 8.1%, all of which is contributing to what has been described as a nutritional recession, with people cutting back on the purchase of fresh food and relying more on cheaper processed food instead.

Last week the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published a study, which included evidence from Scottish households, showing that households in the lowest two income deciles are spending more of their income on food than they were five years ago—such spending is now 16.6% of their income—but their purchases of fresh fruit and vegetables have slumped because of soaring prices and the squeeze on household finances.

There is no doubt that some of the principal underlying causes are the squeeze on real wages in Scotland—down 7.4% in the first two years of this Government—the excessive pace of fiscal tightening, annual energy bills rising by an average of £300 since 2010 and the tax rises being imposed on ordinary people by this Government, not least the hike in VAT, which on average is costing ordinary families £480 a year in extra tax. As we predicted, the effect of those policies has been to strip demand from the economy, particularly from the poorest communities.

Three themes have emerged from this debate. First, the Government have no policy to counter the downward spiral of real wages. Under this Government, people are worse off than they were a decade ago. The effects of continuing with their policies were put starkly by the Resolution Foundation in its recent report, “Gaining from Growth”. Under this Government’s policies, real wages are likely to be no higher in 2017 than in 1999. People will be on average £1,700 a year worse off at the end of that period. With living standards in the UK declining at a faster rate than for some of our major European partners, perhaps seeing us drop to sixth in the European living standards league will focus minds in the Treasury a little more than has so far been the case.

Secondly, underemployment is affecting the disposable income that people in Scotland are taking home and are able to spend on food and other social necessities. More than 270,000 people in Scotland are trapped in involuntary part-time work or self-employment. There is a huge amount of evidence demonstrating the link between underemployment and low pay.

Thirdly, the Government’s policies on tax and benefits will increase reliance on food banks still further. We know that one major driver of the use of food banks among the jobless and those on low incomes is short-term cash-flow difficulties and problems accessing the social fund. Should this Government persist in introducing a real-terms benefit and tax credit cut over the next three years, they will accelerate the process by which people fall into debt problems and extreme poverty.

We need only consider the warning from history about where such policies take society. The cuts in the 1930s contributed to a situation described by Beveridge as one in which social evils such as want were on the rise. Surely we have moved beyond a situation where Conservative and Liberal Democrat Ministers—sadly, no Liberal or Conservative Back Benchers were willing to come to this debate to support their Minister or to defend these outrageous policies—would inflict that on the country once again, in the face of all the evidence on how destructive it would be to fragile economic demand and how it would endanger our social fabric.

The Chancellor said in relation to his emergency Budget of June 2010 that he would not seek to balance the books on the “backs of the poor.” He has at least kept part of that pledge, because with borrowing £212 billion higher at the end of this Parliament, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, and debt higher, not lower, as a share of GDP, the Chancellor is not balancing the books; but he is making the poorest hurt the most through that policy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that the policies announced in the autumn statement will hit the bottom 40% of the income scale harder as a share of income than the top 10% next April while removing work incentives for millions of people. Sixty per cent. of the Chancellor’s welfare cuts will affect people in work, and 76% of the cuts in tax credits in Scotland will hammer families in which someone works.

In the Minister’s constituency, which I have researched, 83% of the tax credit cuts will affect people in work. In the constituency of the Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore), 82% of the tax credit cuts will hammer people in work. How on earth is that defensible?

The politics behind what the Government are doing are equally contemptible. The Scottish National party Government are attempting to divide us geographically from the rest of the UK, but this Government are attempting to divide people socially and economically form their neighbours.

This has been a good debate, but now it requires a proper response from the Government, who must answer why, in a rich country, they are prepared to tolerate the return of involuntary reliance on charity rather than adopt a proper policy to tackle food poverty and boost wages and living standards. They must answer why they are prepared to demonise the poor rather than join the rest of Scottish society in ending poverty. They must answer why, in losing their battle to recapture lost economic growth, they risk losing something even bigger: their sense of morality and what makes Scotland a good society.