I will call Clive Lewis to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with prior permission from the Member in charge of the debate and the Minister. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates. A Liberal Democrat Member has just requested to make a speech. I am happy with that. Minister, are you happy with that as well?
That this House has considered living standards in the East of England.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. As I will be discussing nature, water and the far right, I would like to declare interests that meet the relevant test. The first is my role as vice-chair of the climate and nature crisis caucus. The second is that I have received donations from Compass and Betterworld Ltd, which have supported my work on water. The third is support I have received from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung—try saying that after a few pints—to attend their parliamentarian forums on the far right. I have written about issues touched on in this debate—climate, water, the far right and economic growth—for The Guardian and Byline Times, which I have been paid for.
If we take an honest look at life in the east of England today, and in my city of Norwich, we do not see the prosperity that Governments have often boasted about. We see a region where too many people are running faster and faster just to stand still. In Norwich, wages remain below the national average. One in five workers earns less than the real living wage. One in six is trapped in insecure work—zero hours, agency or short-term scraps dressed up as jobs. Meanwhile, rents have risen by more than 20% since 2021. A quarter of private renters are handing over half or more of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. That is not prosperity; that is daylight robbery with a tenancy agreement.
I also find in my constituency that the cost of a decent home is far too high for far too many of my constituents. Does my hon. Friend agree that the solution to that problem is not, as is believed in some quarters, to give the developers the right to strip away our environment and destroy nature, but rather to get on with building the council housing that delivers the genuinely affordable homes our residents need?
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and for all his work in this area. Council homes are overwhelmingly the solution to this country’s housing problems. There is always space for private housing, for affordable housing and for housing associations, but it is council housing, built in a sustainable way, that will solve the housing crisis in this country. I agree with him that developers—not climate, nature or local democracy—are the block to building more houses here, and I am firm in making that point.
Public transport in my region is patchy at best. Broadband in rural Norfolk is slower than a tractor on a Sunday morning—people who live in Suffolk or Norfolk will know what I mean. Child poverty levels run at one in three in Norwich once housing costs are factored in and, although we are blessed with extraordinary landscapes, too many of our neighbours live in what I can only describe as nature deserts—no green space within walking distance, and no safe place for kids to play.
I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. He is right to underline the issue of low income; the quality of life for working families on low incomes is the worst that it has ever been. When I spoke to him beforehand, I referred to my constituency, and indeed all Northern Ireland, where I understand that the rates are the same as in his constituency: 16% of working-age adults are in relative poverty. It should never be the case that working people are in poverty. The Government need a strategy to address that issue, but they do not at present. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution. I do not raise this in this speech, but I think that one of the key ways of lifting people out of poverty is by strengthening trade unions and their sectoral pay bargaining ability, which I do not think even this Government—my Government—are going to do. That is key, particularly in the areas of social care and many other low-paid sectors. It would ensure that people get decent pay and attract people into those areas. It would make a massive difference.
We face real and urgent challenges in the east of England. Now, the Government—my own party’s Government—tell us not to worry, because living standards are going to rise and we have a plan for growth. But what do we mean by that? In practice, it means looking overwhelmingly at one number: disposable income, or what is left jingling in our pockets at the end of the month. Useful, yes—but adequate? No.
Reducing the richness of life to something we can measure is like trying to paint a rainbow with a single grey crayon: we get the outline, but none of the colour, none of the joy, none of the lived reality. The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen warned that dignity cannot be reduced to decimal points. Martha Nussbaum, a US philosopher and ethicist, reminds us that the question is not just what we earn, but what we are free to do and to be. Kate Raworth is also right: paper prosperity that trashes the planet leaves our children bankrupt.
When we are told that living standards are up because the averages look rosy, we should remember what Danny Dorling pointed out: an average can hide a multitude of sins. If Jeff Bezos walked into a Norwich pub, the average wealth in the room would shoot through the roof, but not a single person’s pint would get cheaper—and I doubt he would get to the bar ahead of anyone else, either.
The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do how rural and isolated much of Norfolk can be. I represent the oldest constituency in the country, and I have been shocked by the living standards of some of my elderly residents in isolated communities, who simply feel that there is no help out there to give them the quality of life they deserve. They, too, are lost among averages. Does he agree that poverty in rural communities across the east of England is often more hidden than in metropolitan areas, and needs to receive a similar level of attention?
The hon. Gentleman is a champion of such issues in his constituency, and I agree: poverty is very often out of sight, out of mind. The dispersal of rural poverty makes it easier to hide, and harder for organisations to point out, but he does a very good job of doing so. His point was well made.
