Cost of Living
Debate between Claudia Webbe and Drew Hendry(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)
The cost of living crisis is not really a cost of living crisis; in reality, it is a cost of greed crisis. It is greedflation driven by a lack of political interest in protecting ordinary people. As with any crisis, it is the most vulnerable in our society who suffer most, and there are few more vulnerable and more unsupported in our society than those with a disability. Disabled people are no strangers to poverty and crisis. Under 13 years of Tory Government, they have faced constant cuts and conscious cruelty at every turn, sharpened by punitive and pointless assessment regimes, conditionality and sanctions. We live under a Government who responded to the UK’s mass crisis of debt and hunger by suggesting that people should work more hours or take a second job to help with their finances, but many disabled people face huge challenges to work a single job, let alone a second, and they are even harder hit by the soaring costs of energy, fuel and other essentials.
As the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) has highlighted, according to research by disability charity Scope, disabled households in the poorest fifth spend twice as much of their household budget on energy bills, are twice as likely to have a cold house and are three times more likely to be unable to afford food. The heat or eat scandal is a mark of disgrace on this country, not just because people cannot afford to do both, but because disabled people suffer the worst of it. It shames us as a nation.
Again and again, for well over a decade now, the heaviest burden is placed on the shoulders of those least able to pay, while the wealth of the rich piles up. In a constituency such as mine in Leicester East, where we suffer some of the worst health and lowest incomes in the country, the evils of our unequal system hit especially hard. In my constituency, far more children—37% compared with 26% nationally—live in a family with at least one disabled member than live with none, piling yet more hunger, ill health, stigma and misery on children in a country that is already failing them.
The median annual wage for workers in Leicester East is £19,960, compared with an average of £25,837 in the east midlands and £27,756 in the rest of the UK. The level of poverty in my constituency is stark. My community is hurting. The level of suffering is deep. I am witnessing that daily, and it is painful, yet the Conservatives continue to offer at best a sticking plaster for the grievous wounds they inflict on the poor and vulnerable. In 2017, the United Nations condemned the UK Government’s treatment of disabled people as a “human catastrophe”, and it has only grown worse since then. The abuse and abandonment of our disabled people is an international disgrace and a stain on the UK’s standing among nations. Until this cruelty towards disabled people and all our millions of poor and vulnerable citizens is reversed, the UK cannot consider itself a civilised nation. Every day’s delay in putting it right means more lives lost and ruined.
The Government need to tackle prices and address the inequality of extra costs that disabled people face. They need to work towards the redistribution of wealth and establish a welfare system that provides an adequate level of support for disabled people. We need radical transformational change.
