Work and Pensions Committee
Education Committee
Oral evidence: Realising potential: Delivering the Child Poverty Strategy, HC 75
Wednesday 1 July 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 1 July 2026.
Work and Pensions Committee members present: Debbie Abrahams (Chair); David Baines; Steve Darling; Damien Egan; Patrick Hurley; Liz Twist.
Education Committee members present: Helen Hayes (Chair); Jess Asato; Sureena Brackenridge; Jodie Gosling; Darren Paffey; Mark Sewards; Peter Swallow.
Questions 122 - 146
Witnesses
I: Sahar Khan, Rachel Luke, Ella-Mae Michalski, Samantha Richards, Jonathan Paul Roberts, Tayyaba Siddiqui, and Caroline Rice.
Witnesses: Sahar Khan, Rachel Luke, Ella-Mae Michalski, Samantha Richards, Jonathan Paul Roberts, Tayyaba Siddiqui and Caroline Rice.
[Debbie Abrahams in the Chair]
Q122 Chair: Welcome to this special session of the Joint Committee of the Work and Pensions and Education Committee examining the delivery of the child poverty strategy. It is such a special session because today we are joined by people who have experienced poverty in the past and who are going to give their views and thoughts about how we can ensure that this child poverty strategy will do what it says on the tin, which is to reduce child poverty.
Can I go round and ask people who have joined us today to introduce themselves? Just give your first name, if that is alright.
Caroline Rice: I am Caroline. I am from Northern Ireland. I can say a wee bit about myself. I am currently working as a classroom assistant, and I am a mum of one; she is currently sitting at home.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I am Jonny Roberts. I am a single dad. I have two school-aged children. I live in Newbury. I trained as a teacher but I am currently doing a master’s degree and tutoring as well.
Sahar Khan: My name is Sahar. I am based in Glasgow, Scotland, and I am a parent of one child with special needs. I am self-employed and I am a carer as well.
Samantha Richards: I am Sam. I from Cardiff. I am a single mum to my 12-year-old son, Oscar. Sadly, I am his only parent as his dad passed away three years ago. I work full time. I am reliant on private childcare, so there have been issues with that and with some of the policies that I can see as problematic when you are on a low income.
Rachel Luke: My name is Rae. I am a single mum. I am based in London. I have always worked and I am currently facing redundancy, so things are a bit precarious.
Ella-Mae Michalski: Hello everyone. I am Ella. I have been advocating and campaigning as a participant of Changing Realities for the past six years. I have two primary school-aged children. I have a particular interest in supporting those with SEND children and navigating the early years support system.
Tayyaba Siddiqui: My name is Tayyaba. I am from the Borough of Islington in London. I am a single parent of a teenager who is 15 years old. I used to be a key person in the NHS, but, due to circumstances and the situation, I am not working at the moment. I am one of the 200 parents trying to change the system for good.
Q123 Chair: Welcome to all of you, and thank you so much for giving your time to come and speak with us. I just wondered whether you would like to share whatever you feel comfortable in sharing in terms of your experience of living on low incomes and raising children. What has been your experience? What are the difficult points and things that you experienced?
Caroline Rice: I have said that I live in Northern Ireland, but I live right down on the border, so I am quite far from things. I live rurally. I was previously registered as a self-employed childminder. There have been occasions when I have had to cancel and postpone appointments for hospital in that time because our services have been stripped away from us, so it would have meant a 200-mile journey and a full day off work. On things like that, I have had to make decisions to say, “No, I can’t do these things”. My health was impacted by that.
Recently, I had to cut my hours back for personal reasons, and that financial strain ended up impacting my own health again, so now I have a medical condition. I am trying to get back into more full-time hours. I am still working. Obviously, as a classroom assistant, when I am not at work, it impacts the other SEN kids who are at school alongside my own child. With the financial implications, it is not easy. It really is not. People think that, when you are not working, other things make up for that loss of income, but it does not make up for the loss of income.
Q124 Chair: What did that mean for you? What did you have to cut back on?
Caroline Rice: We have already cut back as much as we can. I have a car. I would love to cut back on that car but practically I cannot, because if I do not have a car I cannot go to work. That is a huge expense that I always have to consider.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I mentioned that I live in Newbury. Cost of living in the south-east is particularly hard. For example, the local housing allowance for a three-bed property in Newbury is £1,200, but my rent for a two-bed is £1,300. That is relatively cheap compared to when you look at other places that might be available. It just does not keep up and it does not reflect the realities.
The childcare element is something I will come back to later, hopefully. There are significant issues with that, but one of the main issues was that, when I was made unemployed, I lost access to the childcare. The system did not feel child-centred in that moment. It felt very much like a sanction against me, the parent, for having lost my job, which was out of my control in that moment.
I am doing this master’s degree online part-time as well, and there are issues with the finance around that in terms of how universal credit interacts with it and the childcare elements.
Q125 Chair: You are trying to improve your circumstances by doing the online course, and it just does not accommodate that.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: Yes. While being on universal credit, I also trained to be a teacher, which was treated as undergraduate. The support there was quite good in that it interacts quite well with universal credit.
The childcare element was handled much better, but, with the master’s situation, the loan is bundled together for maintenance and the fees. The premise that universal credit works on is that 20% of the master’s degree loan should be treated as income and tapered from your universal credit, but the reality is that my course fees take up 88% of that loan. A chunk of income that comes to me goes straight out of my bank account to the university, but I get tapered for that, which does not feel like it is in the spirit of what the system is supposed to be doing.
There is no allowance for course costs and things like that to be separate, which was probably the intention in that policy design. It is very much like everything is tapered away that I am left with, as well as additional that I never actually see.
Then in terms of childcare, there is childcare support through Student Finance England that is not available for master’s students. You just use the universal credit system. I can perhaps talk more about that later on, but the whole structure of that is not quite right.
Tayyaba Siddiqui: This is just a little bit about me. I am a domestic violence survivor. The day I fled from my ex-home with only my one-year-old son and my educational documents, I thought things would change and get better. It took me a long time to get back on my feet.
I feel like I am a victim of the system; this is how I feel. The effects of domestic violence on my son have created trauma that is now affecting his school attendance. I am a qualified physiotherapist. I was working for the NHS, but they were not understanding of the flexibility I needed as a single parent. I was always on a short-term contract. I want to work. I miss my patients. The hospital is my second home. I feel like the system is not broken; it is made like that.
Sahar Khan: This is not just my experience but the experience of a lot of other parents I speak with as well. We have lots of categories to look into and get worried about, starting with cost of living, which influences your house, and then supporting your children’s mental health needs and educational needs as well. Then both earning as self-employed and being a carer, you cannot earn a lot because you are investing a lot of your time and energy in that place where, on carer allowance, you do not even get a minimum wage. That is not even a career or a stable income.
The gap is so huge. I really do not understand where you start and how you fill up those gaps so that all the kids are on the same level, at least when they are starting their new life.
