Homelessness among Refugees

Debate between Neil Coyle and Kate Green

Tuesday 17th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kate Green]

I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman. Those points will be the thrust of the remainder of my speech.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I am glad that she mentioned the 28-day move-on period, which the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness also recommended scrapping. Does she share my hope that the Minister will accept that recommendation for inclusion in the strategy, which is due by the end of the month?

[Kate Green]

I do, and I will be very interested to hear the Minister’s response.

I am grateful to charities and individuals who have shared stories to illustrate what it means for those who become refugees without either the resources or the home they need to rebuild their lives. The Boaz Trust, with which I have had the privilege of working in Manchester, told me about what happened to Mohsen, a 28-year-old man from Iran who arrived in the UK in 2015 and was found asylum accommodation in Manchester. He says:

“I left NASS in January 2018. They let me stay on for two more weeks because they knew I didn’t have anywhere to go. Then I stayed outside for 2 nights. It was very cold. After that I stayed in a shelter. After 3 weeks the NASS support stopped. Then after maybe three weeks my money came in from the Job Centre…When I left my NASS accommodation, I went to the council and registered with housing. I knew to do this because I have been here a long time. They said I am not priority, and I cannot have any hostel place. I applied for housing and I waited two months…At first the Council say there will be something in 4 weeks, then 8 weeks. In that time, I stayed at Boaz night shelter. Now I am in hostel and I am waiting for a house. I am bidding every week. It was hard staying in the night shelter, staying in different areas every night. During the day I have nowhere to go”.

Sadly, that is far from an untypical story.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Neil Coyle and Kate Green

Thursday 17th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle]

We have discussed some of these issues this morning. To be accused of bluster is unfortunate and insensitive when the concern is that an intervention at 16 is far too late. It is unclear exactly what the Government intend to do if they discover—shock horror!—that there are children aged 16 who are educationally disadvantaged. I am fortunate, as the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, to have a constituency where schools are outperforming the national standards, but this is still a massive concern for us. Intervening at the age of 16 is far too late.

I think that those in the sector will conclude that the Government, in failing to accept the amendment, are acknowledging that they have something to hide on the issue, but I will not force the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 4 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 5

Social Mobility Commission

[Kate Green]

I beg to move amendment 7, in clause 5, page 5, leave out lines 16 to 27 and insert—

“5 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission: additional functions

(1) After Section 8A of the Child Poverty Act 2010 insert—”

To leave the name of the “Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission” unchanged.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Coyle]

My hon. Friend says that child poverty is flatlining, but for many families, is it not the case that absolute child poverty has risen? That is a particular concern in constituencies such as mine in inner London, and it is linked to in-work poverty.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come to that point, because it leads into something that I shall say about the measures and targets that we use.

The summer Budget and the measures in the Bill will push more families and more children into poverty. We have not yet got an analysis of the impact of the Bill or the Budget on child poverty and on the numbers of children growing up poor. It is disappointing that the Government have not laid that impact assessment before the House. We cannot know for sure what assessment, if any, the Government have made of the impact. We do not know whether they bothered to make such an assessment. From our knowledge, expertise and understanding of what drives poverty, we can expect that the impact will be pretty adverse. We can also look to the very helpful Joseph Rowntree Foundation minimum income standards research, to which I referred earlier. It points to a particularly harsh effect on the family incomes of some particularly vulnerable groups, including single-parent families, couples with several children and families who face high housing costs.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point about the complexity of disentangling causes from consequences and about the fact that Ministers are giving the public distorting messages about what poverty actually is. Let me make this clear: only 4% of parents experience alcohol or drug addiction, and far from all those parents are parents of poor children. Of course, it is devastating for children who grow up in households where parents are addicted, but it is not the same as poverty and it certainly does not explain the 3.7 million children growing up in poverty in the UK today. As she rightly noted, family break-up affects families across the income spectrum. There will be hon. Members in this room who have experienced it in their own families. We should not conflate the two. While it is true that single parents and their children face a higher risk of poverty, there are measures that could be taken to ameliorate and address that consequence, instead of which the Government will make the position of those families worse.

[Neil Coyle]

Is there not a challenge in what the Government are attempting to suggest, in that on the one hand the Minister says their policies on tackling poverty are working but on the other suggests that the measurements, accepted by the Prime Minister when they were introduced, are flawed? Does that not expose the Government’s real agenda, which is to mask their lack of effort in tackling the low-wage economy and in-work poverty?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend absolutely makes the case.

