argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
James McMahon (Labour, Centre-left): Like my hon. Friend and neighbour, I think the work that our volunteers do at Oldham Foodbank reflects the work done in food banks up and down this country. They are the very best of us. They make sure that people do not go hungry, but they rely on the charity of our neighbours, and if our neighbours are struggling to put food in their own cupboards, that will have an impact on what they are able to donate to the local food bank. That is the reality, but where is the Government’s plan for that? How are we going to tackle the cost of living crisis and ensure that the safety net is in place? We just do not see it. That is a real issue that we need to address.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Agriculture
Kerry Gillian McCarthy (Labour, Centre-left): We have indeed. Both the current Secretary of State, during the Committee stage of the Agriculture Bill, and the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), when he spoke with me at the Oxford real farming conference, made a pledge to support more county farms and peri-urban farming, so that cities such as Bristol could produce food locally. We were promised funding, but it does not seem to have appeared. Can the Minister tell me what the Department is doing on that front?
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Macroeconomics
Stephen Nathan Kinnock (Labour, Centre-left): Research from the House of Commons Library shows that in my constituency, electricity and gas prices are up by £741 a year, the petrol price is up by 22%, and food costs have risen by £100 a year. Does the Minister really think that this is the time to be hiking national insurance contributions by 1.25%?
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Hilary James Benn (Labour, Centre-left): Bearing in mind that we are the sixth richest country on this planet, what explanation would the Minister offer for the fact that a growing number of my constituents in Leeds Central are having to go up to a complete stranger at a food bank and ask them for help to feed their families because they do not have enough money to feed them themselves?
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Labor
Andrew Joseph McDonald (Labour, Centre-left): I think a lot of people would swap now for the 1970s, when people could afford a home and food and had decent terms and conditions. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should recall the clapping for care workers throughout the crisis—the very people who should be benefiting from sectoral collective bargaining and fair pay agreements that give them a decent standard of living. We will take absolutely no lectures from Tory Members on that subject With the fall in these agreements, many workers have seen a similar dive in their rights and pay, undermining their ability to put food on the table. Almost four in five workers are now at the mercy of the labour market and the whims of their employer, with no means by which to bargain collectively—a situation only exacerbated by bogus and discriminatory classification of workers. There are a number of categories of worker, with different degrees of employment rights. Some workers—employees—are entitled to all the pathetic statutory rights that are currently available if they have been employed long enough, while others, including the bogus self-employed, limb (b) workers and agency workers, are denied many of the basic rights they should be entitled to That is why I am pleased to introduce in this House the Status of Workers Bill, which was guided through the other place by my noble Friend Lord Hendy. The Bill would merge all the categories so they would all be classified as workers with statutory employment rights giving them the freedom to bargain for a decent wage. I implore the Minister to allow the Bill the necessary time to pass through this House to make this fundamental change to workers’ rights, which will bring about the changes we need to solve the cost of living crisis. Like many in this Chamber, I have been inundated with cases of constituents who are struggling in the present circumstances. Lisa, a single mum, is in terrible circumstances. She has no money left. She has 10 days to go before she can get money to put food on the table for herself and her son, who is suffering from covid. I have pensioners who, proud as they are, refuse to go to food banks. That is a damning indictment of the current situation in modern Tory Britain. It has got to change—there must be fundamental change for the benefit of our constituents.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Ian Lavery (Labour, Centre-left): UK wages are at the lowest they have been and they are a 15-year standstill. Wages are gone and energy bills are going through the roof—I will come on to that. Poverty is a political choice. Hunger is a political choice. I am sick and tired of debates in this place where people from all parts are basically reducing hungry and cold families and individuals to mere balance sheet statistics—count them as human beings. The debate often gets dragged into whether this is absolute poverty or relative poverty.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Ian Lavery (Labour, Centre-left): That does not matter to people who are suffering greatly in our communities. If they are sitting at the table with nothing to eat in the morning or at teatime at night, they are not aware of whether they are in abject poverty, absolute poverty, relative poverty or overall poverty. They might not even know that they are in poverty, but they know they are hungry. I think we will all probably have experienced being behind the person in the local newsagent who has the key to put £5 on their electricity bill—
