Cost of Living Increases — House of Commons, 2022-01-24
Topic: Macroeconomics
Joanna Catherine Cherry (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): It is a real pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey), and I entirely support his views on Scottish independence. I also support the call for a constitutional convention, which was the idea of our First Minister and was first called for by her just prior to the start of the covid crisis I just gently say to the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) that those of us who are returned to this House on an SNP ticket will continue to talk about independence for so long as we are returned in the very significant numbers that we are. If she has been looking at the opinion polls over the weekend, she will see that support for independence in Scotland is at 50%—considerably more than support for her own party—so I am afraid that her calls on us to stop talking about independence will very much fall on deaf ears. We believe that we could tackle these matters better in a social democratic, independent Scotland The real focus of this debate is how the weight of the cost of living crisis will fall hardest on low-income households, who on average spend a much higher percentage of their income on energy and food and will therefore be most affected. A number of hon. Members have referred to Jack Monroe’s work. Jack Monroe has shown in a blog and in an excellent article in The Guardian at the weekend how the rise in food costs in particular falls on the poorest people in our society As for the rise in energy costs, I will give one example, from the many that I could give, of a constituent of mine in Edinburgh South West. She contacted me in despair after receiving her renewal quotation from Octopus Energy: "I am really shocked. I currently have a fixed 12 month tariff and pay £86.55 a month but from end of Jan 2022, they"— Octopus Energy— "have proposed the following deals between £116 and £240 per month. I expected prices to rise and expected £200-300 more a year however based on their new tariffs I am looking at an extra £1000 to £2000 per year." That is just one example of the sort of difficulty that my constituents have been put into by this crisis The constituents who will suffer the most are those who are already in considerable difficulty because of the misery heaped upon them by unfair Conservative and Unionist party policies. The Government have it within their power to help these low-income families and the most hard-hit. The Government can always find money when they want to, and they have written off a pretty extraordinary amount of money, squandered during the covid crisis because of what their own resigning Minister has called a "woeful" lack of oversight This is about priorities. When my constituents suffering on low incomes go to the supermarket to shop, they do not go with a suitcase to fill with wine and spirits for illegal parties; they go with a wee basket, which they fill sparsely, taking things out as they realise that their meagre budget will be exceeded. The low-income families in my constituency do not have money for cheese and wine parties in the garden. Most of them do not have a garden, and if they did, they would not have the leisure time to spend in it because they are working all hours in low-paid jobs and the gig economy to feed their children In households not just in my Edinburgh South West constituency but across this country—across all the nations of the United Kingdom, on the Tories’ watch—parents go hungry to feed their children. The walls of those low-income families are not papered with expensive designer wallpaper; often, they are damp and poorly insulated, so they need to spend even more on extortionately priced energy to heat them than they should. The Tories have the power and the money to solve this. Do something.