Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2020-07-02
Topic: Social Welfare
Fleur Anderson (Labour, Centre-left): 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.