Those were just a few points. We can go into details if you would like.
Samantha Richards: The problem we have at the moment is that the foundations are not right. A lot of the things that have been implemented with the child poverty strategy are to be commended, like lifting the two-child cap, but the benefit cap still remains. You have expanding the number of school meals and things like that. That is great, but the problem is that you have cracks in your foundation, and those are just papering over the cracks until we fix the basics.
The LHA rates need to be uplifted. People who are in private rentals are paying hundreds of pounds extra a month. Also, benefits have not kept up in line with food prices. People need to be able to adequately heat their homes. Childcare covers a certain amount, but it does not take into account school holidays.
Most of my family have passed away. Sadly, his dad has passed away. I am wholly reliant on childcare, and my childcare for the summer holidays just in August will top £1,600. Even at the maximum entitlement from universal credit, I will only get £840. We do not take holidays because I have to save. What do I do? Do I quit my job in the short term or do I just struggle through?
What I want is to have the solid foundations there; then people are able to thrive. The state of New Mexico has introduced 100% childcare funding with expanded eligibility. As of the first three months of that last year, 12,000 children were lifted out of poverty. Parents want to work, but the infrastructure is not there yet. That is what I think.
We are reliant on charities to fill the gap. I will give you an example. My son has gone through two bone marrow transplants. In 2015, he went through his first one. We were given two days’ notice to go to Newcastle-upon-Tyne because it was an emergency. His platelets had dropped so low. We drove 325 miles. His dad and I only had £150 in our bank. We were told by universal credit, “You cannot have it because you have to attend home appointments and you will not be home”. We spent the first few days hungry.
Help for us came in the form of charities with vouchers, cash grants and offers of accommodation, but this is what is happening with child poverty now. The use of food banks since austerity began is no longer short-term; it is just an accepted thing. We are one of the richest countries in the world, and people are still relying on food banks. It cannot go on. We need to get the foundations right and then rebuild.
People can choose to manage their lives and have better accommodation. They would not have to stay in damp, shoddy homes if the local housing allowance give them the choice. If 100% childcare was paid, people would have the choice to work extra hours.
The universal credit system as it stands now creates a poverty trap. The upper capital and lower capital limits have not changed for 20 years. In 2006 £6,000 bought you a lot more than it does now, and the same with £16,000 as the upper. This is what I feel like; you are trapped. If you work more hours, your universal credit income goes down. You are always on this wheel trying to catch ahead of you, and you cannot get out of it.
Rachel Luke: I feel like everybody who has spoken so far resonates with me so much as a single parent being in that trap.
I just thought I would bring up something that I do not know whether anybody else is going through or has heard of. Many of us are in social housing, and there is something called communal heating. That has created a massive trap because, clearly, energy prices have risen, and we pay for our energy via this communal heating system where it seems okay on paper. You pay a flat rate. You pay that throughout the year, whether it is summer or winter, but in 2023 our charges went up 300%, and our universal credit did not go up. No other benefits went up to support that.
From our perspective, it was like a rent rise, but it did not act like a typical rent rise, which would attract significant upscaling in your benefits. Many of us struggled with that. Many of us were put on course for eviction because of that because we were unable to keep up.
We are dreading the next rise, which is on our doorsteps, because we can see this happening again. I do not know that enough people are aware of it, and I do not know whether anything is being done about it, but it sure would be nice to have some kind of benefit system for those of us who are on a low income, are single parents, and need that help to cover our costs. It is just the thing that I want to bring up.
Q126 Sureena Brackenridge: I was wondering whether I could ask a follow-up question to something that Rae mentioned regarding the impact of rising energy bills, which obviously, on top of everything else, just add more and more pressure and a burden. I want to hear if anybody has experience with the warm home discount; I believe for low-income families it is a £150 discount. Does anybody have experience of that? Is it simple and easy to navigate and claim, or is it not what it seems to be?
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I claimed it. I found it relatively easy. I got the letter I was supposed to get, which was from the Government explaining that I would probably be eligible, and then to contact my energy company. It was one quick phone call, and then it was applied to my bill about a month or two later.
I feel like I am almost unfairly receiving that in some ways, in the sense that I am on a low income and my energy bills have gone up, but I know that I also live in a relatively new flat that is quite well insulated. My energy bills are not massive. On other things, yes, but on energy they are not massive.
I know some people who are living in poorly insulated homes. The warm home discount would be better if it was reimagined around the EPC energy certificates so that those who have the worst-insulated homes receive more. People like me would have to receive a little less to pay for that, but so be it.
Samantha Richards: I have never personally claimed it because it has time limits. I will be honest with you; my gas bill alone is £150 a month for a two-bedroom flat, because I live in a flat with an open fireplace that has never been blocked up by the landlord. The windows are draughty and you can see the curtains moving in the winter. It is absolutely freezing, but that is my luxury because I refuse for my son to be cold. It would not do that much for me because I am paying that a month in a flat just to keep warm in winter.
Q127 Sureena Brackenridge: Have you looked into it? Is it the case that you are entitled and you are not claiming, or that it is not easy to access and the information is not there?
Samantha Richards: The information is there, but for me personally it is a drop in the ocean with my energy bills, so I have thought, “It is £140 for the whole winter. I am paying over that a month because of the condition of my property”. This is the problem. You get trapped in these properties, because, if I go and try to rent a similar property, they go for £1,100 now in Cardiff. My local housing allowance is £800; I already pay £100 above that.
Sahar Khan: You are saying that it is not automated. Even if you are on a low income and universal credit knows, it is not automated; you have to apply for it.
Sureena Brackenridge: I am not sure; this is why I am asking.
Samantha Richards: You have to apply for it; it is not on universal credit. I looked into it before. It might be different in Wales; I do not know, because sometimes we have little differences with the devolved Governments, but there is usually a time limit. You can only apply from, say, September. They open the scheme. Do you get what I mean? It is usually four or five months.
Sahar Khan: If you know about the scheme, you will apply; if you do not know, you will not. It is not automated.
Samantha Richards: Yes. You have five months.
Chair: That is a good point about communication and information, and making sure that that is available. Thank you so much for that.
Rachel Luke: For some of us, it was automated. We received letters, but I have to agree with Sam that it was a drop in the ocean. It evaporates very quickly. By the time the next bill goes through, it is like nothing. It is a one-off payment. You need something sustainable over the winter months for those people who are in the most need.
Caroline Rice: Within Northern Ireland, as far as I am aware, there is no such thing as the warm home scheme. I know within the Barnett programme there was money sent over to Northern Ireland. People on low income in Northern Ireland still have not received any of the money that was sent out automatically. It was at the start of this year that there was money awarded; it still has not been sent out in Northern Ireland.
Q128 Helen Hayes: You have all spoken quite a bit already about some of the barriers. It is really hard to hear about some of the things that you have faced when you have tried to take more hours, or when you have been stopped from going to work because the system just does not really work with your circumstances.
