Queen’s Speech — House of Lords, 2022-05-11
Topic: Social Welfare
Margot Aline (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, while levelling up is a welcome aim of the gracious Speech, the Prime Minister recently admitted to the committee of committee chairs that we cannot level up the country without reducing the number of children living in poverty. When it was pointed out that child poverty is not mentioned once in the levelling-up White Paper, he responded that this was a "purely formal accident". But I fear that it is not an accident at all. Rather, it is symptomatic of how the levelling-up agenda has failed to include any form of anti-poverty strategy, even though, as the Social Mobility Commission pointed out last year, unlike the other nations of the UK, "England has no official poverty or child poverty reduction strategy"— and none is promised in the gracious Speech. Yet Action for Children identifies a child poverty strategy as key to levelling up for children In his letter to Peers on the levelling-up White Paper, the Minister noted that the disparities it promises to tackle are often larger within places than between them. Surely this suggests that levelling up has to address inequalities between people as well as between places—as noted by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley—which includes reducing poverty. The White Paper acknowledges that levelling up "means giving everyone the opportunity to flourish"— an admirable goal—but there is no recognition of the ways in which poverty stunts the opportunity to flourish of millions of our fellow citizens, or of the role that social security should play in preventing and alleviating poverty This has taken on a new urgency with the cost of living crisis. The combination of the withdrawal of the £20 uplift, despite cross-party pressure, and the uprating of benefits by less than half the current inflation rate is pushing low-income households into what the Trussell Trust, which has reported a recent surge in need for emergency food parcels, calls "desperate territory". Just this week, the Food Foundation reported a sharp increase in the proportion of households with children experiencing food insecurity—from around 12% in January to around 17% last month. Today, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research warns that, without an additional boost to universal credit, which it says is affordable, around 250,000 more households could slip into extreme poverty, taking the total to around 1 million We are not talking about what the Prime Minister referred to as "feeling the pinch", which is an example of a "lack of understanding among policy-makers of the scale and severity of the difficulties" that those on low incomes are facing—to quote a recent Covid Realities report. One participant in this important participatory research commented: "There is quite simply nothing left to cut back on." Without a firm commitment to address the intense hardship and even destitution that so many confront, levelling up will appear to them as a cruel joke—as will the Prime Minister’s repeated assurances that the Government "will continue to use all our ingenuity and compassion".—[Official Report, Commons, 10/5/22; col. 17.] What compassion? As a wide range of civil society groups and think tanks have made clear, rather than ingenuity, what is needed is a simple boost to social security benefits In its recent Universal Periodic Review report, the Equality and Human Rights Commission calls on the Government to "examine the factors", including social security changes, behind the disproportionate risk of poverty faced by "certain ethnic minorities and children … and develop strategies to address them." Will the Government commit to doing this? Can the Minister tell us when we can expect the strategy to tackle the "entrenched inequality" experienced by the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities that was promised by his department back in June 2019 Poverty is not just a matter of low income; it is also experienced as powerlessness and lack of voice. While I welcome the acknowledgement in the levelling-up White Paper of the importance of community-led regeneration and the role that community wealth funds might play in that and in developing all-important social infrastructure, I would like to have seen greater emphasis on this. It is said that residents will have more of a say; I hope that they will have a say on more than just changing street names and al fresco dining, as set out in the notes on the Queen’s Speech from No. 10. There also needs to be a commitment to lowering the barriers to participation faced by marginalised groups, including those in poverty Finally, it is simply unbelievable that, yet again, the gracious Speech did not mention the employment Bill promised in the Conservative manifesto. If now, when a growing proportion of the workforce suffers labour market insecurity in various forms, is not the right time for the Bill, as Ministers have claimed in the past, when is the right time? As it is, the absence of the Bill from this year’s legislative programme means, among other things, that there is still no carers’ leave and still no reform of the hopelessly ineffective shared parental leave scheme, which has been under evaluation for over four years. Both are important to the levelling-up agenda, particularly from a gender perspective, as emphasised so ably by my noble friend Lady Prosser. More generally, the Women’s Budget Group comments that instead of "meaningful measures that would have provided reassurances at a time of increasing financial insecurity … we have a set of policies that fail to consider the reality of women’s lives and fail to deliver the change women need." These various omissions from the gracious Speech mean that the Government’s programme for the coming year holds out no hope for those who, having first borne the main burden of austerity, are now facing catastrophe, as they are hit hardest by the cost of living crisis to which the Government have no meaningful answer.