Continuing on the theme of averages, as council areas get bigger, the averages are skewed a little. Within my area, which is already in a large unitary authority, life expectancy can vary by up to eight years. If the Government say, “Hooray! The council area is getting a Best Start family hub!”, I ask, “Where?”, because it could end up in a leafy village or in an area of deprivation. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to redouble our efforts to find pockets of deprivation, and perhaps use artificial intelligence as a new tool to do so?
I thank my hon. Friend for an interesting contribution. I will take a time-out on the AI component. I think it has a place and could, I am sure, contribute something, but the real way to ensure that resources are going to the right place is to ensure real devolution: empowering communities, local government and local people to decide where the money is spent, because they know best. Ultimately, pushing power down is how we will get better outcomes.
Let us be blunt: living standards as currently measured give us a snapshot, but not the whole picture. They can tell us whether the tills are ringing, but not whether the people are thriving. Look at Norwich: a zero-hours care worker has no work-life balance to speak of; they have work-life whiplash. Mental health referrals in Norfolk are up 40% since 2020—we will not find that in an Office for National Statistics income chart. The poorest wards in my city have five times fewer parks per person than the richest. Try raising kids in a concrete cage in one of the most polluted parts of the city—where, unfortunately, our Government subsidises electric SUVs that, through their brakes and tires, churn out more particulate matter than smaller electric vehicles—and then tell me that their living standards are on the rise.
Let us look at Norwich South. We had more than 500 sewage pollution incidents last year. My constituents are not comforted by fines levied on Anglian Water; their lived standard is filthy rivers, dead fish, cancelled swims and massive bill hikes, while they watch multimillion-pound payouts to shareholders and executives—and that is after the passing of our much vaunted Water (Special Measures) Act 2025. So when the Government cheer that GDP is up, or that the average household is a few pounds better off, I say, “Growth for whom? Growth for what? Growth at what cost?”
I acknowledge that this Labour Government have already taken steps to make a difference. The extended household support fund for councils, soon to be replaced by the crisis and resilience fund, has been a lifeline for many. Our new Best Start hubs, replacing the axed Sure Start programme, will help millions, as will our new universal breakfast clubs and investment in home energy efficiency, which will cut bills for years to come. Those are brilliant and welcome tangible measures, but we cannot stop there.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse, and I thank the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) for letting me speak. As a fellow east of England MP, I thank him for securing this important debate, and I hope he agrees with me that health is central to living standards. As vice-chair of the East of England all-party group, I note that my predecessors published a report on levelling-up in the region in 2022. The report found that women in the region can expect to spend 19 years of their lives in less than good health, compared with 16 years for men. According to an international Global Burden of Disease study, 42% of ill health in the east of England can be linked to preventable factors linked to socioeconomic deprivation and other health inequalities.
I regularly receive casework from constituents experiencing long delays in referrals following GP appointments. That is shown in the data, with gynaecology waiting times a particularly bad example. For example, in June Chelmsford’s Mid and South Essex integrated care board had the highest gynaecology treatment waiting list of any ICB in the east of England at 15,768, with almost half of women waiting for longer than 18 weeks for treatment—well below the Government’s 92% target. Indeed, one of my constituents wrote to tell me that she would face a 78-week wait for a gynaecology appointment, not 18 weeks. We all recognise that the longer someone needs healthcare, the more complex, financially costly and serious the consequences can be, and we need the Government urgently to bring down referral waiting lists.
As the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists noted, the public health grant must be adequately funded to address the underlying causes of sickness, especially those that acutely affect women. In Chelmsford, my city council has emphasised how important that is, helping to meet one of the statutory duties of ICBs, which is health and wellbeing, especially in the context of reduced staffing, the abolition of NHS England, and ICBs being asked to reduce their costs by 50%. I urge the Government to commit to expanding the number of women’s health hubs in the east of England in particular.
It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) for securing this debate and the opportunity to have a constructive discussion about living standards in the east of England. I thank other hon. Members who have contributed, including the hon. Members for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman), for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—he is on form, as ever—and for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), and my hon. Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard (Alex Mayer). I do not have an enormous amount of time, so I will crack on with my speech.
This Government are committed to raising living standards for everybody across the UK and, of course, in the east of England, but it is worth pointing out that that is no small task. When we came to power, we took over from a Government who had dropped the ball on living standards—the last Parliament was the weakest on record for living standards. We were elected to turn that around, and through our Plan for Change we are delivering policies to kickstart growth that will boost living standards in every part of the UK. Indeed, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, we can expect living standards, measured by real household disposable income per capita, to rise by 2.6% over the course of this Parliament.