I just wondered whether anybody wants to speak a little bit more about that and about just how hard it has been, when you have tried to do something to raise your income, to improve your circumstances, to get beyond the challenges. What are the particular barriers that you have encountered? I know that, for some of you, you have experience of children with health issues, disabilities or SEND that we have heard about. Are there particular barriers—there probably are—around those systems of support as well that mean that you can do everything you can, but it still proves impossible to make progress? I do not know whether anyone wants to say a bit more about some of those challenges.
Caroline Rice: I know that for myself personally—it is probably the same across the board—when I was a registered childminder, I wanted to progress myself. Colleges are 100 miles away from me. I had tried to do an Open University degree course, but that meant full time and quitting work.
When I looked into it, it was too scary. Nobody could tell me what I was going to have to live on and I thought, “I cannot risk this”, so I just progressed into doing the classroom assistant. Personally, I feel that there is a fatigue within universal credit users in terms of constant burnout. You are constantly chasing your tail; you get that, “I can’t be bothered any more. I can’t fight the system any more”; and you give up. It is hard.
Samantha Richards: When you are on universal credit, there are quite a lot of tapers and exclusions. This is the problem you have; we will talk about my friend, the benefit cap. Even if we raised the local housing allowances, if you did not work, it would not affect you because you would be subject to the benefit cap. Again, we are excluding people.
Also, if you work full time, if you earn more, your entitlement to childcare will be slashed. You get a very low work allowance of £440, I think, and then anything above that is 55p out of the pound. There is no saving up for a special treat. There is no working more hours and saving up for a special treat, because next month your wage comes in and then, the month after, your universal credit will go down.
Yes, I agree that under the old system people faced huge back payments and things like that, and that was part of the motivation with universal credit, but what you are doing is making people think, “What is the point? I won’t work extra hours. I won’t strive because I am just going to be penalised”. All the elements interact with each other. You have childcare, housing and children; none of them is exempt from the work taper. Do you get what I mean?
There is the rigidity of the system. Childcare providers have to be registered. Some holiday clubs, for example theatre clubs or any type of provision, are not always registered. In Wales it is CIW; in England it is Ofsted.
This is a funny example. My son goes to a new holiday club this summer in Cardiff. I cannot name it because it has over 100 branches in the UK. In England, it has to register with Ofsted. If I lived in Bristol and he was going to that holiday club in Bristol, I would get some sort of contribution from universal credit for the childcare. Because we have different registration rules in Wales, I get nothing because it does not have to have a CIW number. Make that make sense.
There are also issues with SEN provision. It is very different in Wales from in England. I firmly believe that, if you want to eradicate child poverty, certain things need to be at a central level and not devolved. Childcare registration should centrally come from UK Government. SEN provision should centrally come from UK Government, because we see all these differences in the devolved Governments and people are being discriminated against because they are in Wales and they have less rights than, say, someone in England, or someone in England can access funded childcare and someone in Wales cannot.
Universal credit is a very complicated system. Even some of the staff you speak to do not fully understand it. You have an element, if your child has DLA, called carer’s element. I have spoken to someone on universal credit who told me I could not have that even though my son had DLA because I worked full time. It is not actually true. I consider myself very savvy, and I did not have my full entitlement for two years. I think I am quite switched on; that is just me. That must be happening time and time again.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I mentioned the childcare situation. When I became employed, the issue was that it was particularly difficult for me to find work. As I said, the system is designed more as a sanction to try to get you into work. Luckily my parents were able to scrape some money together and pay for it, but I had basically gone suddenly from a situation where universal credit would reimburse me for 85% of the cost to zero. If I had not been able to get that money together, then I would have had to pull my children from the afterschool club at their primary school. Then, when I go back into work, I would have to try to find them a place, but that would be oversubscribed because there is a waiting list.
There are two things about that. First, from an Education Committee perspective, it is not a child-centred system, because you are stripping the children out and then saying, “You have to go to a completely different club with different friends” and whatever. Inevitably, questions then get asked as well. “How come you could not go to the afterschool club any more?” “My dad lost his job”.
From a work and pensions perspective, it did not help in finding a job because you would not be able to say to people, “I know I can work between 9 am and 4 pm because I can pick them up at 4.30 pm. I can drop them off in the morning at the breakfast club”. The reality is that you would be able to say, “I don’t really know what childcare I can get”. If that is you and another candidate, they are obviously going to pick the other candidate.
This stripping away of the childcare because you are unfortunate enough to have lost your job is not a healthy system for getting people into work or for children.
Tayyaba Siddiqui: I just want to chip in; I was working for the NHS and I have two degrees. My son said to me, “You have two degrees and you are not working”. No disrespect, but, when you are not working and you go to the jobcentre, the DWP does not know what job it can offer me regarding the NHS. There are some courses that are expensive but would upgrade my CV. If it is a £500 fee but it is going to upgrade my CV and give me more chances to get a job in the NHS, they do not know; they just refuse, and they signpost you to the free courses. I am already overqualified for that. It seems like a trap. For me, I say it a lot, but it is the hope that the ventilators are about to be switched off.
Sahar Khan: I have three points. I agree with everything that everybody said. There is the inflexibility of the workplace, including the government sector and the private sector. For single parents, it looks like the workplace is not meant to be. Either you can be a parent or you are working. You cannot choose both.
It feels like catching your tail when you are earning. You get a reduction on your council tax, but then you start working. That is taken, and then you have to arrange the money to pay for the childcare up front. Then later on you are getting it. It is a lot of investment going in there.
In the end, when you look at the numbers, it does not make sense. You are paying more and you have not even earned that much, but you have given all that burden and pressure to keep up with the costs because you are working now.
Also, transportation to and from work in a lot of places is not very accessible, especially when you are dropping off the kid and you have to be at work at a certain time. You cannot do it.
Rachel Luke: I agree with everything that has been said. I just want to talk about the summer holidays situation as a working single parent. It seems really messy, although I know that there is this fund available; I think it is called the holiday and food fund.
Darren Paffey: It is holiday activities and food.
Rachel Luke: Yes. It seems like every year it gets a bit more stingy. For example, if you are working full-time hours and you cannot take any time off during the summer holidays, you do not have full cover. I get it; it is meant to be a help, but, with the expense and the difficulty obtaining good, consistent childcare, a lot more could be done with that.
At the moment, we get 16 sessions, which equates to 16 days of state-funded holiday club childcare. Of that, it is about a four-hour period throughout the day. I do not know anyone who works four hours during the day and still has time to pick their child up.
We are not given the cover that we need, basically. It would be from 10 am until 2 pm, 11 am until 4 pm or something like that. I am currently looking for another job. I am in a similar position to Jonny. How do I tell people, “I don’t really know what my childcare situation is going to be over the next six or seven weeks”? It has put me at a real disadvantage and it makes me feel quite scared, but I do not know what we can do with that. It needs to be extended.
