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Tackling Poverty in the UK

The hon. Lady has extremely extensive experience of these matters and she is absolutely right. We remain firmly of the view that early intervention is important. I mentioned parenting skills earlier; when talking about these matters, I always pay tribute to the charity Home-Start. Enabling people who have good parenting experience to mentor those who do not makes a valuable contribution to helping young people who grow up in more challenging environments to do better than they might otherwise have done. That is hugely important because we have massive divides within communities, between people living side by side. Here in Westminster, for example, we have the largest difference in life expectancy of any London local authority. In areas such as Knightsbridge and Belgravia, people can expect to live into their mid-80s, but just up the road in Queens Park life expectancy is just over 70—a gap of nearly 15 years. For every two minutes on the tube between Knightsbridge and Queens Park, the life expectancy of the communities through which one travels drops by a year.