Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
The Government are committed to ensuring that parents meet their obligations to their children and that the CMS has robust enforcement powers where parents refuse to pay child maintenance that they owe. The Child Support (Enforcement) Act 2023 received Royal Assent in July, and will substantially and rightly speed up that process.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Mims Davies
The hon. Lady is right; every child maintenance arrangement plays a vital role in ensuring that both parents play their part to support their children, whether they live with them or not. I am happy to take up that case urgently, on behalf of our noble Friend in the other place.
Two-child Benefit Cap and Child Poverty
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(9 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Kim Johnson
I thank my hon. Friend for the intervention and the Welsh Government for rolling out universal free school meals, and I support her and the Welsh Government in saying we need to end the two-child cap.
Does the Minister really believe it is acceptable for children to suffer more just because of the number of siblings they have? The two-child cap on benefit payments is cruel and ineffective. Larger families are punished, leaving them struggling. A majority—some 55%—of the families affected by the policy are already in work. Black and ethnic minority families and single-parent families are disproportionately impacted, as well as families who rent. The two-child limit creates a huge hole in budgets that simply cannot be plugged by working additional hours. The Government claim that the policy helps to push parents back into work, but after six years, they still cannot provide a single shred of evidence that that is actually the case. The truth is that the policy does nothing to remove barriers, and research from the University of York shows that in some cases, the cap is counterproductive in helping parents back to work.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate and for all her campaigning on the issue. I completely with her points about poverty and children suffering, but I have a slightly different concern about this punitive policy. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is an absolute disgrace that the rape clause is still in effect? I ask the Minister not to ignore that point. Why is the clause still on the statute book, and why will the Government not repeal it?
Kim Johnson
I thank my hon. friend for raising that important point, and I will come to it later.
Last year, 1,830 mums were forced to declare that they were raped in order to be eligible for extra support for their children—compelled to disclose horrific and personal details. The anguish that this demand creates for women has been found to have an impact on their decisions to terminate pregnancies. Just take a second to consider that. Imagine a woman having survived such a deeply traumatic ordeal, to then be faced with a Government policy that makes her feel she can no longer carry on with her pregnancy. It is so deeply cruel and damaging that we have to ask whether the Ministers who devised that heartless policy had an ounce of compassion between them.
We know that lifting the cap would immediately raise 250,000 children out of poverty, and a further 850,000 out of deep poverty. Campaigners call it the single most effective intervention that would tackle child poverty immediately. It would cost this Government just £1.3 billion. Consider that against the £37 billion that they wasted on a failed test and trace system, the £5 billion that they found for the defence budget in March, or the £9 billion tax cut to corporations and the pensions giveaway for the 1% that they so generously granted in the last Budget.
We know that the money is there to help struggling families, if we can only find the will. Poverty is a political choice, and time and time again this Government have chosen giveaways for the rich and scraps for the rest of us. Inflation is being driven by corporate greed creating record profits for the super-rich. The Government would like us to believe that there is no money to meet basic needs and support struggling families, but the reality is that it is just being hoarded by the 1%.
We are seeing the biggest drop in spending power in 70 years. Total spending on public services is set to be 12% lower in 2027-28 than in 2010, yet the wealth of UK billionaires has more than trebled since the Tories have been in government. With skyrocketing rent and energy bills eating into people’s pay packets, disposable income is being squeezed more and more. The record rise in food prices is pushing millions more into food insecurity.
There is a simple fix for this: enhanced workers’ rights to ensure that work pays enough to live and raise a family. That way, we can ensure that not a single child in this country goes hungry, and no child gets left behind. The evidence is there for all to see. Punishing families for having more than two children does not push parents back into work; it only drives more children into poverty. Tory austerity cuts were nothing less than an ideological drive to rig the economy in favour of the few at the expense of the many, and children in my constituency and across the country are now paying the price. The impact of growing up in poverty can be lifelong. We cannot wait for a new Labour Government to provide these children with a future; this Government must listen now and lift the two-child cap.
This debate is not the first time that I and many of my colleagues here in Westminster Hall today have raised these issues in this House over the years. We know the tired and misleading lines parroted by the Government, pointing to a rise in employment and a drop in absolute poverty over the course of their leadership of the country, so before the Minister gives his reply, I want him to consider the bleak reality of this situation. Work is no longer a route out of poverty. The Tories have undermined workers’ rights and trashed the very concept of work, to the extent that seven out of 10 children living in poverty in this country are in working families. Just let that statistic sink in for a minute: over two thirds of the children who live in poverty in the fifth richest country in the world are struggling because their parents’ wages are not enough to live on and raise a family.