Q129 Peter Swallow: Jonny, I will ask you this question, and I am sure others will have views as well. As a fellow Berkshire resident, one of the things that I find when I talk to people in government about tackling poverty is this perception sometimes that the data shows that for an area like Newbury or Bracknell, or other parts of the country, because we are relatively affluent, poverty does not deeply affect people in our communities. You have spoken about how high house prices are one of the things that affect you. What is your lived experience of, if I can put it very crudely, struggling in an area where lots of people think that nobody struggles?
Jonathan Paul Roberts: Housing is the biggest element because you are getting quite a lot of money, notionally, from the Government. I understand that it is a huge expense, but that is reflective of the fact that the rents are so extraordinarily high. Like I said, the local housing allowance is almost like one bedroom less than it should be in terms of the realities of what it can provide for you.
The other thing is in terms of availability of housing. I do not know what those figures are worked out on in terms of the local housing allowance, percentiles and things, but my daughter has turned 10, so by government guidance she should have her own separate room because my son is seven. If you look for a three-bedroom place in Newbury, you will not find anything anywhere close to what local housing allowance can afford, and I cannot afford to move. I am claiming it for the three-bed because that is how it works automatically; it is not like I put in a claim. You get a three-bed allowance, but it is only able to support you to afford two beds.
That is probably the biggest thing. We are underhoused, so to speak, in terms of our rooms allocation situation. Obviously, she is getting towards puberty, to be honest; I have tried to give her her own room, but it has meant my son having to stay in the same room as me. That is the reality of what that looks like.
The other thing I would say is about the education situation. I have also worked in a school, so I know a bit about this. I know that, in some places where there is a lot of poverty, schools build in the pupil premium and it is a cultural thing. The pupil premium is definitely, from my experience, treated sort of like, “Bless them, they are the pupil premium kids”. They do not really know what to do support-wise, but they try to give some support. Because it is such a small minority of people—my children would not be eligible for it—a lot of poverty is being missed in schools.
When they extended the free school meals to all of us on universal credit, I thought, “That is brilliant. Now there will be some recognition of pupil premium”, but of course the pupil premium has not moved in line with that extended eligibility.
Within the pupil premium system, there are already two tiers, because there is the armed forces element and there is the poverty element, to put it crudely. I guess it is about money at the end of the day, but, if they extended the armed forces element—obviously, call it something different—to all of the extra eligible people when they extended free school meal eligibility, it would only be a small pocket of money towards our children, but you would be making a cultural shift in the school, because suddenly a lot more people on the register would be showing up as pupil premium. Schools would then have to go, “Okay, those children also might need support”, whereas at the moment schools are blind to what the children are growing up in.
Q130 Darren Paffey: I am interested in getting people’s views on the child poverty strategy that has been introduced. You might be aware that it includes measures such as the scrapping of the two-child limit, measures around breakfast clubs, limiting school uniforms, increased minimum wage, childcare, et cetera. There are lots of different elements.
From your experience, how do you see that helping you and your families in your situations?
Ella-Mae Michalski: I would start off by saying that, to his credit, Sir Keir Starmer has left a fantastic legacy by being one of the first in a very long time to pay attention to the child poverty strategy. He has delivered it in a way that is fantastic and well collaborated, with lived experience at the heart of it. That is why we are here today.
For example, something that has positively impacted my family, along with many others as well, is that we will be in and among the first cohort of families to receive free school meals from September onwards for the new academic year because of the widening eligibility criteria. The implementation of this will take a substantial pressure off many people who are battling rising food prices. The anticipated 5.7% increase in food inflation this year will hit low-income families particularly hard, so this measure will be fantastically welcome by many.
One thing I feel really passionately about, however, is the stigma around the term “free school meals”. Free school meals are not a handout; they are essentially a vital necessity to set children up for a healthy day. The wording “free school meals” needs to be changed; it has to be re-addressed because, even from the days when I was a child, there was a stigma around free school meals. That has not gone away and we need to address that.
Rachel mentioned the expansion of the holiday activities and food—HAF—scheme. It is wonderful to see that there are so many additional activities for children to do. A problems that I have found, particularly in the world of the SEND community, is that so often children with additional needs are either not catered to or separated from their peer group. What ends up happening is that low to medium-need children, so huge volumes of children who just probably need light-touch support alongside their neurotypical peers, are completely uncatered to.
While it is wonderful that we have the expansion of the HAF scheme, following on from the mainstream model, which is about mainstream education being as accessible as possible, we then need to mirror that in the HAF scheme; otherwise it is completely pointless.
The other thing that is really positive, which has been fantastic, is that the strategy also mentions the positive step of ensuring that newborns are discharged from hospital to suitable accommodation. To use myself as an example, when my daughters were discharged from intensive care on 24-hour home oxygen, we were moved into a property with mice, rodents and black mould, which was a severe health and safety risk. A measure such as this would have directly impacted families like mine, so I am really pleased to see that it will enable families to have a better start in life. Those are a few of the takeaways from the strategy from my perspective.
Q131 Chair: Caroline, what is the experience in Northern Ireland?
Caroline Rice: With the experience of Northern Ireland, the childcare strategy is brilliant and it is to be celebrated that the two-child limit was lifted. It does not have an impact on me because I only have the one child, but I would like to see it addressed across the UK.
Within Northern Ireland, there are no holiday schemes. I did see recently that there is a bit of a discount with some schemes, but the schemes where I live are quite expensive. We live rurally. There is more accessibility in urban areas and they are cheaper.
Free school meals for the schoolkids are not available in Northern Ireland. We have seen a 20% increase in the cost of school meals in January this year. Regarding food costs, again, we pay higher for our food rurally, but there are no allowances for that.
Our schools just recently had a review of school uniforms. They are still very expensive, and the grant is minimal. Even without the grant, it is still quite expensive; they are still pushing for quite expensive blazers, and young girls are still not allowed to wear trousers.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done within Northern Ireland. I would like to see more of that addressed within Northern Ireland and more accountability in holding Stormont to account in terms of addressing those needs.
Q132 Steve Darling: Thank you all for coming today. It is really helpful. There are two areas I just wanted to cover. I just wondered whether anybody else wanted to unpack areas where there are gaps in the strategy. Also, I would just welcome some reflections on targets for levels of child poverty reduction and whether you feel that should be built into the scheme. Any reflections on that from anyone would be really helpful.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: There is a bit of a missing piece around childcare. The biggest missing piece is around housing. With childcare, I have mentioned some of the issues already. If you try to do a master’s degree, you do not get support in the same way that you do for doing an undergraduate or a teacher training qualification.
When I was a trainee teacher, I was under the Student Finance England system for childcare. It is the same principle as universal credit, with 85% paid for and 15% paid back to you. The difference is that it was a much better system. A different part of Government is doing something much better. It is similar to the tax-free childcare system, as I understand it. I have not used it, but your provider registers for you with Student Finance England. They invoice Student Finance England and pay 85% up front, and then I get invoiced for the remaining 15%. It is much more manageable.
