I thank the right hon. Member for that intervention. He will know that those measurements have not resulted in reduced levels of poverty. The amendments would strengthen the Government’s commitment to reducing it.
There are 14.5 million people living in poverty across our country. Poverty among children and pensioners rose in the six years prior to covid, alongside a resurgence of Victorian diseases associated with malnutrition, such as scurvy and rickets. Surely the Government must have grasped that for at least five of their own missions to succeed people need access to food. Living standards, education, skills, health and wellbeing are all deeply impacted in a household impacted by hunger. The Government’s own reporting in the family resources survey, which was made possible only after years of campaigning to implement my Food Insecurity Bill, shows that households in the north-east are more likely to struggle to afford food than those anywhere else in
the country. It would be totally misguided to think that we can level up the country without addressing that issue.
We know that the figures will increase. Already this year food insecurity has risen by almost 10%. Thanks to the Government’s economic mismanagement, the biggest fall in household incomes on record will only exacerbate those levels of hunger. The Food Foundation has found that levels of food insecure households are rising, with figures for September this year showing a prevalence in nearly 10 million adults, with 4 million children also suffering from hunger. If it were not for the over 2,500 food banks in the country, those adults and children would be without food. That should be a source of great shame for Government Members.
Regional disparities, which the Bill supposedly aims to level out, are more stark when we look at the fact that life expectancy in my part of the world, the north-east, is two and a half years less than in the south-east. Increasing healthy life expectancy is a huge challenge. The pandemic revealed the serious underlying health inequalities in this country. Public health funding will play a crucial role in helping to achieve the mission; however, in the most recent allocation councils faced a real-terms cut. That is just another example of where the Government’s actions do not meet their levelling-up rhetoric.
The Government commissioned a national food strategy, which found that diet is the leading cause of avoidable harm to our health; however, the Government have ignored Henry Dimbleby’s recommendation to increase free school meals eligibility. If the Government are serious about levelling up, tackling food insecurity is vital to achieving the levelling-up White Paper’s missions. As Anna Taylor, chief exec of the Food Foundation, said:
“If the Government wants to really get to grips with the issue, a comprehensive approach to levelling-up must tackle food insecurity head on.”
The Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison), claimed that the amendments in Committee were not needed as the Bill is
“designed to establish the framework for the missions”––[Official Report, Levelling-up and Regeneration Public Bill Committee, 20 October 2022; c. 859.]
not the content of them. That sums up the vacuous nature behind all the missions in the Bill. By making them as opaque as possible, and lacking such content, the Government will not have to bother delivering on a single one of them.
The Government should accept this amendment today. By doing so, they would signal that at long last they accept that people are going hungry on their watch and they are eventually prepared to do something about it. I sincerely hope that they will do this, but I expect that they will not. In any event, I look forward to the Minister’s response later on.