Amendment of the Law

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

People in Croydon North were looking to this Budget to help them with the cost of living crisis that has hit them so hard since this Government were elected. Wages are down £1,600 a year since 2010, long-term youth unemployment remains unacceptably high and people are struggling with the Government’s VAT hike and failure to restrain energy price rises. They looked to this Budget for change, but I regret they found precious little.

Instead, the Budget simply ignored the real problems facing people in Croydon North. With the average national income around £26,000, very few working households have a spare £15,000 a year to invest in ISAs. The issues that concern them are how to put food on the table, how to pay the heating bills and how to stay in employment, but on the things that really matter there was precious little help on offer from the Chancellor yesterday.

There is a desperate housing shortage across London. Croydon North has extremely high numbers of people living in substandard overcrowded private rented housing and what is needed is an urgent increase in the building of affordable and social housing. The proposals for Ebbsfleet, although welcome, are just a drop in the ocean compared with what is needed.

One of the most painful of all the challenges facing Croydon North is the scandal of long-term youth unemployment. Week after week in this Chamber I watch Tory Ministers’ complacency about that issue. In Croydon North, more than 1,000 young people have been unemployed for more than a year. That figure remains unacceptably high and the statistic masks the tragedy of individual young people growing up to be told that the society around them thinks that they have nothing to offer. It is a waste of their talent and of their ability, of their present and of their future. A national house building programme at scale could have helped to provide the jobs that those young people need, but that opportunity, alas, was missed yesterday.

One of the most welcome proposals for my party is the youth jobs guarantee. What a difference that would have made to those young people’s self-esteem and dignity and what a crying shame it is for every unemployed youngster in Croydon North that this Government will not introduce it.

Hard-working people are not obsessed with beer and bingo, in the way the Tories like to caricature them. Instead, they care about jobs, homes, education, health and how to pay their ever-rising household bills. The Tories can put out condescending adverts as much as they like, but they cannot hide from the fact that people are worse off, not better off, after four years of Tory rule.