The way childcare works under universal credit is that I have to pay 100% up front each month. Then notionally I keep that money aside, when I get the 85% back, to contribute towards the next month’s 100%. The reality is that, first, that creates a budgeting issue for families on low income. Second of all, childcare fluctuates. There might be providers out there who do a monthly fee, but many providers will charge you for that month. May has a half-term in it, so I will get back my 85% from May, but I have to pay 100% for June, which has no half-term. It is four and a half weeks. March is a particular problem if there is no Easter.
In an ideal world, we would move to 100%, which the Institute of Fiscal Studies says will only cost an extra £200 million. To me, that would be an awful lot of money, but in Government terms I believe that is the kind of thing they find down the back of the sofa. It could be done, but even if that cannot be done for, whatever reason, at least move to the same model that is used in another part of Government, where the provider invoices.
The other thing that would benefit from a work and pensions perspective is that every month we have to upload evidence of our childcare costs with screenshots of the receipts, and then you get an email back saying, “It doesn’t show the dates though”. Okay, so I will give another screenshot of the dates that were allocated.
The fraud element that that is there for is understandable, but it would not exist if the providers were invoicing the Department instead. You have taken away the fraud element, and you have taken away the stress on me of having to upload in time, because if I do not upload in time I do not get paid this month. That is a childcare bureaucracy point.
The other thing is about housing. You talked about the local housing allowance, and I have talked about my own situation. I know we are three Prime Ministers on now, but Prime Minister Johnson at the time said that he was going to extend the housing element to mortgage repayments. That never came to pass. You just get the interest and the scheme that is available.
I am renting, as I said, but it would be transformational, because it would mean you could go to a lender with confidence and say, “This is how much universal credit I will get as well as my own net income”. On the margins of where you might be able to get into shared ownership, for example, and start building your life up in that way, it would really make a massive difference, but the system basically traps you in renting, which is bonkers from a government perspective, because renting is often more expensive than mortgages, even with current high interest rates.
Of course, as you pay off the mortgage, the mortgage comes down to zero eventually, and the Government support would therefore go down and down to zero, whereas instead you are signing up to pay for my rent for the next 30 years, which seems a bonkers way of doing things. Those are the two biggest elements for me, but there might be others.
Q133 Damien Egan: I just want to ask a small one on the housing element. Does anyone who is in the private rented sector have experience of trying for local authority housing? Obviously, the housing waiting lists are longer and different in different places. I would be interested in that experience.
Samantha Richards: Yes, I am used to that. In Cardiff, there are 10,000 people on the waiting list. I got told by the council that I could join the register but, because I was in a private rental, I would not be a priority and I would probably be waiting 20 years.
Now, let us say I was served a section 21 and the council were satisfied that I had not deliberately made myself homeless. That can include if you fall behind with your rent; they will see you as deliberately making yourself homeless.
If I had got to that stage, I would have had to have waited until the bailiffs turned up at my door, with a child, and people are staying in hotels for six to 12 months. I will be honest with you. You do not go from private rental without going through staying in a hotel room for months on end or wherever. I know not to be ungrateful, but nobody really wants to be in a hotel room with small children and no access to washing to wash clothes or ability to cook. That is the only option I know of where people nowadays are getting up the priority lists.
Unless something catastrophic happens and you are served a section 21 and left with no alternative, the councils are actively telling people before it gets to that stage to go and look in the private rentals. They have a list of landlords and they offer to pay a bond. They say, “If the bond is a problem, we will pay the bond for you”, because there is no availability.
Yes, social housing and lifelong tenancies are brilliant, but look at what you have to go through to get to it. People seem to think that you just go, “I will sign up for the housing list”, and then a couple of months later you get a little phone call. You are not given an option either. People who are unfortunate enough to have to go and stay in the hotels are given one option. They say, “Do you like this?” “No, it’s not near my family”. “Okay, you can go off the housing list because you have intentionally made yourself homeless again by refusing that”.
Q134 Damien Egan: If I may just ask the quickest follow-up, not to put words in your mouth, but what do you think would be a proper strategy? If there was confidence in the council house building programme nationally, would that make a difference in terms of child poverty and families on low incomes?
Samantha Richards: I will be honest with you. You have such huge waiting lists for council housing because the private rental system is so high and people cannot afford it. You have these two problems that work hand in hand. You have young people. In Cardiff, a one-bedroom flat is £800 to £1,000. The average take-home minimum wage is £1,800. You have these two issues and you cannot solve one without solving the other.
We cannot just always rely on social housing. It is not feasible for building to be at those levels. You need to make private renting more affordable. Some people are perfectly happy to rent privately for a little bit if they do not have children, save up money for a deposit and then go on to the mortgage that way, but at the moment people are going into social housing because there are no private rentals that they can afford if they are on benefits.
The councils have a duty of care. They cannot allow someone to take a private rental if they are not going to pass the affordability check, because that is setting someone up to fail. Then that person will have to move towards social housing with lower rent costs. You have this thing where you cannot just fix one; you have to fix them both and make them work together in tandem.
It is a recent thing in the last 20 years where the local housing allowances have been so inadequate. They used to adequately cover it.
Damien Egan: When I was growing up, they would take the average, so whatever the median was. In the late 2000s, they cut it down to the 30th, and then it got frozen from 2010.
Q135 Chair: Sahar, do you think the Government should have child poverty reduction targets?
Sahar Khan: Yes, definitely. I would like to share the experience from Scotland as well. The child poverty strategy plan in Scotland has legal binding, which was UK-based earlier but then England removed it. That provides you with accountability. People who are responsible for applying the strategy will be thinking that there will be evaluation and accountability. If not, then it is just some words on paper and they think, “I will do what I want to do”.
Can I go back to his question as well about the discretionary payment that we used to get before?
Chair: Yes, of course.
Sahar Khan: If LHA is very low, then earlier you could get some help from the council in terms of what they used to call a discretionary payment. Now councils are overstretched; you cannot even get that help any more. It is a huge gap that you need to fill in with your private renting. It is killing people.
Chair: There is a new thing called the crisis fund that councils should have. They have merged two budgets together for people who are in real need.
Caroline Rice: I know I am not down for this, but can I just address the targets? As a person in Northern Ireland, it is hugely important that Westminster addresses targets and sets them, because, in my opinion, that will hold devolved Governments to account in terms of what they are actually doing to address poverty within their own nation.
Practically also, in addressing child poverty, it is not just about money; it is about services. It is about children being able to access their dentist when they need it, and not having to travel 100 miles to an NHS hospital. It is about being able to get the doctors’ appointments where we are. If you cannot get in in the morning, you do not get an appointment. You cannot make an appointment for two weeks ahead of time. It is about getting services for the children. At the minute, our community groups are being underfunded as well. It is not just about money; it is about the practical resources.
Q136 Chair: Does everybody think that about targets? Is there a common view that target would help?
