Food Banks

Tony Baldry Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I hope that every Member will read the all-party report entitled “Feeding Britain”, which has 77 recommendations, all of which seem eminently practical. I think everyone would agree that we should collectively seek to ensure that benefits can be paid as quickly as possible. I was not sure whether the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) was giving an undertaking that, if a Labour Government were elected next spring, benefits could be paid within five days. We would all want to ensure that benefits are paid as quickly as possible.

I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions announcing earlier this week that the Government were

“looking to new measures committing the Department to raising much more awareness, as was asked for, of the short-term benefit advances. We are doing that through websites, on posters and by providing information in jobcentres…hoping to roll it out at the beginning of the new year”

ensuring that advisers

“constantly advise those at risk of the availability, should they need it, of interim payments.”—[Official Report, 8 December 2014; Vol. 589, c. 633.]

We should all agree on that.

On sanctions, the report suggests the introduction of a yellow card system. No one has spoken about it as yet, but it seems an eminently sensible idea. We all know as constituency MPs that constituents sometimes get into circumstances where there is not necessarily a fair or black-or-white situation, so introducing some sort of yellow card system might be much fairer.

I caution the Opposition against trying to give the impression that there is some huge new fund of money that can be given for this purpose. Every party, so far as I can recall from when I was in the Division Lobby, voted for the welfare cap, and if the leaders of both parties are also ring-fencing payments to pensioners, it means that benefit payments to working families and so forth are inevitably going to get squeezed. I fully support encouraging employers to pay the living wage and, if we can, to raise the minimum wage, but we are all working within tight conditions.

The report makes recommendations not just to the Government, but to the food industry. Tackling food waste is an important issue, and I was slightly surprised that some Opposition Members would discount it. I was glad that, in Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions, Ministers acknowledged that and said that they would meet industry representatives to see how better to deal with food waste. The waste and resources action programme, which is based in my constituency, is already taking a lead on this.

As to the suggestion or implication that the debate is entirely about benefit delays and sanctions, may I read in my remaining time a short extract from the Bishop of Truro’s article in last week’s Church Times? This is just one quote to show the complexity:

“The other force at work is the addiction that many individuals and families have, but which particularly sharply affects the budgeting of low-income families. A family earning £21,000 a year, for example, where both parents smoke 20 cigarettes a day will spend a quarter of their income on tobacco.”

He went on to talk about the need to address the

“circle of addiction fed by debt, at the expense of being able to put food on the table.”

These are complex issues, and I suggest that pre-election soundbites are not worthy of them. It is a pity that this evening’s debate has sometimes degenerated into a pre-election soundbite debate.