In response to my question to the Prime Minister last month about the two-child benefit cap, the Prime Minister responded in his usual manner, by claiming that his Government had lifted 400,000 children out of absolute poverty since 2010. I am sure that Members in this Chamber would all agree that, on the face of it, that sounds like a really great achievement and one worth celebrating. However, as the Prime Minister and his Government well know, that statistic is misleading and does not take into account the impact of inflation, which is an approach that can only be described as being grotesquely out of touch during a cost of living crisis, when we see security tags put on basic necessities such as nappies and baby milk.
Economists and organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies use “relative poverty” as a much more accurate measure of the reality of the trajectory in poverty, and this measure clearly shows the deepening trend in child poverty that we see every day in our constituencies. I ask the Minister not to take us for fools today. We are here because we know the desperate reality facing so many of our constituents. We are here to demand better for them. We will not continue to go round in circles debating meaningless numbers while the Government continue to bury their head in the sand and ignore the struggles of the people they were elected to represent.
I thank the Minister again for responding to this debate and the arguments that we have made, and I hope that he can feel the strength of feeling in this Chamber today about the facts of poverty.
Private Pension Schemes: Regulation
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Mr Jones
I thank the hon. Member—it would not be an Adjournment debate without his intervention. He raises an interesting point. Most people do not understand their pension; they put their trust in the provider. They think that they are saving for their retirement and that they should have a pension when they retire—let us be honest, we have all encouraged people to pay into a pension—only to be let down by the way in which the various schemes operate. I will touch on the regulation in a minute.
I want to make two key points at this stage. First, the change to the pension scheme was not directly communicated to pension plan members. In fact, having done some research, I understand there is no legal requirement for the scheme to do so. However, the trustees cover themselves slightly on page 8 of the 2011 annual report by saying that, during the planned year, they had made changes to some factors and a calculation of methodology—it is literally two lines in the annual report. I beg anyone to understand what that meant in practice for people’s pensions. The annual report provided no further detail and, frankly, it is not worth the paper it is written on. The first time most people found out about this was when they realised the pension they had already taken was not increasing.
According to the Pensions Regulator’s website, trustees must act in “the best interests” of scheme members, as well as “prudently, responsibly and honestly.” In this case, I would argue that the trustees are not putting the interests of pensioners first; they are putting the interests of Nissan Motor Corporation above those of pensioners. The cumulative effect of what they have done is to save Nissan money it would have put into the pension scheme. Nor would I argue that it is responsible or honest to hide the changes in less than two lines of an annual report. There was no direct communication to let pensioners, or potential pensioners, know about the changes and how they would affect future years.
When I heard about this, I thought the obvious person to go to was the pensions ombudsman or the Pensions Regulator. Well, there was a bit of a ping-pong between the two of them. One wrote to me saying that the other was responsible, and vice versa. It went backwards and forwards. Frankly, my experience of them is that they are about as much good as a chocolate teapot. They are just blaming one another. It was this Member of Parliament writing to them—heaven help an individual pensioner writing to them to get any joy out of them.
It comes back to the point raised by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on regulation and how we control these pension schemes. As I say, my experience of those two organisations has not been very good, so I would like the Minister to look at that point about the regulator and the ombudsman.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Constituents have contacted me on this very issue, so I thank my right hon. Friend for securing this debate. Does he agree that this is an outrageous way to treat workers and that, frankly, it reflects terribly on Nissan?
Mr Jones
It is. These people have worked hard and saved into their pension. They think they have done the right thing and, through no fault of their own, they have found themselves in this position.
I did finally get a line out of the pensions ombudsman; he said that he was not prepared to look at the case because that notification, that one line in the annual report, was good enough. I find it absolutely amazing that it could be argued that this is communication with pension members. I doubt very many people actually read their pension scheme’s annual report. I am one of the sad people who do, but that is because of my trade union background. Many people do not. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) knows that I am a bit of an anorak when it comes to the pension industry. Again, the idea that that can be held up as showing that the pension trustees have informed the pensioners is ridiculous. But that was the end of the game—no more correspondence came forward from either the regulator or the ombudsman.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(10 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Mims Davies
I congratulate the hon. Lady on the new addition.
New statistics on food bank usage will help the Government to understand the characteristics of the people most in need, and we will continue to work across Government to support the most vulnerable. I was very interested to read the recent “Child of the North” report, which we are taking very seriously.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(1 year, 1 month ago)
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Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton) on her wonderful and passionate maiden speech, and welcome her to her place.
The Budget does not even come close to resolving the cost of living crisis faced by so many of my constituents right now. The Chancellor said that Britain will not enter a “technical recession” this year; that is of little comfort to my constituents. For more than 12 years, people in Durham and the north-east have suffered thanks to the austerity politics of the Conservative party. Child poverty is sky high in Durham, food bank use has rocketed, and people across the country face record-breaking waiting times for NHS services.