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Ian Lavery (Labour, Centre-left): Mr Deputy Speaker, that has taken out a minute and a half of my time, but thank you very much for allowing me to continue. I am far from a coward, by the way The debate in here is quite often about relative poverty or absolute poverty, but that does not make any difference, man. We live in a country—the sixth richest economy in the world—where we have 4.3 million kids living in poverty, and we have 14 million people living in poverty. It does not matter how or what we claim about poverty, and it does not matter whether we have reduced it by 1 million or whatever. If we have millions of people in poverty, we should be bloody well ashamed of ourselves. It is a political choice and we can do things about it. We could have done something about it last night, but obviously we did not do what some of us chose to do and vote against the benefits uprating To move on very quickly, the fact is that there are them that have and them who do not. Is it not really embarrassing to this country when we have chief executives of energy companies, which have just made $40 billion in the last few weeks, suggesting that it is not bragging to say their companies are like cash machines? What does that make people in poverty feel? And we introduce a "Buy now, pay later" scheme and think that is enough support Thank you for your forbearance, Mr Deputy Speaker. In concluding, let us tax the super-wealthy, the Tory donors and the corporations—they are the real benefit cheats in this country—because, quite frankly, that is the only way we will start to tackle the inequalities and make life look much brighter for many people in our country.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Macroeconomics
Zarah Sultana (Labour, Centre-left): Listening to Conservative Members, one would think that the cost of living crisis was something natural, like bad weather or a freak accident. They have said that the Government have done everything they can to help, but that soaring living costs, cuts in support and the fall in the real value of wages are beyond their control. That is simply not true. Britain is facing a cost of living crisis not in spite of the Government’s political choices, but because of them Millions in the UK are struggling because of whose side this Conservative Government are on. Last week the Tories took the side of the bankers, voting to hand them a tax cut worth £1 billion a year. Last night they voted to slash social security for millions of people by roughly 4% in real terms. Last week, they took the side of fossil fuel giants, refusing to back a motion for a windfall tax on companies like Shell and BP. Then, just a few days later, they gave the green light to energy bills soaring by nearly £700. As the Government refuse to bring forward a wealth tax on the super-rich, they are hitting workers with a national insurance hike Time and again, the Government take the side of the wealthy few, not the struggling majority. They scrap the £20 a week universal credit uplift, but hand contracts worth £880 million to a handful of Tory donors. They dump the pensions triple lock, but let the likes of Amazon get away with tax dodging on an industrial scale. They allow Britain’s billionaires to add an extra £106 billion to their fortunes in the pandemic, but stand idly by as poverty gets worse and worse, with nearly 5 million children now in poverty, including around 7,000 in Coventry South This is not inevitable. It is not a natural disaster. It is about whose side this Government are on: the many or the few? Do they hand bankers a tax cut while hiking national insurance for workers, or do they do things differently? [Interruption.] I can tell that some Members want to carry on doing the same: supporting the wealthy few. The alternative is taxing the richest and funding a proper safety net. It is about bringing in a windfall tax on fossil fuel giants and stepping in to bring down energy bills. That is what the French are doing—not letting bills soar by 54% like our Government, but capping the rise at just 4% There has been a lot of focus on the Prime Minister, and he should have resigned a long time ago, but it is not just him. Whether it is the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) or for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), they have all voted to slash taxes for the richest, while cutting support for the rest. They are all in it together and they all need booting out.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Janet Jessica Daby (Labour, Centre-left): We regularly hear in this Chamber about choices between heating and eating. That is a tough reality for many, but it does not have to be like this. The cost of living crisis and food insecurity sit at the Government’s door. Over the last two years, the Government have had to take some serious action to deal with the furlough scheme and the speedy NHS roll-out of the vaccine, and those were indeed the right outcomes. However, the £4.3 billion in covid loans written off by the Treasury as wasted money, the £37 billion wasted on track and trace and the Government contracts given to their mates are all unacceptable. While public money is not being managed well by the Government, we have seen individuals and families attending food banks and asking for food that they do not have to cook, so that they do not have to use their ovens. Imagine it—no heating, no hot food and no excess money to buy white goods, furniture or clothes. Universal credit just does not go far enough Low-wage earners are squeezed to the maximum. They are experiencing rises in private rents, in fuel prices, in national insurance contributions and, of course, in food prices. Universal credit has been reduced at a time when it is needed the most. The Salvation Army in Catford has said: "Money is not going as far as it should be to cover all expenses." We know that, but the question is: do the Government care? If they care, what are they doing about it? The Government have a track record of increasing poverty, or poverty being increased while they are in government.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Kim Marie Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that it is an outrage that this Government have just voted for a real-terms cut to social security and pension payments while giving the bankers a £1 billion tax cut?
