Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

I was pleased to contribute to last week’s debate on rising energy prices, shortly after which the energy price cap was increased by 54%, adding more financial woe to millions of families across the country. If we listened to the Conservatives, everything is hunky-dory in the garden, everything is fine and great, there are no problems and we should move on. That debate provided important context for this debate on food insecurity and the cost of living.

Some 22 million households will suffer because of the Government’s failure to invest in cheap, green energy generated on our shores—fact. The Chancellor’s announcement that the Government will force people to take loans will do nothing but prolong their financial misery—fact. Both energy insecurity and food insecurity are related to the dramatic increase in inflation over which the Government have presided, which is now a painful concern to millions of people—fact. But it is important that we put these issues in a wider context.

There are many long-running flaws in how our community is being run. After all, food insecurity is not a new phenomenon in the United Kingdom. In 2014, the coalition Government continued their deep cuts to state support, and the United Nations found that 8.4 million people were living in households in which someone did not have enough to eat. Since then, food bank queues have increased, as in my constituency.

Last year, the Trussell Trust provided 2.5 million three-day emergency food parcels across the country, and 40% of them were for children. Of course, inflation is intertwined with this crisis. According to the Office for National Statistics, food and beverage prices made the largest single contribution to inflation in December, but we have to look at the root causes, which include, under this Government, the longest fall in real pay since the Napoleonic era. That has left real wages at 2008 levels, and has been supplemented by repeated attacks by the Tories on public pay. There is also the tearing up of the social security net, which millions relied on to provide the bare minimum, and the slashing of funding for local authorities that try to cope on the frontline.

Those were the wrong choices, with the Chancellor asking workers earning only £9,000 to pay more national insurance while the wealthy were left untouched. There has been policy after policy attacking ordinary working people. Many just do not have enough money to put the food that they need—the right food, quality food—on the table. Inflation is not a single factor that is driving insecurity. This is a crisis of low pay, of insecurity, of our safety net. It is about much more than the cost of living and we cannot continue to ask working people to pay the price of the Government’s mismanagement. We must now get the response right.

Last week, the Governor of the Bank of England suggested that working people should moderate their pay demands to avoid, in effect, a wage price spiral. In an interview, when asked whether the Bank was effectively asking workers not to demand a big pay rise, he told the BBC:

“Broadly, yes…In the sense of saying, we do need to see a moderation of wage rises…that’s painful…I don’t want to in any sense sugar that: it is painful”—

said the Governor, on £575,000 a year. That is exactly the sort of blinkered response that we have come to expect.

It is worth repeating that the 1.25% increase in national insurance is, in effect, an 8% increase in total—not 1.25%. If that is not adding to food insecurity, I do not know what is. There is a fairer way: not the Government Wonga scheme being introduced by the Chancellor, but real solutions that put money in the pockets of the poorest households, ending food insecurity once and for all. I am talking about a windfall tax on the big oil and gas companies; taxing wealth at the same rates as work to raise billions towards a permanent uplift to universal credit; and an end to austerity in the public services that we all rely on when times are so hard. The British public has paid too much under this Government. It really is time that the Conservatives asked their wealthy donors to pick up the tab.

Finally, I plead with Tory Members, of whom only three are in the Chamber at the moment: if they do not have the wherewithal and decency to rid the country of food banks, they should have the decency to stop visiting them for a photo opportunity. It is unseemly.

[Several hon. Members rose—]