Oral Answers to Questions
Richard Burgon Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Will Quince)
Throughout the pandemic, our priority has been to protect the most vulnerable, which is why we spent an additional £7.4 billion last year to strengthen the welfare safety support for working-age people. Our ambition is to help parents return to work as quickly as possible, as there is clear evidence of the importance of having parents in work for reducing the risk of child poverty. That is why we are spending over £30 billion on a comprehensive plan for jobs.
Will Quince
I thank the hon. Lady for her question. We are wholly committed to supporting families with children. We spent an estimated £111 billion, including £7.4 billion on covid-related measures, on working-age welfare in 2020-21. In addition, as the hon. Lady referenced, we introduced the covid local support grant. We have now extended that grant with an additional £160 million in funding between 21 June and 30 September. That brings the total funding package to £429 million. For the hon. Lady’s constituency—I reference Tower Hamlets London Borough Council—it means an overall funding package of over £3 million.
Richard Burgon
What we have been hearing from the Government is, frankly, rubbish. In Leeds East alone, 11,000 children—that is approaching half of all children—live in poverty. It is not getting better for the children of Harehills, and it is not getting better for the children of Cross Gates, Gipton, Seacroft or anywhere else; it is getting worse. Poverty levels went up by 25% in the five years before the pandemic, and it is going to get worse when £20 of universal credit is taken away from families in October. I dare the Minister today to come to the food banks of Leeds East and tell people in my community why the Tory party thinks that their children should be forced into further poverty this winter.
Will Quince
Recent statistics show that before the covid-19 pandemic, we were in a strong position, with rising incomes and 1.3 million fewer people, including 300,000 fewer children, in absolute poverty, after housing costs, compared with 2010. There were also over 600,000 fewer children in workless households. Our long-term ambition is to support economic recovery across our United Kingdom, and our new plan for jobs is already supporting people to move into and to progress in work.
Income Tax (Charge)
Richard Burgon Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
The Budget should be judged on one key issue: whether it improves the living standards of the vast majority of people in this country. On that, I am afraid, it has failed, with a pay freeze for key workers, the poorest families facing universal credit cuts, 1 million lower-paid workers having to now pay income tax, and council tax rises. Living standards have faced an assault over the past decade, and that is set to continue. Average wages will be no higher in 2026 than in 2008: almost two lost decades.
The Government’s disastrous handling of the virus has caused one of the world’s deepest economic collapses, yet they expect the vast majority to pay for it—including through further cuts to public services of £15 billion per year compared with last year’s plans. Despite the need to treat a huge backlog and to fund ongoing vaccine and test and trace schemes, the Government would also cut the national health service budget back to pre-pandemic levels. That will also mean an axe to unprotected areas, such as local government, which is already cut to the bone.
The Government may counter that they are fixing the economy and that a higher tide will lift all boats. That is simply a lie. The Budget will see Britain continuing as a low-growth—just 1.7%—economy once the end-of-lockdown boost wears off. We have low growth, falling living standards and hollowed-out public services. For most people, I am afraid that it will feel very similar to the last decade, but it does not have to be. This should have been the Budget to invest massively in growth, in tackling inequality, in jobs, in tackling the climate crisis, in rebuilding our public services, in social housing and in moving us to a high-skill, high-wage economy.
Instead, public investment will remain pathetically low, and the main stimulus is a £25 billion corporate handout that may bring business investment forward but, as the Government’s figures show, will not increase overall investment levels. Those funds should instead have gone into a huge state investment programme also funded by record low borrowing costs and taxes on the super-rich, starting with a 50% rate on those on over £125,000. That could spur a shift to net-zero with a green new deal, build modern transport and infrastructure fit for the 21st century, lead to a mass house building programme, and renew our public services, all boosting growth, which is the best way to pay off the debt, but also creating decent jobs and helping to rebuild communities left behind for far, far too long.
That should have been the legacy coming out of this crisis, and that is what we on this side of the House will need to fight for.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call Jerome Mayhew by video link.
I am afraid I am going to have to stop Jerome Mayhew and come back to him.
Covid-19: Statutory Sick Pay
Richard Burgon Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab) [V]
The idea behind statutory sick pay is as simple as it is important: workers who are ill are financially supported so that they can stay off work to recover. But during a rapidly spreading virus pandemic, it also helps to prevent the spread of infectious illnesses. The test of whether a system of sick pay is working is whether it achieves those simple aims.
Unfortunately, as has been shown time and again during this crisis, the UK’s statutory sick pay system is quite simply broken. In the middle of a global pandemic, it is failing to protect either workers who are ill or their wider community. This failure, like so many others of this Government—from Serco test and trace to the personal protective equipment debacle—has contributed to the virus having spiralled out of control and so many losing their lives unnecessarily.
From the very start of this crisis, I have been contacted by constituents who simply cannot get by on statutory sick pay. Before this debate, I invited my constituents to share their experiences of having to rely on statutory sick pay. The stories that people from my constituency sent to me were quite simply heartbreaking: workers forced to use up their annual leave to self-isolate because the sick pay they would get is not enough to keep them going; families who found that sick pay did not cover even a quarter of their bills; and people forced to use a food bank to feed their family and go into debt to pay their bills after just three weeks of relying on statutory sick pay.
I have described just a glimpse of the horrific social harm inflicted on people in this country by this Government’s refusal to provide proper financial support during this crisis. People are being forced to choose between putting food on the table and self-isolating to protect their community and their colleagues. This is happening in every constituency of every Member across the country. MPs in this House know it is, and those who refuse to call for better sick pay have to take responsibility for the consequences.