I will focus on a number of measures that we have taken to strengthen household income, particularly for those on low incomes. The first is that we have increased the national living wage, which will benefit around 3 million of the lowest paid workers and make them up to £1,400 better off. We are investing more than £0.5 billion in the Best Start family service over the 2026 to ’29 spending review period, making sure that every local authority has a family hub that is open to all, and focusing—this was mentioned by one of my hon. Friends—on areas with higher proportions of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are putting early years back at the heart of how we deliver stronger outcomes for our children, as it has ever been with Labour Governments, including this one and the previous Labour Government, with half a million children benefiting from the roll-out of the new 30 hours free childcare entitlement that we brought forward this week.
Too often, we give with one hand and take with the other. We extend support, but keep the two-child cap that pushes hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. We invest in households, but cut disability benefits that provide dignity and security for millions. We offer relief, but leave the structures that drive poverty and insecurity untouched.
As the charity Norfolk Community Law Service told me:
“We’re seeing a growing number of families live in extreme poverty, struggling with benefits that don’t provide enough to live on, unable to feed themselves properly or heat their homes. This is not because they are lazy or unprepared to work hard in their lives, but often because they are caught in the poverty trap, unable to break free.”
The problem is compounded by neglect of prevention. As Age UK in Norwich explained:
“The lack of strategic investment into community, preventative services is not only threatening the voluntary sector—it’s chipping away at the foundation, the NHS and social care so many rely on.”
Here is the challenge: unless we deal with those deeper structures, we will never truly lift standards in the fullest sense of the word. That means overhauling our tax system. Yes, we need higher taxes on wealth, windfalls, capital gains and inheritance, but we must also face a hard truth: without structural reform, much of that revenue simply flows straight back into the pockets of large corporates—companies that now absorb vast amounts of public money in contracts, subsidies and outsourcing while skimming billions in excess pay, dividends and profit.
Tax reform must go hand in hand with a clampdown on corporate capture. I fear that many of my colleagues now in Government understand that after 45 years of privatisation, deregulation and outsourcing, the levers of state are increasingly connected to very little. “Deliver, deliver, deliver,” we are told; but how can we deliver when the accelerator and the gearstick are connected to thin air?
Let us not forget that, when those same interests come under pressure, they rarely look in the mirror. Instead, they reach for the oldest trick in the book and tell us that the problem is not profiteering landlords or privatised monopolies. They tell us that the problem is foreigners; that migrants are the reason wages are low; that Europe is the reason services are stretched; that some other is to blame. That scapegoating is not accidental. It is structural. It protects an economy built on extraction—extraction of wealth, of labour, of nature—and it corrodes our democracy, replacing solidarity with suspicion, and common purpose with division.
Labour, at its best, has always known better. There was a time when our movement understood that redistribution of income, wealth and power was not a footnote to our mission—it was the mission. We understood that we could not simply leave the means of production, distribution and exchange in the hands of those who use them to extract, rather than to serve; that, if our economy was to work for the majority, if standards of living and wellbeing were to rise, people needed more than just money in their pocket. They needed more say, more power and more ownership over the things that make life bearable and meaningful.
That meant public ownership of essential services, from water and energy to rail and post. It meant universal basic services such as healthcare, transport, housing, education and, in our age, internet access. It meant building new institutions to strengthen the cohesion of our society: co-operatives, trade unions, community media and local assemblies. It meant giving people not only the means to live, but the means to shape the communities in which they live.
These are the specific asks I would like to put to the Minister. I ask the Government to introduce rent caps in high-pressure areas, as seen in Austria and Scotland, so that families are not priced out of their communities; to cap food prices for a basket of essential goods, as France and Hungary have, so that no child goes hungry because the basics are unaffordable; to abolish the two-child cap on benefits and reverse the recent disability payment cuts—policies that undermine dignity and trap children in poverty. I ask them to launch a major programme of public housing construction using public land to build secure council homes for rent; to take our water companies back into public hands, ending the scandal of dividends flowing abroad while sewage pours into our rivers; to mandate universal broadband and affordable transport access as basic services in a modern economy.
I ask the Government to overhaul the tax system, to close the loopholes, tax wealth properly and ensure that revenues are not siphoned off into dividends and corporate profiteering, and to tie corporate subsidies and contracts to strict conditions on pay, investment and environmental responsibility. Finally, I ask them to stop mainstreaming racism. By all means, secure the borders and control migration to what we need, but take out the toxicity. Open secure routes and defend and deepen human rights—do not water them down—for all our sakes.
