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Poverty and Inequality

I have no doubt that the electorate will hear that point. The hon. Lady has certainly been a great parliamentarian, and the House of Commons will be the worse for her not being in it after the election. She said that the debate would be topical literally as the Prime Minister returned from the palace and the general election was called. The debate is important because there is a feeling, certainly among the charities with which I have spoken, that if we are not careful the election might see a new Government come in who will not give the same priority to poverty and inequality that Labour has done in the past 13 years. I congratulate the Labour party on what it has done in many areas in those years. It has poured billions into tackling child poverty, but there is a real fear that the recession will undo some of that work or at least set it back. Although child poverty has decreased under the Government, pensioner poverty has not fallen to the same extent. Poverty among working, childless adults has increased to its highest level for 40 years. In addition, the Government's third term has seen a rise in income inequality, with the poorest fifth of the population experiencing a fall in income. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has stated, for example, that the gap between the income of the rich and the poor is now the highest it has been since its comparable time series began in 1961, the year I was born, and inequalities in wealth are even greater than those in income. The hon. Lady mentioned the Child Poverty Act 2010, which we of course supported. However, we are concerned that the Government have watered down the goal of "eradicating" child poverty by 2020. Instead, the Act now states that no more than 10 per cent. of children should be in poverty. By our maths, that means that the Government are resigned to accepting that around 1 million children will still live in some form of poverty in future. The recession has seen inequality and poverty continue to rise in certain groups, as they did in the past few years when the UK was booming, so what will be the effects when we tackle the problems ahead? The targets of halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it by 2020 were set out by Tony Blair in 1999, but the interim target was missed in 2005-06 and, unsurprisingly, it looks as though the 2010 target will be missed as well. When times were good it was easy to pick off the low-hanging fruit, meaning those who were only a few percentage points below the poverty line or who were perhaps on a low income temporarily and would quickly find another job, or who were poor simply for one reason, rather than for complex, multiple reasons. However, now that times are harder, we are concerned that the good work that has been done so far will stall and perhaps start to go backwards, particularly if there is a new Administration after 6 May who will place less emphasis on tackling child poverty than the current Government have done. We have seen some recent changes on pensioner poverty, one of which has been to the state earnings-related pension scheme. The second state pension scheme has effectively been frozen for 2009-10, meaning that around 9 million pensioners will have a real-terms cut in their pension payments this year, amounting to around £515 million.