Meeting of the Parliament 13 January 2016
The member need only look around Scotland, at the increase in the food banks and at the Cottage Family Centre, for example, to see that poverty is not at a historic low—far from it.
As the Trussell Trust said recently:
“The UK Government is trying to find ways of eating into the national debt, while many people are just trying to find ways to eat.”
Last night, I was at a food bank in Cowdenbeath that is run by the Dunfermline Trussell Trust. I met the volunteers and thanked them for the work that they do to help others. I heard first-hand examples of how emergency food parcels are being accessed and by who. In 2016, it cannot be right—it is not right—that we have men, women and children who are reliant on charity to feed themselves.
For the first time in more than half a century, we have absolute poverty in communities up and down this country. Absolute poverty means that people are unable to access the very basic needs that are required to live. I suggest that food is a very basic need.
We must use the benefits system to help and to support people, not to drive them to desperation. People cannot be starved back to work; rather, they must be supported. Over the past three years, in the Dunfermline area, where there are food banks in Cowdenbeath, Crosshill, Inverkeithing and Rosyth in my constituency, more than 10,000 people have been supported with emergency food parcels. According to the Trussell Trust, the most common reasons for people having to turn to emergency food parcels are benefit sanctions and welfare reform. We need a social security system that is based on respect for those who it aims to help and which treats people with dignity, with a focus on increasing people’s opportunities and choices.
I am always reminded that, throughout the history of the labour movement, the Jarrow marchers, the upper Clyde sit-ins, the miners’ strikes of the 1980s, people marched not for benefits but for jobs. Today, our ambition must be to use all the powers that are at our disposal in this Parliament to support people to get the skills and the opportunities to get jobs.
Let us all agree today that full employment must be our goal, because the key issue is jobs: good jobs; jobs for young people; jobs for the long-term unemployed; quality jobs; jobs that will last; and jobs that we can build our future around. That is why we need to set out a strategy for the jobs, education, training and industrial investment that we need and for the hope in the future that we urgently need to make for a better Scotland in which having a decent paid job is the norm for all Scotland and all its people.
The second point from the visit to the food bank last night is that people in work are also accessing food banks. Some 60 per cent of Scottish children in poverty have a parent in work. Therefore, let us agree that we will work towards achieving the living wage across all Scotland in the next five years. Labour is committed to funding the living wage across the care sector. We are committed to using the procurement process to expand the living wage to all public sector contracts, and we will work with employers and trade unions to make that happen. Action to put an end to poverty pay once and for all in Scotland is needed.
We should take that action further. Scotland’s jobs strategy must be driven by a partnership of Government, employers and trade unions working alongside one another to grow a dynamic economy. We need an industrial strategy for Scotland and the conditions and support to be put in place for new business start-ups and to support and grow existing businesses. All of that must be the backbone of the Scottish economy.
Our policy priority has to be to develop a dynamic approach to growing Scotland’s economy. Most of all, we need a Scotland of high skills and good education in which no one is left behind.
It is widely acknowledged that we have a housing crisis in this country, but we are not building houses for rent or to buy in the numbers that are needed. To compound that, if we were building the houses that we need to build, we would find ourselves with a skills shortage in the construction sector. We would find a shortage of brickies, plasterers, sparkies and plumbers. We need a national house-building strategy for Scotland and new council houses for rent sitting alongside a drive for new build to buy.