Not just in my constituency or the north-east but for working-class people across our country, incomes are down, housing costs are up and public services have been trashed. What was the Chancellor’s response to this malaise? “Back to work.” He may as well have said, “On your bike.” There is nothing to sort out the cost of living crisis, nothing to sort out the housing crisis and nothing to sort out the crisis in our public services.
We needed a people’s Budget; instead, we got a bankers’ Budget. We needed to see a pay rise for our workers, who have been forced to strike because of poverty pay, but we did not get one. We needed to see a long-term commitment on the energy price cap, but we did not get one. It is yet another Budget in which the Conservative party has not prioritised working people. In fact, our country is in the midst of the longest pay squeeze for more than 200 years—not that our multi- millionaire Chancellor and Prime Minister would know.
Now, the Chancellor wants to force disabled people back to work with an even stricter sanctions regime. Sanctions are ineffective and harmful and have led to deaths. If only the Government went after the tax evaders who owe us billions with the same obsession.
If the Government had wanted to encourage people back to work, and to stay in work, they could have increased the minimum wage, scrapped fire and rehire and taxed the rich—the sort of policies that would give people dignity in work and get our country out of the rut that the Conservative party has created; the policies that Labour will implement once we are in government. Instead, the Chancellor has given £9 billion in tax cuts to corporations and at least £2 billion in tax cuts for the pensions of the highest earners.
Even the Government’s flagship childcare policy will require working parents to wait for more than two years to see it rolled out. As my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) has pointed out, the cost of childcare does not end when children go to school. Where is the funding for universal breakfast clubs? Where was the announcement for a real green industrial strategy? Where was the funding for our NHS—both for its workforce and for patients? Without proper investment, staff will continue to leave the NHS and health inequalities will worsen.
This has been a dark week in our politics. On Monday, we debated the immoral Illegal Migration Bill—or the anti-refugee Bill, as it should be called. The Bill scapegoats refugees—people fleeing from climate change and from war. Now we have a Budget that fails to resolve the real issues that working people in our country face. Whether it is at home or abroad, the Conservative party does not care for working people or the most vulnerable people. The nasty party is well and truly back, with its divide-and-rule politics.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mims Davies)
I thank my hon. Friend for that question, which I think will interest the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) as well. From April this year, our new DWP in-work progression offer will support working universal credit claimants to progress and increase their earnings. It will include better support to upskill and retrain, and low-paid workers are eligible for training funded by the Department for Education via skills boot camps in digital engineering and the green sectors.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Dr Coffey
The hon. Lady raises an important point. All parents automatically go into the direct payment process. I am working with my noble Friend Baroness Stedman-Scott, the Minister who has direct responsibility for this portfolio, to see what more we can do to accelerate reform if people are clearly not being compliant and not paying. Meanwhile, our financial investigations unit will investigate where people are hiding money and, if necessary, take them to court to ensure that the money gets paid.
Regional Inequalities: Child Poverty
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) for having secured this debate. Sometimes we can become numb to poverty and inequality, and we can allow the symptoms of poverty that should appal us to become fixtures in society. Food banks, anti-poverty charities and now clothing banks, although they are great sources of good and bring out the best in us, should not be necessary in 2022, yet in County Durham—as in too many places—the evidence that our communities are becoming ever more reliant on them is all around us. I also read the briefing from the North East Child Poverty Commission, and the figures for poverty in our region are indeed scandalous: the UK’s second highest. That means that in our region, in an average classroom of 30 children, 11 are living in poverty.
Growing up in poverty can have a corrosive effect on a child’s life chances. Their social, educational and health development is likely to be reduced compared with that of their richer peers. Growing up in a poor household can reduce a child’s expectations, and an absence of clear opportunity can reduce aspiration for what can be achieved in life, creating a cycle in which poverty is repeated from generation to generation. Many of us will have witnessed those tragic problems in our own communities. In the village of Witton Gilbert in my constituency, I recently met with volunteers from Children’s Hopes and Dreams, a community group whose food bank and other support activities for children have become a vital community safety network. With the cost of living crisis that is hitting many families at the minute, the work of that charity is needed more and more each day.
However, charity alone cannot eradicate poverty or regional inequality. The Government cannot stand idle and ignore poverty as a natural tragedy; they are not powerless to counter it. The daily decisions of Government can reduce or increase children’s life chances, and as we have heard, poverty is a political choice. We have witnessed this at first hand in the north-east—the region that saw the largest drop in child poverty during the last Labour Government, yet the largest rise since the Conservatives took power over 12 years ago. Consistent policy choices and spending priorities at every level of Government are needed to tackle a decade of worsening regional inequality, which has been exacerbated. We should not forget the view of Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty, who said that the Government’s approach to poverty is
“not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one”.