Those are not revolutionary demands, and they are not even radical demands; they are common-sense measures to ensure the economy serves the public, not the other way around. We need a plan for transformation, rather than tinkering at the edges or hoping that growth alone will deliver fairness by accident; a plan in which the demos, the people, have a greater say on how their life, and the life of their community, is shaped.
The alternative is stark. Failure to do those things will deliver our country into the hands of the authoritarian right. If we get this wrong, it will not mean some marginal difference in some marginal metric of living standards—it will be the difference between civil co-existence and barbarism, between a society held together by solidarity and one held together by scapegoating and fear.
People are crying out not just for a few extra pounds in their wage packet, but for security, dignity and hope. That means we must confront the extractive model, rediscover our roots in redistribution and democracy, stop pandering to racism and rebuild the social compact that once gave Britain both prosperity and purpose. People are not simply consumers to be measured or units of labour to be costed. They are the economy—not components of it, or cogs in someone else’s machine; they are the economy, and we seem to have forgotten that. If we forget it, we will not only fail to raise so-called living standards, but we will fail to rebuild trust, fail to hold our community together and fail to protect our democracy from those who would happily divide and rule. We can do better.
We will be investing £410 million per year by 2028-29 to expand free school meals in England to all children with a parent receiving universal credit, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty by the end of this Parliament. We are providing £1 billion a year to reform crisis support, including the first ever multi-year settlement to transform the household support fund into a new crisis and resilience fund. We have frozen fuel duty, saving drivers about £3 billion this year, while extending the £3 bus fare cap until March 2027, keeping prices low on some 5,000 routes across England.
We are also protecting the pension triple lock and, in doing so, gave 1.2 million pensioners in the east of England a 4.1% increase to their basic or new state pension in April this year. At the recent spending review, we confirmed funding for our affordable homes programme; my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South spoke passionately about council houses. The 10-year affordable homes programme will involve £39 billion during that period. We have also committed to local transport priorities for some our larger city regions via the transport for city regions settlements.
For the east of England, we have confirmed £14.2 billion for Sizewell C, which, at peak construction, will create 10,000 jobs, including 1,500 apprenticeships, and wider economic benefits in Suffolk and the wider region. We have also made significant progress in creating the conditions for growth, with reforms to the national planning policy framework, which the Office for Budget Responsibility concluded will permanently increase the level of real GDP by 0.4% over the next 10 years—the biggest positive growth impact that the OBR has ever forecast for a policy with no fiscal cost.
We are going forward with the introduction of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and, in the east of England, with support for the Oxford to Cambridge corridor, which will bring many benefits to local communities. That approach will drive growth in city regions, towns and communities and make the most of the opportunities in each part of the country to make people better off. We are already seeing the results of our plan working, with the Bank of England having reduced interest rates five times since we came to office, which will put downward pressure on mortgage payments.
However, we recognise, of course, that challenges remain. We must support those in immediate need while making the structural changes necessary to give our cities, towns and rural and coastal communities the resources and powers that they need to succeed. Through our plan for neighbourhoods, we are providing long-term funding directly to communities, delivering visible improvements on people’s doorsteps, championing local leadership and fostering stronger communities. Of the 75 places already announced in the plan for neighbourhoods, seven are in the east of England; each will receive up to £20 million over the next 10 years.
We are also driving forward devolution, pushing power down, as my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South discussed, giving local leaders the powers and resources to shape their own futures. The devolution priority programme will see two new mayoral strategic authorities established in the east of England, both in Greater Essex and in Norfolk and Suffolk, with inaugural mayoral elections in May next year. We have established the Cambridge Growth Company, which will work with local partners to unlock key developments and deliver an “infrastructure first” strategy for sustainable growth in the area.
The Government are providing certainty and stability through our commitment to in-flight local growth projects, including freeports and investment zones. Those programmes can and should be key tools for driving growth across the UK, including the east of England. We are committed to bringing them together as part of our modern industrial strategy.
I do not have very much time left, Mrs Hobhouse. The Government are committed to sustainable and secure economic growth, and we are bringing that about in three major ways: restoring stability, as we did in the Budget last year by introducing non-negotiable fiscal rules, to put the public finances back on a stable path; secondly, investment in renewal, within the fiscal rules made in the autumn, supporting the step change needed, as confirmed in our plans in the spending review period; and changing the economy to prioritise long-term growth through key reforms.
Every investment, reform and partnership is focused on one goal: raising living standards in the east of England and across the country, creating opportunities in every community. I know that we are all passionate about that. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South again for bringing this important debate to the House.