Budget Resolutions
Debate between Debbie Abrahams and Melanie Ward(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
This was a positive, progressive Budget with fairness at its heart. These fiscal decisions will benefit most people, but particularly those who have been really struggling with the cost of living crisis over recent years. Those with the broadest shoulders have been asked to do their fair share of the heavy lifting, with all but the top 10% income households seeing the proportion of their net income increase by 2028-29. Fairer policies benefit us all, not just the recipients. As the International Monetary Fund has shown, reducing income inequality stimulates growth, but we also know that fairer societies improve educational attainment, social mobility, trust between communities, health status and much more.
Collectively, these tax reforms are forecast to raise over £8 billion in 2029-30 from wealth and the wealthy. The total package of tax changes has allowed the Chancellor to make some incredibly important decisions to help with the cost of living crisis and boost living standards, including increasing the minimum wage and living wage, increasing the state pension, freezing rail fares and fuel duty, and cutting £150 from next year’s energy bills.
I particularly want to talk about the abolition of the so-called two child limit. It is now believed that this measure drive the increase in child poverty from 3.6 million in 2010 to 4.5 million in 2024, causing a multitude of poverty-related harms, including an increase in the prevalence of young people not in education, employment or training. A person is five times more likely to be NEET if they experience childhood poverty, and more than half of the current NEET population belong to this cohort. Getting rid of this harmful, damaging policy will lift 350,000 children out of poverty almost immediately, and another 150,000 will be prevented from being drawn into poverty over the life of this Parliament.
I commend the former Work and Pensions Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), and the former Employment Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern), for bringing forward spending on employment support. I know that the current Employment Minister is keen to continue that work and escalate it. Analysis commissioned by the Work and Pensions Committee showed that supportive employment programmes such as the new deal for young people and the new deal for disabled people introduced by the former Labour Government in the noughties led to between 5% and 11% of that group getting into sustained employment for a minimum of three years. Applying this approach to the current group of unemployed and economically inactive people would ensure that schemes such as Connect to Work, WorkWell, and Individual Placement and Support, could increase employment by at least 5%, generating savings to the Exchequer of £20 billion by the end of this Parliament.
Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend join me in recognising the work of charities such as Kirkcaldy Foodbank and Kirkcaldy YMCA, which joined me in Parliament earlier this year to call on the then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who they met, to lift the two-child cap? They underlined the need for this cruel policy to be scrapped. Indeed, Kirkcaldy Foodbank has fed 833 children so far this year, and it has welcomed the lifting of the cap. Will my hon. Friend join me in recognising that lifting the two-child cap was the only possible step to ensure that child poverty levels go down, instead of up?
Debbie Abrahams
I absolutely agree. It is a shame that we need food banks at all—this is the state of what we have inherited, unfortunately.
I commend the Health Secretary for the work that has been done to increase capital investment in the NHS, which will boost NHS productivity. A recent Health Equity North report, “Health for Wealth”, showed that by reducing the inequalities between the north and the south, and by improving health in the north, we can increase productivity by £18 billion a year. On health inequalities, I hope we can focus on the weighting given to resource allocation.
My final point is about the commitment to index pre-1997 accrued pensions for inflation, capped at 2.5%, where scheme rules allow. This means that pensioners whose pension schemes became insolvent through no fault of their own, and that have failed to keep pace with inflation, will now have the situation rectified. That will benefit more than 250,000 pension protection fund and financial assurance scheme members, and I give credit to the Pensions Action Group and the Deprived Pensioners Association, and to the Pensions Minister for listening to me.
This is a very good Budget. It gives hope, particularly to my constituents and others like them, so I am very grateful.
Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Access
Debate between Debbie Abrahams and Melanie Ward(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Melanie Ward
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am sure that the Minister has heard what she said, and I have a lot more to say about how we can protect civilians and aid workers, too.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is being very generous with her time. Just before this debate, I met Antoine Renard, who made a point to me about the disinformation that is being spread about rotten food, and emphasised the importance of having trusted NGOs, a point my hon. Friend made earlier in her speech. Does she agree that we must compel the President of the United States to recognise those points when he comes to the UK on a state visit next week?
Melanie Ward
My hon. Friend makes an important intervention. Indeed, this topic is riddled with misinformation and errant nonsense, put out there for political reasons; I am sure that we will hear some more of it later on.
The issue of access for aid workers has received much less attention than that of aid not being allowed into Gaza in the first place, but, to state the obvious, it is no use getting malnutrition treatment into a warzone without the skilled staff—whether local or international aid workers —who know how to use it. Being able to reach starving children is obviously essential to saving their lives.
There are many ways of denying humanitarian access: visa and permit restrictions that deny entry; failing to grant movement permission, which means not agreeing to give safe passage to humanitarian workers; putting in place requirements to hand over sensitive information about local staff and clients; threatening to close down banking; and making it simply too dangerous to work in an area. The Israeli Government are using every one of these tactics to shut down legitimate humanitarian operations in Gaza today. It is not Hamas that pay the price for that; it is starving children.
The Israeli Government have a new front in their war. It is against NGOs, including humanitarian aid charities, some of them British. As of yesterday, the Israeli Government have introduced new restrictions on NGO registration, which require international NGOs to share sensitive personal information about Palestinian employees or face termination of their humanitarian operations across the OPT. NGOs such as Medical Aid for Palestinians have made clear that such data-sharing would put lives at risk in such a dangerous context for aid workers, especially given the fact that 98% of aid workers killed have been Palestinian nationals.
One month ago, on 6 August, UN agencies and others issued a warning that, without immediate action, most international NGOs faced deregistration, which would force them to withdraw all international staff and prevent them from providing critical lifesaving aid to Palestinians. The deadline of 9 September passed yesterday; the evidence so far suggests that the staff of aid agencies that speak out about what they witness are being particularly targeted. As a former aid worker who has worked in a range of war zones, including Gaza, I know that advocacy about what we see is vital in trying to bring change.
The move to block international NGOs from operating in Gaza has been compounded since the chilling arrival of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in May. Let us call it what it is: a bunch of mercenaries, and a disgrace. Since the GHF was set up, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Gaza while seeking aid, in what has been described by Médecins Sans Frontières as “orchestrated killing”. A recent MSF report says that the majority of people attending their clinics after being shot at GHF hubs are
“covered in sand and dust from time spent lying on the ground while taking cover from bullets.”
It quotes one man as saying of the site:
“You find what seems like two million people gathered around five pallets of food. They tell you to enter, you go in, you grab what you can—maybe a can of fava beans, a can of hummus. Then a minute later, gunfire comes from every direction. Shells, gunfire—you can’t even hold onto your can of hummus. You don’t know where the gunfire is coming from.”
Three months after the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began its operations to supposedly provide humanitarian relief in Gaza, the integrated food security phase classification confirmed that Gaza was in famine for the first time. That is the grim reality of a situation where Israel attacks independent aid workers while its own so-called aid workers attack civilians. At least 531 aid workers and 1,590 health workers, overwhelmingly Palestinian nationals, have been killed in Gaza in the past two years.