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Janet Jessica Daby (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government’s track record is one where they are not doing what is needed for people in poverty and experiencing poverty. They are actually helping their own, and that comes down to one rule for them and another rule for everyone else The Government are not fit to govern our country due to their failed promises and decisions time and again. The Prime Minister promised that we would take back control when we leave the EU, with lower fuel prices, control of gas and oil and having more to invest in our NHS, but this could not be further from the truth. There are solutions to eradicate the burden of hunger and improve the standard of living to keep families warm and fed, but this Government lack the political will to do so.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Catherine Malloy Hollern (Labour, Centre-left): Millions of people in this country are living with food insecurity, and this appalling state of affairs is the result of a decade of levelling down by this Government. Some 313,000 food parcels were given out in the north-west by food banks such as the Trussell Trust, which I commend for the excellent work it does. Relative poverty in Blackburn has jumped by more than 25% since 2014. Over 11,000 children are living in households that are struggling with the sad and unthinkable trade-offs that we are hearing about. This crisis has been a result of political choices, and that is shameful. It is shameful that we see such levels of relative poverty, child poverty, in-work poverty and food insecurity in one of the world’s richest countries The Minister spoke of people in work, but I remind the House that in Blackburn over a third of people in work are in receipt of universal credit. It is not ending poverty. The Food Foundation found that almost 9% of households experienced food insecurity in the past month. Millions of children are living in households where they do not have healthy and affordable food, giving parents sleepless nights. Pensioners are struggling with this cost of living crisis, making tough decisions on whether to eat or heat. But this is an opportunity for the Government to act—to act fast and go further I am concerned that on numerous occasions the Prime Minister has had to be reminded about what he presents as facts in this Chamber. Perhaps he really believes the statements he makes, but policy decisions to improve the situation have not been based on sound data. If his decisions are not based on sound information, he will inevitably get them wrong. That is what is happening now.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Macroeconomics
Nadia Edith Whittome (Labour, Centre-left): I know that we are short of time, Madam Deputy Speaker, so thank you for fitting me in The cost of living crisis has been years in the making, and the blame lies at the door of successive Conservative Governments. Communities like mine have been devastated by a decade of austerity. The number of people using food banks has increased every single year that the Conservatives have been in government since 2010. Now, in the fifth largest economy in the world, there are more food banks than there are branches of McDonalds. Almost 1 million people are on zero-hours contracts and hundreds of key workers earn less than the real minimum wage. These jobs are simply failing to put enough food on the table Nottingham already has about 15,000 children eligible for free school meals. To make matters worse, last year this Government implemented the biggest overnight cut in social security since the founding of the modern welfare state when they ended the universal credit uplift. Some 14,250 households in Nottingham East have lost £20 a week. The national insurance hike in April will mean that workers lose an additional 1.25% of their income. This is a flat tax, of course, which will hit the lowest paid workers the hardest The cost of food and bills is soaring. Rising inflation has a disproportionate impact on people in poorer households. Food writer and activist Jack Monroe has exposed how the prices of cheaper food products have soared as availability has fallen. For example, the cheapest pasta in their supermarket has gone from 29p to 70p—a 141% price increase. When I visited Himmah, a food bank in Nottingham East, in November last year, I was told it was already seeing a steep rise in the number of people relying on its services. I dread to think of the demand from April, as tax hikes and energy bill increases kick in The cost of living crisis was created by the political decisions of a Government who have chosen to protect the interests of the wealthy and huge corporations, not those of working people. Amazon paid only 7.5% of the value of its income in the UK in tax in 2020, despite sales increasing by almost £2 billion, and the wealth of British billionaires increased by £107 billion during the pandemic. To end the cost of living crisis we should be raising taxes on those who profited from the pandemic at the expense of those who got us through it. Ministers must increase the minimum wage, end zero-hours contracts, and abolish all anti-trade union laws to give workers power to negotiate better pay and conditions.
