Income Equality and Sustainability

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we are most grateful to the most reverend Primate for his tremendous life example. I wish him well in the future. This is also a moment to be grateful for the welfare state, for the furlough support scheme, for food banks and the support of good neighbours—grateful for an infrastructure that protects people from the worst extremes.

I will focus on one particular area: the absence of savings among people in the United Kingdom. According to information received, savings levels are roughly half what they were 10 years ago. People on average are saving less every year than they might have done previously. Some 53% of those aged between 18 and 35 have no savings at all, and for the average person in the population, one in three has savings of less than £1,500. When a big crisis hits, such as coronavirus, people have little to fall back on. We have developed not a savings culture, but a capital expenditure culture and a commercial culture.

I have benefited from the experience of being an ambassador for Tearfund. Just a year ago, I went to see how 400,000 women in Ethiopia had saved nearly $30 million between them by putting their 2ps together. That is like the Grameen Bank model. It is now working in New York; it could work in London. What will the Government do to encourage saving clubs along the pattern of the Grameen Bank? It is successful in Bangladesh and in the USA; it could be successful in the UK. Also, what will the Government do to develop a savings culture so that people can better protect themselves, even with the little they have, as long as they also look to dependency on the state, quite rightly, and the support of good neighbours?