Tackling Poverty in the UK

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)]

I warmly welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was a firm supporter of yours in the recent elections. I also warmly welcome the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) to her position. She has been sitting in the Whips Office for a number of years now, and I am sure that standing at the Dispatch Box beats that any day of the week. I congratulate those hon. Members who have made their maiden speeches today, which I will come to in a bit more detail later.

First, I want to pick up on some of the points made by the hon. Lady in her closing comments. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), began the debate with the bleak picture of poverty that the country faces. Despite record levels of spending on benefits in the last 13 years, we have more working-age adults living in relative poverty than ever before. The hon. Lady said that the Labour Government acted to tackle poverty, but I am afraid that her rhetoric does not match the facts. Income inequality is at its highest since records began, and a higher proportion of children grow up in workless households in the UK than in any other EU country. That is a damning indictment of the previous Government’s legacy, a legacy that I am afraid was absent from the opening comments of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). The facts could not be clearer. The tired old ways of continually throwing money at the problem, no matter how deeply entrenched or seemingly intractable, lie discredited.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I welcome the hon. Lady to her position. I am sure that she will do some very important work in the Department. Will she confirm that the number of children living in workless households has fallen significantly since 1997, having previously risen substantially?

[Maria Miller]

The shadow Secretary of State fails to point out that the previous Government completely failed to tackle the level of poverty in this country in the way that they set out that they would, and they did not hit their child poverty targets. They have left us to put in place a firm strategy to address that issue. The right hon. Lady should not be too selective with her facts.

It could not be clearer that we need fresh ideas if we are to reverse the dreadful situation that we face; and it could not be clearer that, if new approaches to tackling poverty are to have any effect, they require new, clear thinking. That is exactly what our coalition Government are able to offer: a new vision and a new strategy to tackle the root causes of poverty. Family breakdown, educational failure, addiction, debt, worklessness and economic dependency are the pathways to poverty and the underlying problems that can lead to a lifetime—even generations—of worklessness and welfare dependency.