As we have heard this morning, it is also ridiculous to think that measuring worklessness alone could be a substitute for measuring poverty, when two thirds of poor children are in households where somebody works. We have repeatedly heard from the Conservative party that the measures are somehow flawed or insufficient, so let us go through carefully what the Child Poverty Act actually requires in relation to measurement and targets.

We know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects a rise in relative poverty in this Parliament, but it also expects that it is entirely possible that absolute poverty could fall. So there is a two-way street, if you like, built into the cocktail of measures that we have. We have four measures of poverty in the Child Poverty Act: relative income poverty; absolute poverty; material deprivation; and persistent poverty. That addresses some of the concerns that Government Members might rightly have about tracking only one measure. It is right that when median income is falling, relative income poverty alone is not sufficient to give a good picture of what is happening to our poorest families, although it remains important in tracking the gap that exists.

However, it is also right to recognise that we do not look only at relative income poverty in the Child Poverty Act. We look at absolute poverty, persistent poverty and, crucially, material deprivation. Material deprivation gives a real-life test of poverty and the public can engage with it, get their heads round it and understand it. Also, as I said earlier today, it is a particularly good predictor of health outcomes for children.

Welfare Reform and Work Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Neil Coyle and Kate Green

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle]

Does my hon. Friend not think that disabled people’s confidence in the Government’s ability to support them with this commendable target has been somewhat undermined by the reduction in the number of disabled people supported by Access to Work, the number of disability employment advisers and the amount of employment for disabled people in Remploy factories? However in context or out of context they were, the comments made by a Department for Work and Pensions Minister were unfortunate. Does my hon. Friend think that that has affected disabled people’s confidence in the Government’s ability and commitment to ensure that decent employment opportunities are available?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; there is real scepticism about what the Government really intend. I think the Minister is incredibly well intentioned in her ambitions for good-quality, sustainable job outcomes for disabled people. However, wishing for the ends is not the same as achieving them. We need the right steps and the right measures to provide support for disabled people and crucially, as my hon. Friend says, to give them the sense of confidence they need to take advantage of the support on offer. If they feel that the Government’s motivations are, in fact, to make it harder for them to survive while preparing for work, or to push them into unsuitable work—work that may actually make those with serious health conditions even less well—that is naturally not a frame of mind in which we would wish anybody to enter an employment support programme.

The barriers faced by disabled people to an equal chance and an equal right to participate in the labour market are myriad, and many were referred to in the written and oral evidence received by the Committee. For example, we heard from Mind, which I thought gave some interesting and illuminating evidence to us last week, that there is a particular concern for people with mental health problems who are looking for work. It needs to be the right sort of work and the right sort of support to get people back to work.

According to Mind, just 8% of people with mental health problems who have gone through the Work programme have achieved a sustained job outcome. Furthermore, 83% said that their experience of being on the Work programme had made their health worse, and 76% said it made them feel less able to work. Those are really depressing statistics. I know the Minister will share my huge concern about those figures and the experiences of people with mental health problems. It is not a good sign for halving the disability employment gap given that, as I said earlier, so many of us will experience a mental health problem at some point in our lives.

We all share a real concern about young people’s employment prospects. We all know the scarring effects on a young person at the beginning of their working life of not being able to get into the labour market in order to build up their experience of work and ultimately progress and develop their career. I am absolutely passionate about that. I am of the generation that experienced a collapse in employment for young people at the beginning of the 1980s, and I remember the fear and anxiety we lived with at the time. We have seen it happen to subsequent generations, and I know that there is real concern about ensuring our young people have the very best chances to start their careers and get into the world of work.

The anxiety we rightly have about our young people’s employment prospects is massively amplified for disabled young people. Their employment chances, and the educational experiences many of them have that lead to their employment chances, are so much worse. We must all be concerned about that. We know that disabled young people are four times more likely to be unemployed at the age of 26 than non-disabled young people. They are twice as likely to be not in education, employment or training. To the extent that the Minister’s ambition to halve the disability employment gap can bear down on those shocking statistics and improve on the very poor performance we are achieving for our young people, she will have the wholehearted support of the Labour party.

There is widespread support for significant and radical reform of the employment support being delivered to disabled people. We heard it from our witnesses, we saw it in the written evidence and it is widely debated around the House. It is therefore a huge disappointment to us that nothing in the Bill gives any sense of what the Government are actually going to do about the disability employment gap. There is not even any specific reference to it in the Bill, with its full employment reporting obligation. That must call into question the seriousness with which the Government are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. A reporting obligation would really put a spotlight on what the Government are doing and what their programmes and initiatives are achieving to halve the disability employment gap.