Samantha Richards: I believe that the child poverty strategy should have targets that are measurable, because it is only through analysis and scrutiny that you can see what is working and what is not.
As children are our future, we must make sure the child poverty strategy succeeds. This Government should be applauded. They have made significant, huge leaps in tackling child poverty, such as with the removal of the two-child cap limit that Changing Realities talked about and consulted with the Government on, but we need to keep the momentum going.
As I said before about the foundations, we have some of the basics. You have a really strong basic framework. We need to fill in our foundations in our house in the child poverty strategy. That is removing the benefit cap. That is investment in social security, not freezing benefits because inflation is very high. Families with no recourse to public funds are excluded from childcare and things like that. Their children might become citizens, and they are not being offered the same enriching experiences that, say, my child might be offered in the summer with the HAF provision.
That means action on housing costs. People on low incomes do not want to have loads of money and have everything done for them. You want the stability there so you can make good choices for your family. You want to be able to have an adequate house that is adequately heated. You want to be able to feed your child properly. You want to not be saving up all year to pay for the summer holidays. We are not talking about five-star holidays; we are talking about a little caravan holiday.
You have your framework with what you have done, and you really should be applauded for that. That is amazing, but, with all the extra things that we have talked about today, it is just filling in that foundation so we are not papering over the cracks.
To me, yes, expanding free school meals and breakfast clubs is brilliant, but in the primary school that my son went to the breakfast club was not used by the working parents. The school let the parents who were in deep poverty use it. It limited those spaces because those were the parents who needed it. They were struggling to feed their children. Do you know what? We did not mind. We were like, “Yes, fair enough. I have a full-time job. I am not going to take your place. You are struggling to feed your child”.
We are just papering. We need to get the foundations right so we are not spending money on just papering over permanent cracks that are just going to get bigger.
Chair: Those are powerful points, Sam. Thank you so much. We are going to move on now. Jodie has a question to Jonny first.
Q137 Jodie Gosling: I do. We have heard a lot about the complexity of the system and being able to navigate it when you are time-poor and fatigued. Did you manage to engage with the public activities around the strategy? Did you feed into the child poverty strategy? If so, what made it worth while for you?
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I probably would not have engaged with the child poverty strategy if I was not involved with Changing Realities. I would not necessarily have known it was happening. I would know how you could write a response or whatever, but I would not necessarily have thought that my voice, among potentially thousands and all these charities, thinktanks and things, would be taken with any serious weight. Being involved with Changing Realities was a game-changer, and I think many of the people sat around this table would agree.
One of the amazing things was that about 20 of us got the chance to meet the Childcare Minister and the Early Years Minister at the time. We sat around the room and talked about some of these issues. We certainly got across the two-child cap as a collective. Again, it would not have affected my family. A lot of that pressure paid off in terms of the biggest change that came in the strategy.
There were still lots of things that I raised, such as the specific thing about childcare and the different systems, that did not come through at all. In that meeting, the Childcare Minister at the time said afterwards, “That is a really important point. I don’t understand why we are not doing that. I am going to take it away and speak to officials”. There was then a reshuffle, and alas it did not make its way through to the strategy.
There was enough in the strategy. A number of us were asked to write the foreword for the strategy, which we were glad to do, but I would make the point that in that foreword we did explicitly say, “This is the foundation. It is a stepping stone towards reducing child poverty, not the final deal”.
The biggest issue for us—thank you for inviting us because this is exactly what we should be doing—is how parents stay involved in making sure it happens in the way it should, addressing any kinks in the system that are not foreseen, because there will be some, and thinking about what we need to do next. A huge step was taken with the two-child cap, but I feel like there is an element of, “Look at the size of that reduction. Wow, a reduction of that size has never been done before. We are done for this Parliament”. I do not think that should be the case. That is the main thing.
There is one thing that I would say about engagement with people with lived experience in general. There was an NHS mantra that was, “No decision about me without me”. That should be the default setting for Government. When you are in a room and you say to a Minister, “This is how a system works within a different part of Government. Why can’t your system be like that one?”, they go, “I didn’t know that happened”. You only get that from lived experience. You do not necessarily get it from the think-tanks. With the greatest respect to those very intelligent people who have been to very nice universities, they do not know.
Chair: Again, those are very good points. Do you want to carry on, Jodie?
Q138 Jodie Gosling: I wanted to explore whether or not other people’s voices have been heard in the strategy and whether or not you have seen your voices reflected in what has come out. Do you feel heard? Do you feel as if you have had an influence? Did anybody else engage with the strategy?
Sahar Khan: Yes, I would say on different levels and at different places. Most of the times it feels like a tick-box practice. For this strategy, it did not feel like one. It felt they were genuinely interested to know what will work, what will not and the lessons. You could see that, whatever the suggestions were, they were part of the strategy. We could see that they were really listening and actively working on trying to create a really nice and working strategy, not a manual or something like that.
Q139 Jodie Gosling: I have a question for Rae. What are the best ways that the Government could engage with parents as they continue to reduce poverty?
Rachel Luke: To echo Jonny, we need to be in the room. Getting it straight from the horse’s mouth is really important. We are the experts by experience. Although all of us have slightly different experiences, that feedback can give you a dynamic view of what is going on on the ground.
Sometimes the ideas are great and the sentiment behind them is great, but how they operate in practical terms is very different. Sometimes there are other things coming up that are unexpected and hit parents hard. It would be good to be able to let you guys know as and when these things are occurring. Fuel bills would be one example.
I really want to point to the elephant in the room. I tend to believe that, although we separate out this thing called poverty into child poverty, fuel poverty and food poverty, it is all the same poverty. We really need to think about addressing what is driving that. I could be wrong, but one of the big ones is wage stagnation. We want to work. We want to support our families. We want to live independent lives. We do not want to be living off benefits and going through all of that. Why are not we being paid enough to do so?
Compared to eight, 10 or 12 years ago, my wages are going nowhere because I pour so much into feeding my child, keeping the lights on and even travel to and from work. Even with everything that has been put in to help me, I still feel like I am falling behind. I want to understand why we cannot be paid enough to get by.
Q140 David Baines: Just following on from this discussion about engagement and poverty in general, particularly the point that was just made there, in the last year or so some politicians and media organisations, when discussing this issue, have used language such as “Benefits Street”, “supporting strivers, not shirkers” and all this sort of stuff, which goes to a very dark place. Would anyone like to share views on that? What would your message be to politicians and newspapers that use that kind of language? How does it affect you? How does it affect the debate? Is it helpful or not?
Sahar Khan: I have one point. A lot of people on benefits are working. That is one thing. There is a big misconception that, if you are on benefits, you are not working. People are working full time, but still they need something, which does not say much about them. It says a lot about the system and cost of living. That is just one point.
Samantha Richards: It is divisive. The Government need to call it out, as you have been, for the hate speech that it is. It is designed to sell newspapers. It is designed to sensationalise things. It is designed to create hostility and hate. It all comes down to money. Somebody wants somebody to click on a headline and increase their profits. It is not helpful. It needs to be called out.
