Cost of Living

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark), but rather than him being positive, I think that he looks at the world through extremely strong rose-tinted spectacles. The Government’s record is failing the country, and nowhere is that failure felt harder than the north-east, which is where my constituency of City of Durham is located.

Last month, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that the north-east had the highest regional unemployment rate in 2013. It said that the unemployment rate in the region was the highest in the UK at 10.3% in the second quarter of 2013, compared with 7.8% for the UK. The employment rate stood at 66.5%, lower than the UK rate of 71.5% for the same period. Almost a fifth of children in the north-east lived in workless households in the second quarter of 2013. At 18.7%, that was the highest proportion in the regions, compared with an average of 13.6% for England.

[Mr Newmark]

Given that the hon. Lady is discussing employment and unemployment I thought it would be useful to remind her that in the past year alone in her constituency, unemployment has dropped by 26% and youth unemployment has dropped by 29.5%.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I do not know where the hon. Gentleman got his figures, because I looked at the drop in unemployment and the numbers for youth unemployment in Durham showed a reduction of 19 in the last quarter. Although we welcome any increase in employment, he must pay attention to the quality of jobs that have been created. In Durham, a lot of people have lost good, stable, well-paid jobs in the public sector, and have taken insecure, low-paid, zero-hours-contract jobs in the private sector, if any employment at all.

As I was saying, the Government’s failure on living standards is impacting on people in the north-east. I shall go briefly through some of the issues that we are facing. With the current cost of living crisis, people are working longer hours for lower incomes, and despite being in work, many people find themselves in poverty. Government Members seem unable to grasp that.

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

As a fellow north-east MP, does my hon. Friend agree that for young people in particular, the often unsuitable and unstable employment that is out there if they manage to get a job—as she said, they are probably on zero-hours contracts—means that in many cases they have to do a variety of small jobs to make up some kind of income. That is not a long-term way to plan their future careers, is it?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. We need to see much more action from the Government on securing decent employment and career paths for our young people, as we all want.

[Guy Opperman]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I am sorry, but I will run out of time if I give way. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman.

The north-east has the highest proportion of people paid below the living wage—32% of workers are paid less—and research published by the Resolution Foundation has further confirmed that the north-east was the region where workers were most likely to be trapped in low earnings. The Office for National Statistics said:

“In April 2012, median gross weekly earnings for full-time adult employees in the North East were £455, joint lowest with Wales and lower than the UK median of £506.”

So people in the area that I represent are having to contend with lower wages, but they are also having to deal with rising prices. They are being burdened with not only increasing energy costs, but increasing costs for child care, for example. Energy prices have angered people throughout the country and all we have heard from the Government is excuses for the actions of the big six. When npower recently announced an eye-watering rise in electricity costs of 9.3% and in gas of 11.1%, The Journal, our local newspaper, reported that Dorothy Bowman, a campaigner for elderly people from County Durham, said that the price hike would leave householders with a stark choice. She said:

“They will have to choose food or heat, it will be too expensive for both. This is at the wrong time for people”.

She went on to say that npower did not care at all

“about their customers and the dire misery they are subjecting them to, they just care about their profits. If they were going to do this why not do it in spring, now people have no choice.”

She said the elderly would suffer, but so would young families living on a tight budget. I think she makes the point very strongly indeed.

In addition, The Journal reported on 25 October that an official at thinkmoney said:

“Regionally, problems with utility bills appear most severe in Northern Ireland, London and the North East.”

That is why we need Labour’s energy price freeze and long-term reforms to the energy market.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

If the hon. Gentleman is very brief.

[Jim Shannon]

As an example of how dire things are in the high street and the household, Citizens Advice reported that 92,000 people had made inquiries about fuel debt, 81,000 people had made inquiries about water debt, and that there had been a 77% increase in child care costs over 10 years and a 78% increase in the use of food banks. Surely that is the reality of the high street and what is happening at present.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point and I hope to be able to come to some of those issues myself.

On child care, the cost of nursery places has risen by 30%—five times faster than pay for people on average wages. I opened a new nursery in my constituency a couple of weeks ago—Do Re Mi nursery—but without action from the Government many families will not able to take up places there. It is not good enough for Government Members to say that there is help for people and that there is universal credit. No one is on that at present and many are not getting any help with child care.

As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, there are huge problems with debt. The charity StepChange in my constituency said that almost 2,000 people in the Durham area had been referred to it with debt problems from January to June this year. R3, the insolvency trade body in the north-east, found that almost a quarter of survey respondents were extremely worried or very worried about their debts, while 56% were worried about their credit card payments.

For some time, Labour Members have been raising issues about payday lenders and the extortionate rates of interest they have been charging. We obviously welcome the Government’s announcement on this, but as yet there has been absolutely no information about what will be in place to help people who have already taken out loans that they are unable to pay back. That situation is seriously compounding the problems that many families are facing.

Moreover, food poverty is increasing in Durham. The website of Durham food bank states:

“Durham foodbank has now completed two years of distributing food to local people in crisis. In our first year we fed 3686 people, our second year total is now in excess of 10,600.”

It thanks the army of volunteers who are helping it to meet this need, but makes the point, as I do, that that demonstrates a huge increase in the number of people requiring food banks. Indeed, the local citizens advice bureau has reported a 78% increase in the number of inquiries about the use of food banks. This flies in the face of the Government’s claims that they are turning the corner. Lots and lots of families in my constituency have a genuine cost of living crisis, and things are getting worse for them because of increasing prices and, at best, flatlining wages. They simply cannot afford to make ends meet.

Labour is calling for the Government to take real action to make a difference to families in Durham and across the country. We want a list of measures to be included in the autumn statement, including an energy price freeze, an extension of free child care, action to boost long-term housing supply, and a compulsory jobs guarantee—real action that would help people who are struggling out there in our communities. The Government are standing by and doing nothing to tackle the serious pressures on families right across the country, and we cannot let them go on and on doing the same thing. We need real action from the Government to support hard-pressed families. I support the motion.