Thursday, August 22, 2024
Labour still failing on anti-poverty action
They say that speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the former chief executive of the Resolution Foundation said: “You’ve got to be clear where that money’s coming from and that’s what budgets are for and the government’s committed to a child poverty strategy.”
He added: “My view is, why don’t you let the ministers that are writing your child poverty strategy publish that strategy before you start criticising them?
The two-child benefit cap, imposed by Tory former chancellor George Osborne, prevents parents from claiming benefits for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017.
Sir Keir had previously called for the policy to be scrapped but has since said Labour cannot fund the move and will not promise to do so until it can say how the change would be paid for.
He and chancellor Rachel Reeves have faced mounting calls from backbench Labour MPs and campaigners to remove the limit, which would bring 300,000 children people out of poverty and 700,000 more out of deep poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group.
Mr Bell has called the policy “appalling” in his book Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back. Speaking at the festival, he said: “It’s fine for policy wonks and politicians living on high salaries to debate the finer points of parliamentary procedures and the timing of policies but children in my constituency are living in poverty now.”
He added that previous Labour governments had “always brought down childhood poverty”, though adding it had not happened on a wide enough scale.
Meanwhile, the Independent reports that a number of charities have warned that more than half a million children will go hungry during school holiday periods from the October half-term if the government fails to renew a £1bn local welfare crisis fund due to end in six weeks’ time.
English councils last year spent £370m from their household support fund (HSF) allocations on holiday food vouchers for pupils on free school meals (FSM) – but more than a quarter of authorities say this support could disappear if the fund is ditched.
Discontinuing the HSF could also devastate an already threadbare crisis safety net which supports tens of thousands of families at risk of destitution with cash, food parcels, fuel vouchers, clothing, beds, cookers and other essential items.
“If HSF ends, with no long-term strategy to replace it, it will instantly plunge millions into more financial turmoil. The effects of poverty, deprivation and even malnutrition will be exacerbated and the additional costs to public services will be huge,” a report by the charity End Furniture Poverty report concludes.
The report, based on near 100% freedom of information returns from councils, shows England’s local crisis support safety net, which has existed in various forms since the 1930s, is fragmented, and in many areas, nonexistent.
Council-run local crisis support would disappear from nearly a third of English local authority areas covering 18 million people, including Birmingham, Bradford, Nottingham, Westminster, Croydon, Hampshire, Slough, and Stoke-on-Trent.
Its removal would also push scores of local food banks to the brink of insolvency, with many having become reliant on HSF cash grants to meet the explosion in demand for charity food as a result of Covid and the cost of living crisis.
The government, which last week set out the terms of reference for its long-term plan to “reduce and alleviate child poverty”, is under pressure to urgently decide the future of the HSF. Funding for the scheme runs out on 30 September, a month before the autumn statement.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, last month identified the £500m HSF budget for the first six months of this year as one of a number of “unfunded” commitments made by the previous government – part of a £22bn spending shortfall – which would come under Treasury scrutiny.
Campaigners say they believe ministers will be wary of provoking a public backlash if school holiday food vouchers disappear in many areas of England. A popular campaign led by the footballer Marcus Rashford in 2020 twice forced the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, to reverse plans to scrap holiday free school meals support.
The End Furniture Poverty report reveals the extent to which local authorities have come to rely on the HSF to tackle holiday hunger in the past three years. Last year 44% of the entire budget was used to fund holiday food vouchers, the biggest single line of expenditure.
Twenty-two councils have said they will discontinue the vouchers if the HSF is not renewed, with a further 20 saying they were undecided. The report estimates that 561,000 children who currently qualify for FSM vouchers would not be able to access them if the fund was discontinued.
It is all very well saying we have to wait for the government's strategy to be published but children are going hungry now, families with more than two children are struggling to feed them and pensioners are facing a winter when they cannot afford to put their heating on.
We expected better of a Labour government.
