The people who are faring worst out of the Chancellor's budget are women in low-paid, part-time work because they are going to miss out on any tax cuts because they earn too little to profit from the rise in personal allowances, and they're suffering reductions in real income as a result of the benefits freeze. So, they are actually going to be worse off, regardless of all the hype about how austerity is now over. It's completely not over for part-time workers, most of whom are women. Over three and a half million women earn less than £15,000 a year. They are one third of the workforce. At the same time, the top 10 per cent of households are going to increase their income by £1 billion more than for the bottom 10 per cent. This is absolutely shocking: this is how we are absolutely widening the overall earnings gap between the richest and the poorest, and as Helen Mary said, this is in the fifth largest economy in the world.

We have to understand that raising the tax-free threshold always disproportionately benefits people on middle and higher incomes. It does not benefit the low-paid. There have to be other mechanisms provided to ensure that work does pay, because everybody who goes to work, does a hard day's graft, is entitled to get enough to pay for the essentials of life and provide for their families. That is clearly not happening at the moment. Instead, the nearly £17 billion in forgone tax revenue from this deliberate policy could and should have been ploughed into the benefits system and public services, which poor people disproportionately rely on. So, they could reverse the benefits freeze, and even some Tory MPs—even senior former Ministers—are arguing that we should be ending the benefits freeze.

But I just want to talk about the way in which, since 2010, we have really disregarded all our obligations towards children, because the attack on children has been relentless since the new Government took over. First of all, in the way that it's undermined child benefit, which is the most essential part of, on behalf of society, helping those who have children to ensure that they have enough money to raise them. By using the consumer price index rather than the retail price index, they guaranteed that benefits would not keep up with prices, and then there was a freeze in child benefit for the first three years of the Tory Government, and then this shift has had a massive impact upon the amount of money made available for children.

In 2010, child benefit was £20.30 for a family's first child and £13.40 for subsequent children. If the policies of the previous Government had been kept in place, child benefit today would now be at least £24.30 for the first child and £16.05 for other children. That is a massive reduction in children's money, and it's really quite devastating, the impact that it's had. And what it's meant is that over 100,000 children are going to be destitute this Christmas as a result of delay just in one thing: delay in universal credit payment. So, people, for example, on Anglesey, who are going to be started on universal credit, they're not going to get anything until the new year. So, they will be having a Scrooge-like Christmas with no presents, and goodness knows how they are going to survive. Meanwhile, we have the chief executive of Bet365 earning £265,000 a day. I mean, we clearly have a society that has completely lost touch with the values that it's supposed to have. I've run out of time to say what we should be doing about this, but we have to ensure that all our children are fed, at the most basic level.