It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and I thank the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) for securing the debate.
The increase in debt as a result of the coronavirus has been significant, and it has been particularly bad among groups of people who have fallen into the gaps of various furlough and other schemes. There seems to be an enormous lack of balance in who has been helped during the coronavirus pandemic. For example, if your name is David Cameron and you have a few handy phone numbers, you seem to have managed to do much better, by lobbying the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy eight times, whereas if you are a single parent living in Wood Green, you have been much more disproportionately affected by debt.
There are a number of options I believe the Government should look at to address some of the issues raised in this afternoon’s debate. First, they should review their decision, or impending decision, to take back the £20 per week top-up that they wisely gave to universal credit recipients earlier in the crisis. Now would be absolutely the wrong time. If we were to take a vote in this room, I am sure the answer would be that it was the wrong thing to do right now.
Secondly, the Government should take up the recommendations of the Excluded UK all-party parliamentary group, which the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) has already mentioned—he has very much led from the front on that.
We have heard from a number of people, particularly in the creative sectors and in travel and aviation, about the uncertainty and the increase in rent. For example, in my constituency, a poor travel agent has been hit with a rent bill that has increased by 45% during this terrible time.
I would also like the Government to ensure that every single citizens advice bureau in the country is properly funded and that there are sufficient volunteers. I pay tribute to Daniel Blake, chief executive of my own CAB, and Lorna Reith, the chair. Other Members, too, will have excellent CABs.
Finally, the impact on many of the terrible ineligibility for schemes has led to an exponential growth in food banks and 1.3 million more children eligible for school meals—1,700 in my own local government area. We live for a future where there are no food banks. That rise shows the terrible situation for many who work in the informal economy and for small and medium-sized businesses. I look forward to the Minister’s speech.