Children’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Education
Anna Rhiannon McMorrin (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Unlike the UK Government here, the Welsh Labour Government are adopting a whole-school approach, viewing this issue holistically and offering a package of measures, while the English approach has been described as shocking and despicable.
Children’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Rosena Chantelle Allin-Khan (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is entirely right, and that is why we are here today. Our children deserve better; they cannot go on like this. That is why we are talking about measures that can help to ameliorate these difficulties so that no child has to wait that long, and their families do not have to wait that long for answers. This is not okay.
Children’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Education
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): Does my hon. Friend agree with me as a parent—we are both parents and many of us here are parents of school-age children—that the coronavirus crisis hit everyone with kids? I have 13 private schools within my constituency boundary, and I even have parents of children there emailing in that their kids, who were happy and outgoing children, are zonked in front of Teams meetings all day and have turned into blithering wrecks of what they used to be. Coronavirus exacerbated what was a problem with CAMHS all the way along and that has hit all children in this country, and the only people who will not recognise it are Conservative Members, who are in denial because they have their own internal problems to be dealing with.
Children’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Law and Crime
Janet Jessica Daby (Labour, Centre-left): One thing that I hear from parents in my constituency is about the situation when a young person or children have witnessed somebody die due to knife crime. Will the Minister say what type of support those young people should expect to receive in the community or at school?
Children’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Law and Crime
Jessica Rose Phillips (Labour, Centre-left): What I am going to talk about will surprise no one. We have heard a lot about the causes and whether it was lockdown or social media, but I am going to talk about the thousands of children I have met who have been victims of sexual violence and have lived in domestic abuse circumstances I used to run a counselling service—funnily enough, it was one of the first things that went in the cuts and then had to be paid for by the lottery—for children who had been raped. That lifeline was taken away. I want to remove this from what we can do in an educational or even an NHS setting and say that we need specialist trauma counselling for children who have been a victim of sexual abuse, violence and exploitation. Bear in mind that, this year, we are at the highest level ever of children suffering from exploitation. That went up by 10% last year—British children trafficked around the UK—and it is at the highest it has ever been, all while conviction and charging rates are falling. Each one of those children, many of whom I meet, are without any counselling or specialist support while they wait four to five years for justice to be served, for their child abusers to face any sort of justice I will speak briefly about my constituent, who I make come and see me every Friday because I am worried she is going to kill herself. She is 19. She was abused from the age of 10 and she first came forward to police forces when she was 14. She is awaiting the trial after coming forward at 14—she is 19, so that is five years she has been awaiting the trial. She is currently housed—this relates to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) made—in unregulated, exempt accommodation for homeless women and bear in mind, she is a rape victim, a child abuse victim Suddenly, all the Ministers care about child abuse, one notes, this week. This child abuse victim has been housed with three men, two of whom are being released from prison. I have written to the Levelling Up Minister to say, "What would this do to your mental health, if you were a rape victim waiting five years for trial?" No counselling service was available to her when I tried to get it. Basically, I am going to pay for it myself, because there is nothing available to her—nothing. I might as well—I was going to swear then, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will not—do something in the wind, trying to get her on to a waiting list. We are housing her in dangerous circumstances. When I asked the Minister to regulate that, they said we do not have the parliamentary time.
Committees — House of Commons, 2022-02-08
Topic: Government Operations
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): With the leave of the House, we will take motions 5 to 9 together Ordered, ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE That Nadia Whittome be discharged from the Environmental Audit Committee and Clive Lewis be added HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE That Paula Barker be added to the Home Affairs Committee LEVELLING UP, HOUSING AND COMMUNITIES COMMITTEE That Rachel Hopkins be discharged from the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee and Kate Hollern be added COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS That Barry Gardiner be discharged from the Committee of Public Accounts and Kate Green be added WOMEN AND EQUALITIES COMMITTEE That Alex Davies-Jones be discharged from the Women and Equalities Committee and Carolyn Harris be added.—(Sir Bill Wiggin, on behalf of the Committee of Selection.)