The levelling-up White Paper should have been the moment at which every lever of Government was seized to counter that tragedy. However, we have been left without a proper industrial strategy for reversing economic decline and, in the opinion of Michael Marmot, we do not have the funding to meet the Government’s goal of reducing health inequalities by 2035. If the Government had committed as much money as they have rhetoric to levelling up areas such as Durham, that goal would be in reach, but sadly, it is increasingly clear that the opposite is true.
Income Tax (Charge)
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab) [V]
Cutting through the fanfare, this Budget was devoid of imagination and substance. It may see Britain through to the end of the Prime Minister’s road map, but it does not come close to addressing the social, economic and climate crisis we face.
From this Budget, we can assume that the Conservatives intend to increase poverty, rather than end it. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that the Chancellor has created “a perfect storm” by planning to cut universal credit just as unemployment peaks, while he has also continued the Conservatives’ hostile environment for disabled people by ignoring legacy benefits. I dread to think what it will be like for the families who will be forced to use food banks because of his cruelty.
What was there for Durham’s NHS workers, teachers, prison staff and the rest of our public-sector key workers? There were a few claps and a pay freeze. That is not levelling-up; that is a slap in the face.
I cannot have been the only one who was shocked by the absence of any reference to our NHS and social care from the Budget speech. These sectors have been stretched to breaking point, held together only by the determination of those who staff them, yet instead of a recovery plan the Chancellor chose to slash NHS spending, with no strategy to tackle the backlog or the mental health crisis.
The Chancellor also seems to be clueless when it comes to the challenges facing our communities over the coming years, with a £14 billion cut to public services over this Parliament. In Durham, our council and schools have led the way in their pandemic support for residents, but they simply cannot continue on minimal funding. The Government’s council tax rise serves only to deflect blame for Tory cuts while making our local communities pay for the crisis. Durham’s public sector is desperate to lead our local recovery. The Chancellor just needs to give it the resources to do so.
The Chancellor’s remedy for businesses seems to be to help them to limp along until after the pandemic and then leave them at the mercy of the upcoming economic crisis. Durham’s high streets were struggling before the pandemic started. Where is our fightback strategy? This Chancellor is no friend of the independent businesses that are the heartbeat of our high streets.
This Budget called for vision and ambition that met the challenges of the pandemic head on with a bold plan for our recovery—a Budget that learned the lessons of a decade of austerity, deregulation and the eradication of workers’ rights. Instead, the Chancellor came up short yet again. Rather than rebuild, we got a sticking plaster designed to tide us over. Our health services were ignored, our key workers abandoned, our environment forgotten and our economy failed. Britain needs and deserves better.
Supporting Disadvantaged Families
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The people in Warrington will benefit significantly from this addition to what is—in effect, through the covid winter grant—an extension of the local welfare fund, which we had already given money to earlier in the year, as he identifies. I think it is important that we continue to use the strengths of local councils in order to make sure that the help goes to those who need it the most and is really well targeted. I am sure that they will draw on every capability and insight in order to make sure that no child in Warrington will go cold or hungry this winter.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Last month, Conservative Members took to social media to claim that free school meal vouchers were being spent on prostitution and drugs, as well as to criticise selfless business owners who stepped in to provide the support that the Government refused to. Will the Secretary of State condemn these comments by MPs as not only false, but as yet more demonisation of those in poverty by the Conservative Government?
Dr Coffey
This Government continue to strive to help people who are vulnerable and disadvantaged, and we will continue to do that. I welcome any support given in order to help local communities. I am conscious that we need to continue to try to make sure we reach people of all ages; in particular, this grant is focused on children. There will be flexibility in supporting local organisations to do the right thing, but I also continue to welcome other organisations, such as businesses in the hon. Member’s constituency, that also reach out to help.
Universal Credit: Court of Appeal Judgment
Mary Kelly Foy Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
I would like to congratulate these four women on their victory for social justice. It is shameful that the Government have pursued this case to the Court of Appeal. These were working women who were paid a regular monthly salary. Welfare rights experts described them as perfect candidates for universal credit. Does the Minister agree that a system that does not work for people like them does not work at all?
Will Quince
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but I do not recognise the picture she paints. As I said earlier, judicial reviews are brought for all sorts of reason. Like her, I pay tribute to the ladies involved in bringing this case, but I point out gently to her that the Court of Appeal accepted our interpretation of the UC regulations. Nevertheless, we accept and note that some people may face budgeting difficulties. That is why I have committed to take this action.