I will be honest with you. I do not tell people that I am on universal credit because you do get stereotyped. People do not see that I only have one income and sadly my son’s dad has passed away. People with mum and dad both working full time think it is not fair. The newspapers whip it up into a frenzy that, if you claim benefits, you are less than them.
David Baines: They create that stigma.
Samantha Richards: My answer to anyone who complains about people on benefits is, “Do you want to go back to Victorian times when people used to die on the street and you would step over them when you go to work?” That is what it is.
When you removed the two-child cap, the behaviour of politicians, not Labour politicians, and people in the media was absolutely appalling. I was literally embarrassed to be from the UK. What our major newspapers and politicians from other parties were saying was shocking. It is to help children. How can you see something so negatively that is helping children? It makes me very emotional. I wrote an article about it for LabourList. It was just awful.
Chair: Thanks for sharing that, Sam.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: Working in a school as I did, I overheard young people using the phrase “benefits class” as a pejorative. I overheard people saying as an insult, “Your mum’s on benefits”. As a teacher, I stepped in at that point when I had heard it close enough to do so. I made a point of addressing it.
It is out there. It might well be something that is worse in areas like where I am, where there is a lot of affluence. It is not helped if it is being used by media or politicians around this agenda, which is squarely focused on people who are unemployed for whatever reason, which in itself is not fair, but, as the point was made, an awful lot of us are working as well.
Before I was made unemployed, before I was struggling particularly, as a trainee teacher and an early career teacher I was still entitled to universal credit. It would have been less, but I was entitled to universal credit because my income was low.
When I told a member of staff that I was on universal credit because they were having a bit of a rant about people on universal credit, they were taken aback and said, “Why on earth are you on universal credit?” I had to explain, “Because they don’t pay teachers enough, frankly”.
Caroline Rice: The language used around it is demoralising and stigmatising. To me, that just adds to the fatigue that we experience on a day-to-day basis, going around on a hamster wheel. We are all sitting here today, and the chances are some of us are going to face some backlash somewhere on social media after this.
Personally, I do not care any more. I work in a school and I have heard similar comments to Jonny about children on free school meals and parents not working. I am quite happy to stand up and say, “I’m sorry. I am working and I am also on universal credit. Stick that in your mouth and do whatever you want with it”. It is not my fault that my wages are not enough to sustain me and my child. It is not my fault that I am a single parent. I did not make that choice, but that is the way it is.
Chair: Thank you so much for sharing that and how you feel. It is really important. Thanks for asking that, David. A lot of people do not appreciate exactly how people can be made to feel.
Q141 Peter Swallow: Another one of the very offensive stereotypes about families who struggle is that they lack aspiration for their children, which I know is not true of anyone in this room, certainly. Tayyaba, could you share with us what your hopes and aspirations are for your children and what support you would like to see to support that ambition?
Tayyaba Siddiqui: Thank you for asking this question. My main hope is that my child grows up healthy, happy and safe with the confidence and opportunities to achieve his full potential. I want him to receive a good education, develop strong life skills and have access to further education, training or employment opportunities, regardless of our family income or situation. I hope he can participate in extracurricular activities, build positive relationships and enjoy the same opportunities as his friends or peers. Ultimately, I want him to become independent, resilient and able to pursue his ambitions and contribute positively to society.
My son wants to be a barrister, so I want this for him too. My son met the Prime Minister last December and told him that one day he will be a barrister, and mentioned that the system does not look after his mental health. Sir Keir Starmer said something very nice. He said, “One day I will see you in the court”. From that day, he said, “I will be a barrister”.
To improve our situation, let children be children. Look after them now so they can look after the country in the future. The support would be flexible employment, affordable childcare, financial support, access to affordable housing in the community and support with education. We have never been on holiday. It is just holding our hands for some time so we can thrive. Local family support policies need to reduce child poverty. Overall, we need a holistic approach. Everybody needs to be working towards the person. That is why they say it takes a village to raise a child.
Sahar Khan: It is just the basics. That is not just for my kid; it is for any other kid in the entire UK. He needs to have a safe space to call home, which is comfortable for him, accessible to his needs and warm enough in winter. We will not talk about summer.
He needs a school that supports his educational needs and additional needs, so he can thrive and not drop out from the school and so he can go to college or universities if he would like or choose a career that he would like and get support to become what he wants to be, instead of crushing him and not supporting him, and then I have to deal with the mental health issues. Whenever he needs any support, the system should be there to support him.
I am there, but I need support from the system as well. It needs to be from top to bottom: from the people who make the policy to the people who implement the policy and the people who are really at the end of it, such as caseworkers, occupational therapists and the other professionals involved in his life throughout his or any other kid’s journey. Whenever or wherever they need support, just provide them with it—the basics first, their educational and mental health needs second. That is it.
Q142 Peter Swallow: Without wanting to stray into another Education Select Committee inquiry, you both mentioned their mental health. Could I ask whether your sons or the children of anyone else around the table enjoy school? Do they enjoy their educational journey? How do the struggles that you guys are facing reflect on their ability to feel like they belong in school, that they enjoy school and that they are able to face any mental health challenges that come along? That is a very big question, sorry.
Tayyaba Siddiqui: In short, mental health is important for everyone. As I mentioned, I suffered domestic violence. My son was bullied and beaten up in his school. I told someone in the NHS, in a very big position, that my son was struggling. She asked, “Is there a pattern?” I did not understand because English is not my first language, but she literally bullied me with the way that she spoke to me. It is very common. It is me and then my son. In year 7—he is now in year 10—he did not want to go to school. He thought everybody was targeting him. Right now he is in year 10. He will be doing GCSEs, but he is struggling to go to school. There is no support from the school. They say, “Send him to school. Send him to school”. The school says, “Attendance is everybody’s responsibility”. The pressure is on the parent only. They say, “You want to work. You don’t want to look after your son’s mental health”.
It comes back to this point: there is no holistic approach. People know your situation, GP, doctor, everybody, but they do not work together. They ask the same questions and we are just stuck in the system. Yes, his mental health is getting worse day by day.
Ella-Mae Michalski: Over the last year I have had to reduce my hours because of a similar circumstance. My child is in year 11. She started GCSEs, but, because of anxiety, she could not go to school. She hated school, could not stand the school uniform and was really overwhelmed. It was just crash and burn.
The school that she goes to has been really good with her and said, “Your child needs crisis”. When I reached out for crisis, they said, “No, not crisis yet. The waiting list is two years”. I was like, “Okay”. I had to stop my job to sit at home with my child, who could not go to school, and try every morning to get them into school. Some days I would get them out of the bed; some days I would get them in the car, but I could not get them out. It was just a drain. Of course, that all took an impact on my health.
