I strongly agree with my hon. Friend, and that brings me neatly on to the next point I was about to make about employment conditions in our country. For my mum, as a single mum, it was difficult to hold down a steady, stable job and often she was reliant on temporary, casual, low-paid work to help make ends meet. Looking at the picture in the labour market—and this was pre-pandemic—even in households where one or both parents are working, children are still growing up in poverty. As my hon. Friend said, over the last decade we have seen the bills going up, but the wages failing to follow.
We have also seen labour market conditions that mean that, even when people are doing the right thing, as the vast majority of people want to do—going out to work, often with two, three or even four jobs in a week, and working all the hours God sends to try to make ends meet—they are still unable to make ends meet. It should never be the case, especially in a country with the wealth and opportunity available here, that when someone goes to work and puts in a full week’s work, at the end of the day they still do not have enough to make ends meet. Things are likely to become even more challenging in the wake of the economic fallout from coronavirus. Unemployment statistics from recent months have been not only jaw dropping but unprecedented, and the pace at which our economy has collapsed as a result of the necessary shutdown has been astonishing. I welcome and recognise the steps that the Chancellor has taken to try to protect people’s incomes, but unless he goes further than he has already announced, many people will face greater poverty and hardship later this year.
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Against that bleak backdrop, I would expect any reasonable Prime Minister with the right priorities, or any Prime Minister with their heart in the right place, or the faintest understanding of what life is like for most people in this country, to make tackling poverty a top priority. This Prime Minister, however, does not even know in which direction the poverty numbers are going. I do not expect him to have instant recall of month-by-month poverty data, although if I were Prime Minister I would ensure that those numbers were on a dashboard that I looked at every morning, but he did not even know that on his watch, and that of his predecessors, child poverty in this country has been rising. I think that is negligent, but having followed him closely during his time as Mayor of London, his lack of attention to detail, and lack of grip on Government, does not come as a surprise.
That brings me to our Chancellor, who many people believe to be a more impressive political figure and leader than the Prime Minister—that is certainly the talk of the Tories in the Tea Room. It remains to be seen, however, whether this Chancellor, who says that he will do whatever it takes to get the country through the pandemic, is also prepared to do whatever it takes to tackle poverty in our country. We know it can be done; we know the difference that political leadership
can make. We know what happens when a Prime Minister wakes up every day and thinks, “What can I do today to make the country a fairer, more equal and just society?”, because we saw that under the previous Labour Government.
In 1999, Tony Blair promised to end child poverty within a generation, and the Government set ambitious targets to halve child poverty by 2010, and eliminate it by 2020. When that Labour Government left office, they left to the Conservative-led Government who followed an inheritance and track record that put them on course to achieve that target. The year 2020 will be remembered in the history books as the year of the covid-19 pandemic, but it should also be remembered as the year when this country, one of the richest in the world, ought to have achieved its target to end child poverty.