4. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Child Poverty Progress Report 2019

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:21 pm on 10 December 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:21, 10 December 2019

Yes, I'm very happy to assure Dawn Bowden that we're looking very carefully at that. That's one of the reasons that the former First Minister commissioned the gender review, of course, and we're taking forward phase 2 of the gender review. One of the primary findings of that gender review, which is no surprise to any of us, is that income inequality drives gender inequality, which drives domestic violence and other issues. Until you can get women earning at the right level, without the gender pay gap, you continue to have those problems. Let's be clear, we know, across the world, what is the most effective way of getting people out of poverty, and that's to educate and pay women properly. And so the Government needs to step up to that plate.

With the welfare reforms that we've had from the UK Government, of course we've moved money from the purse, as they used to say, to the wallet. So, you've actually taken money out of women's pockets and put it into that of the male head of the household. That also drives domestic violence, it also drives a woman's inability to leave a situation that's intolerable to her, and it drives the rise in single-parent families, because the levels of personal debt under the current Tory Government have skyrocketed as people fail to make ends meet. And personal debt drives insecure mental health and insecure mental health drives relationship breakdown. And so these things are not accidental. This is a deliberate policy by a Government designed to make working-class people poorer, let's be clear, and all of the attendant problems that go with that.

So, we have Boris the Prime Minister who, as elected mayor of London, cut police numbers very substantially, and is now pretending that he's going to put it back. It doesn't actually make up the numbers. And then we're all astonished that we have knife crime rising. We slash youth services, but we're astonished that we can't get children to attend properly schools and all the rest of it. We cut vital public preventative services but we're astonished that acute service provision rises.

Mark Isherwood has the brass neck to quote statistics at me about levels of pay in Wales whilst supporting a Government that cuts trade union rights and refuses collective bargaining to a large number of workers. I would suggest very strongly that there are a number of policies that work in many countries around the world where we do not have driving inequality, and I would highly commend the British public to vote Labour on Thursday so that we can become one in their ranks.