Food Banks

William Bain Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. While we all applaud and thank the food banks, the volunteers and the people who donate food, that is not how our basic needs should be met. The basic need for food should be met through wages and a social safety net when it is needed. The basic need for housing should be met by our wages or by a social safety net when it is needed. The basic need to be able to heat one’s home and turn on the lights should be met by having a decent wage or a social safety net when it is needed.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

Has my hon. Friend seen, as I have, the study by the Children’s Society showing that under this Government the real value of the adult national minimum wage is 50p an hour less than it was when Labour was in office? Is this low pay crisis not one of the key drivers of the explosion in the use of food banks?

[Rachel Reeves]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The national minimum wage was one of the proudest achievements of the previous Labour Government. It lifted millions of people out of poverty pay, the majority of them women, and employment increased when Conservative Members said that unemployment would increase as a result. We also know today that the real value of the national minimum wage has not kept pace with average earnings or with the rising costs of energy, food prices and everything else, and so people who are in work are increasingly having to turn to food banks to be able to make ends meet.

Although we welcome today’s unemployment numbers, we know that a record number of people are working part time who want to work full time, and that for 41 of the 42 months that this Prime Minister has been in office, prices have risen at a faster rate than earnings. For all those reasons, my hon. Friend is right to point to the problems with the minimum wage, which has not kept pace with the rising cost of living and is not even being enforced. With more than 5 million people being paid less than a living wage, we know that we need to redouble our efforts to ensure that more people can support themselves and their families, rather than having to turn to food aid.

Seventy years ago, William Beveridge spoke of the five giants that he said a civilised country must overcome: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. Under this Tory-led Government, those giants are rearing their ugly heads again. We need a Labour Government to slay them.