In-work Poverty

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) for securing this debate, which is absolutely vital but should not be necessary in 21st-century Britain.

My constituency of Bolton South East is the 38th most deprived constituency in the United Kingdom. We have a jobs crisis, a wage crisis and a poverty crisis. Every single day, constituents write to me, outlining the most tragic circumstances. The stories include the inability to get a job, an unexpected benefits freeze and, more recently, a collective panic about how to pay for food, heating and bills. These are not the make-believe people that Cameron and Osborne dreamed up in 2010—the “shirkers” or “scroungers”—but the strivers that the coalition supposedly championed. They work long hours in tough jobs to provide for their families, put food on the table and give their children the best chance in life.

The 800 taxi drivers in the borough of Bolton are an example. Many of them live in my patch, and work long, hard hours, but because of rulings about the gig economy and their self-employed status, they often fail to make even the minimum wage on some shifts. We need to factor in the continuing restraints on licensing by local authorities, insurance costs, and other rules set by local authorities that make life even harder for them.

So many hard-working people are living in poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 56% of people in poverty are working; that represents a rise of 17% from 1998. Additionally, almost 40% of people on universal credit are working. That tells us that our economic model and wage system are fundamentally broken. We are told frequently by the Government that work is the best route out of poverty, as if that is an irrefutable fact, but clearly it is not the case.

Real wages were revised down again on Tuesday and are collectively lower than at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, yet the pay of chief executives of big companies has ballooned. The rich have actually got richer over the years. House prices are up by 150% in some areas of Bolton. Of course, there is also the rise in national insurance for the lowest paid, just to make things even worse for them. We need the Chancellor of the Exchequer to top up universal credit and take it back to the rate that it was at during the pandemic. The removal of the £20 uplift is not only morally bankrupt, but economically illiterate. It affected 14,000 of my constituents, and £20 per week is a lot of money for them.

Another reform that the Government could support is in relation to public transport. Only 30% of households in my constituency have a car and therefore rely on public transport, at significant cost. Thankfully, the Mayor of Greater Manchester has brought the buses into the public sector. As a result, no one will have to pay more than £2 per journey, which will make life so much easier for people. The Government could also quite easily implement a windfall tax on the £31 billion-worth of profits from oil and gas companies—above the ordinary profit that these companies make. That could be used to help to alleviate people’s problems, yet what does the Treasury say? “We’ll give you a £200 loan that you must pay back to us.” That is an insult to our constituents.

Many of my colleagues have today suggested practical steps that the Government could take. Bearing in mind that we are the fourth richest country in the world, we should not have constituents in poverty. I hope that the Minister listens to the suggestions put forward today and acts on them.