The two biggest problems with sick pay have been clear from the very start: the level that it is paid at is far too low and, even then, huge numbers of workers are excluded from actually getting it. At £95.85 a week, statutory sick pay is an 80% cut in income for an average worker. Many workers simply cannot afford the immediate loss of income. And who can live off £14 per day? The TUC found that two fifths of workers would have to go into debt or miss paying bills if they had to take statutory sick pay.
Of course, the terrible consequences of this unacceptably low level of support are not felt equally. Many of the workers hardest hit by it are the same workers on the frontline fighting this pandemic. Let us look at social care. The GMB trade union has revealed that the majority of the UK’s social care workers are entitled only to statutory minimum sick pay, with no additional sick pay from their employer. When the GMB consulted its members who work in social care about what they would do if they had to rely on statutory sick pay, a full 81% said that they would be forced in to work. The Office for National Statistics found that care homes where staff got contractual sick pay above the level of statutory sick pay were less likely to have covid cases than those where staff were forced to rely on the statutory minimum. It is hard to imagine a more fatally self-defeating system during a pandemic than one that leaves care workers forced to go in to work when they should be self-isolating. How many people died in care homes because of this Government’s refusal to properly support workers financially when they are unwell?
As if the paltry level of sick pay was not enough of a problem, nearly 2 million of the lowest paid workers do not even qualify for sick pay because they do not earn enough. The lower earnings limit means that those earning less than £120 a week are prohibited from accessing sick pay—a discriminatory measure, given that 70% of the workers excluded by that limit are women. Millions of self-employed workers are also excluded. That is the stark reality of working conditions in this country in the 21st century: millions of workers—disproportionately women, black and minority ethnic workers, and those on zero-hours contracts—excluded from even the most basic and limited support by the Government.
From the start of the pandemic, Labour has called for urgent action to remove the barriers to sick pay that have left the lowest paid workers without support. Throughout the pandemic, trade unions such as Unite the union have made consistent demands on the Government to increase statutory sick pay to the level of the real living wage, and to remove the minimum income requirement so that every worker who needs to self-isolate is supported to do so. The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union has also called for the Government to legislate for full rights to contractual sick pay for all workers from day one, paid at 100% of wages. Outside the Conservative party, there is even widespread support in Parliament, with MPs from seven parties signing up to support my motion calling for sick pay at a real living wage level.
I am sure that the Minister’s response will include reference to the Government’s £500 self-isolation support scheme. It is true that, six months into the pandemic, the Government introduced a scheme to give a one-off payment to some people on low incomes who have to self-isolate. Unfortunately, the scheme is woefully inadequate. Only one in eight workers qualify automatically for the main payment; the rest have had to apply for a discretionary payment, and figures suggest that 70% of applications for support from that scheme were rejected.
Back in November, I asked the Government how many people had applied for that payment. It took more than 100 days to get an answer, and when it finally came, it was that the Government still did not have the figures. No one could honestly look at the scheme and claim that it is an adequate alternative to providing proper sick pay at real living wage levels.
We know that covid is increasingly a disease of the poor. Those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods have been more than twice as likely to die from covid as those in the least deprived. People in some of the lowest-paid manual jobs are three times more likely to die of covid-19 than those in higher-paid, white-collar jobs. Covid is still circulating at higher levels in the poorest neighbourhoods than in the wealthiest. Proper levels of statutory sick pay would disproportionately help those in poorer areas and in manual occupations, and that is what needs to happen. When we look at why the Government have never acted on increasing sick pay as a priority, perhaps that is the real answer.
Sick pay was already broken before the pandemic struck, yet even in a global health crisis, the Government have chosen not to fix it, helping the virus spread out of control. The Government cannot claim not to have been warned in advance of the scale of this problem, because just months before the covid crisis struck, their own consultation on sick pay said that the system of statutory sick pay
“does not reflect modern working practices, such as flexible working,”
and looked at
“widening eligibility for SSP to extend protection to those on the lowest incomes”.
I, along with many in the labour and trade union movements, have been demanding better sick pay for workers for almost a year. In fact, it was a year ago tomorrow—when the UK had a total of just three deaths from covid—that the TUC published a report warning the Government to urgently make our sick pay system fit for purpose. The report called on the Government immediately to raise sick pay to the level of the real living wage and make it accessible to all workers, including the lowest paid. Those recommendations were ignored. It was also last March that the Health Secretary himself said that he could not afford to live off statutory sick pay, but, 12 months on, his Government have done nothing to raise it. If only the Health Secretary were as generous with the payments to working people as he appears to be with his friends when handing out Government contracts.
The Government’s refusal to act decisively has meant that the virus has spread more than it would have done, and people have lost their lives who otherwise would be with us still. The Government knew about this problem from day one but chose not to address it. The decision not to raise sick pay to a level that workers can actually live on is a deliberate political calculation from this Government. They feared that if sick pay was improved during this crisis, they would never be able to lower it again in the future; it would be a permanent gain for working people. This Conservative Government cannot allow that because it would go against the grain of the constant undermining of our welfare state. Fundamentally, the Conservative party sees the social security system as a means to punish—be that by setting universal credit deliberately low or the cruel bedroom tax— rather than it being there to support people when they need help.
The Chancellor has a chance finally to sort this issue out tomorrow at the Budget. If he does not, once again he will have shown which side this Government are on, and it is not on the side of working people and their families.