My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for tabling this amendment, to which my name is attached. The stated intention of the Bill, reiterated many times by the Government in both Houses, is the moral duty to reduce economic, social and environmental disparities between and within different parts of the UK. I will make two points.
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First, the overriding cause of disparity is poverty. Families not having sufficient funds to buy food is resulting in some 14% of the total UK population—11 million people—being forced to use food banks. The main driver of hunger and recourse to food banks is low income; 82% of those facing hunger—the vast majority—are in debt. Vulnerable sectors include the disabled, single parents, carers, ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. According to the Trussell Trust’s latest report, Hunger in the UK, this level of poverty leads inevitably to greater, deeper and more far-reaching disparities in health and well-being—yet, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, it is not a focus of any of the Bill’s 12 missions. There is no reference in the Bill to poverty or the means to reduce it, nor any suggested practical measures to support communities facing a cost of living crisis or to achieve long-term health and well-being. It is not enough to indicate eliminating such inequality as an “intended outcome”. We must be a little more explicit.
Secondly, the failure to address the pressing issue of severe poverty as a cause of inequality in the Bill does not make sense. It means that there will be no regular annual reporting on this particular inequality and no obligation for the Government to reveal whether or not the goal of reducing poverty has been reached. This amendment would at least ensure that lifting families, especially children, out of poverty could provide the necessary structure for tackling other disparities. Without such clear and unambiguous reference to poverty, levelling up cannot be genuinely transformative.