It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hood.
I came to this House just over two years ago, and the main reason I got into politics was my belief in making Britain a fairer society—a more equal society in which
the gap between the haves and the have-nots is narrow and in which we protect and look after our most vulnerable people. I believe that to be intuitively right and just, and there is also significant evidence to show that a fairer society benefits everybody in respect not only of life expectancy improvements and mental health benefits, but of educational attainments, improvements in social mobility and in rates of offending. All of us benefit from having a fairer society. Unfortunately, the measures in this Bill contribute not one jot to such a society.
As I said in my speech on the Budget a week or so ago, this Government absolutely fail the anti-poverty test. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) mentioned the analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, but there are also those of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group, the Resolution Foundation, the New Economics Foundation—and the list goes on. They all reached the same conclusion: the poorer people are, the worse off they are.
Raising the personal allowance does little for the lowest-paid workers, many of whom do not pay tax anyway. Over 682,000 working families receiving child tax credit earn less than £6,420, so I am afraid that they will not benefit at all from the increase in the tax threshold. Taken in conjunction with the welfare cuts they are now facing, the lowest earning taxpayers will receive an income boost of 32p a week or £16.80 a year as compared with those not claiming housing benefit or council tax benefit of up to £112 a year. That does not take into account the impact of the 20% VAT hike back in 2011, the additional 26% rise in food prices since 2009 or the 20% increase in energy costs that households face on their household bills. Nearly 8,000 households in my Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency—nearly one in four—already live in fuel poverty. How are they meant to cope? As other Members have said, our constituency surgeries are crammed with families that are desperate about how they are going to cope in the coming weeks and months. My constituency now has a food bank—the first ever in modern Oldham—and the number of recipients of food bank support has trebled over the last quarter. I am deeply concerned about that.