Be under no illusion – poverty has risen under this government

In a debate on poverty in the UK last week, my colleague Lisa Nandy told the story of one of her constituents – a young man with learning disabilities who had been sanctioned for arriving to sign on just four minutes late. He was extremely vulnerable and could not tell the time. Sanctions had left him without food, electricity or gas.

It was one of many stories of people pushed into poverty by a benefits regime that was meant to help them.

Instead of responding with compassion, or an understanding of learning disabilities, Mark Spencer (the Conservative MP for Sherwood), said:

“It is important that those who are seeking employment learn the discipline of timekeeping, which is an important part of securing and keeping a job.”

Not that that rule applied to the three Conservative MPs who arrived late for the debate. They’ll still get their £5,000 salary at the end of the month. One of them, Chris Heaton-Harris, took this view of poverty and inequality:

“I guess there will always be a difference in politics between the two sides in this debate—I think that 1% of people paying 30% of income tax is actually quite a good deal for 99% of people”

Esther McVey, the minister responding for the government, didn’t address her colleagues’ comments directly, neither supporting nor condemning them. Instead, she used her response to deny that there was a problem at all.

Esther McVey claimed that under the Coalition government, poverty and inequality is falling. She would “never recognise” the evidence from the OECD and International Monetary Fund that shows otherwise.

So let’s set the record straight. Poverty fell under Labour and has risen under this government.  If Labour wins in May, we won’t deny the problem, we will try to fix it.

What’s happened to poverty, then?

The last Labour government committed to ending child poverty by 2020 and I had the privilege of steering through the Child Poverty Act 2010 that enshrined this target in law.

Measuring poverty is complex, which is why we introduced a suite of four measures for the target, including “absolute poverty” (poverty measured against a fixed level of income) and “relative poverty” (defined as falling below 60% of the median income).

Here are the government figures for children in absolute and relative poverty, when Labour arrived in government, when it left government, and the most up-to-date figures under the Coalition government.

Number of children in absolute poverty in real terms after housing costs

Number of children in relative poverty after housing costs

Relative poverty has continued to fall following Labour’s trend, but absolute child poverty is up by 500,000. The pattern repeats itself for households as a whole too, with two million more households in absolute poverty under this government.

To put it bluntly- everyone except the super-rich is poorer, it is just that those at the bottom haven’t got poorer quite as quickly as those in the middle.

We can see the effect this is having on people’s day to day lives. In 2009-10, the Trussell Trust gave out 41,000 food parcels. In 2013-14, they distributed nearly a million.

The government’s much-feted tax and welfare reforms are in large part to blame. Delays in benefit payments and benefit sanctions have been highlighted as a major factor in food bank use. In the last fortnight, the IFS published a report showing that those hit hardest by this government’s tax and benefit changes are low-income households with children, losing the greatest proportion of their income.

This is a complicated subject. It would be irresponsible to claim that there is a quick or easy solution. But the first step has got to be to acknowledge the situation – something Esther McVey and this government have refused to do and something that the Archbishop of Canterbury has decried as wilful blindness.

Labour is committed to reducing inequality and pulling families out of poverty. We have already pledged that we will:

1. Abolish the Bedroom Tax. If the Tories are re-elected families paying the Bedroom Tax will face an average bill of £3,800 over the next 5 years.
2. Tax Bankers’ Bonuses, using the money to help young people into work with the Compulsory Jobs Guarantee, Basic Skills Test and Youth Allowance.
3. Raise the National Minimum Wage to £8 an hour by the end of the next Parliament and enforce it through tougher penalties. We will also end the abuse of zero-hour contracts.
4. Tackle the cost of living with our energy price freeze and our proposals for a fairer deal for renters
5. Build 200,000 homes a year by 2020

This won’t instantly eradicate poverty – we know that. But it is a start and one which a Labour government would build on. The measure of a civilised society is how it treats its most vulnerable. Addressing poverty might be a technical subject, but at it is heart is a very simple question about how we treat other human beings.

Helen Goodman is the MP for Bishop Auckland and she is the Shadow Minister for Welfare Reform