They are now back at school but not full time, hence I cannot be back at work full time. They did access some support through CAMHS, but that CAMHS worker’s contract was not renewed and it was basically, “Do you want to come back to somebody else?” “No”. They had made that relationship with that person and they were gone. “No, I’m not doing it again”.
They will not engage with school because it is like, “I’m at school to be at school. I don’t trust these people to tell them why I’m afraid to come here. I don’t trust that they will keep it within those four walls”. There is nobody now, but we are getting there slowly but surely. With me being in a school, I can address a lot of those needs because I am familiar with what goes on. If I was a parent outside that school, I would not have a clue.
Q143 Peter Swallow: To state the blooming obvious, when you have to take time out of work to look after your child who is struggling, that again exacerbates your ability to earn.
Caroline Rice: Yes. The school that I work in—I will be honest—has been brilliant for me. I do not work in the same school that my child goes to, but the school that I work in was really good. I was working with kids who were doing their GCSEs and who had SEN needs as well. There was an overwhelming guilt. “I need to be at home with my child, but I need to be at school to help these children get through their GCSEs”.
I need to be at work, but I need to be at home. I was on sick initially, so I was on full pay. It was like, “I’m not sick. I need to be at work”. It was like, “If you come back, your hours are going to be cut because you can’t come back full time, and you are going to have a real financial hit there”. It was like, “I need to do it because I can’t live with this guilt of being torn”.
My child was going back to school a wee bit. Thankfully, my child was at a really good school and I was with a really good employer. Other than that, I probably would have had to leave my job.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: Just going back to your aspirations point that you started with, all of us around the room, MPs included, put our children first. If my son wants to learn a musical instrument, it is incredibly expensive to have sessions, but I will find the money to do it. It is the same for school trips. The school is fantastic. It does great school trips. It does payments and instalments for these residential trips, which seem to be every year now. I want him to go to Beavers, et cetera, so we will put money in for that. Around school trips and musical instruments specifically, I feel like there should be more support for parents on low incomes for that kind of thing. That is aspirational, is it not? There is no extra support there.
There is one thing that I would say about the people premium thing. If schools were aware that these people were living in poverty or on a low income, including this wider group, because everyone on universal credit gets free school meals, you would see a step-change in culture in schools. Schools generally want to help children who are growing up in poverty. I have seen the support they try to put in for people on pupil premium, but they do not know that there are an awful lot of people in their schools, particularly in areas such as Newbury, who are eligible for universal credit and growing up in poverty or poverty adjacent. They are treated exactly the same as everyone else in terms of levels of support and things. It would be a big cultural shift to get that recognised. Pupil premium turns up on registers. Teachers know. They make a special effort around it.
On the mental health point, particularly mental health for us as adults, when I was unemployed, I was getting mental health support. The mental health support that I got through Talking Therapies in Berkshire also provided an employment specialist. They were fantastic. It was someone who works in HR, who was either working for them or giving up her time to do it. I do not know how it works. She had six phone interviews with me where she took my CV and came back with edits of the CV, how it could be changed and improved. She talked about prep for job interviews. I told her one specific one that I really wanted and was going for, and she tried to give me prep for that. She went away and did research on the organisations and things. I just thought to myself, “This is fantastic support. Why did I have to have a mental health problem to get it?”
Q144 Damien Egan: Where is the best place for support to come from? Maybe it depends on the type of support, but is it national Government, local authorities or advocacy groups? Could you reflect on the experiences of what worked well for you?
Caroline Rice: It needs to be a bit of everything. There needs to be a holistic approach. It definitely needs to involve local government and local councils. However, I would like to see some accountability when money is devolved out. “Okay, we have devolved this money; you have this money. What have you done with it?”
Within Northern Ireland there has been a lot of talk about childcare. We have a discretionary childcare payment, which was a good thing that they developed in Northern Ireland. If you are on universal credit and you are starting a new job, if you have been off a couple of months and you are going back to work, or if you have a child and you go back to work, you go to your universal credit. It is discretionary. You have to go to your work coach and you apply for it, and they will pay your childcare up front for the first month. You do not pay that back. When you get your next childcare payment, that goes up front again.
It helps with other costs, such as clothing for a new job or petrol expenses. I have had to apply for it myself because as a classroom assistant previously I was not getting paid during the summer. I was going back to work for six weeks with no income. I was like, “I can’t justify these costs, especially with the price of stuff”.
Again, with the nuances that we have in Northern Ireland, I would definitely like to see some real accountability there in terms of money being put in. It could possibly be ringfenced. If you are putting money in for child poverty, let us ringfence that to make sure it is spent there.
I would like to see more rural proofing, so that money is spent in rural areas. Local councils will know the needs of local areas and could get that money out to people. I would like to see fewer barriers, fewer applications and less having to justify, “I’m struggling here”, proving evidence of universal credit or going through those barriers to get support.
Samantha Richards: Can I answer that as well? The child poverty strategy needs to come from central Government and it needs to be a universal approach in all the devolved nations, so that everyone has equal access to the opportunities and no one is disadvantaged because they live in Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland and they do not do that.
Local government is amazing for providing initiatives to tackle poverty that are area specific. For example, where I live in Wales we have issues with higher rates of deprivation in the south Wales valleys. The issues that are facing these communities are very area specific. They require local government targeted initiatives.
When you talk about strategies to tackle child poverty, because it is so important, it needs to all come from central Government. It needs to be universal and everyone needs to have equal access wherever they live in the country.
Q145 Damien Egan: I have one final question. If you had a question to Ministers, what would that question be?
Ella-Mae Michalski: There are a lot of opinions in the room We could probably all agree that the definition of poverty has changed dramatically over the years from being synonymous with hunger and the Charles Dickens imagery of what we thought of it as to a more easily disguisable and camouflaged problem. You might be sitting next to somebody who is considering getting an air-con unit in their five-bedroom property versus somebody who cannot afford the most basic fan to keep their newborn cool in a heatwave.
The UK is battling a market economy that is crippling adults and families with rising living costs, and subsequently this is leaking down to vulnerable children. The fact that support packages have been put together in the CPS is brilliant and it would be a welcome relief, but the problem is that the end service user is so often not familiar with the grants. For example, take the crisis and resilience fund and its predecessor the household support fund. People just do not know that it exists. As a result, families are missing out on essential support.
My question to Ministers would be, “Can they let us know what they would do to ensure that vulnerable members of society are aware of these funding pots and that the most vulnerable people are reached?”
Q146 Chair: That is a really good point. Thank you so much. What would anybody else like to say to Ministers if they were sitting here?
Samantha Richards: I have a couple. Can Government Ministers give assurances that future initiatives to reduce fuel poverty—thank you for getting rid of the ECO4 grant—will be regulated and that private companies will not profit off them?
Chair: That is noted.
Sahar Khan: I just have one. Let us work together. It is not for us; it is not for them. It is for the country’s future. Let us work together and build a great future together.
Chair: That is an excellent message.
Tayyaba Siddiqui: I would say, “No disrespect, but what is stopping you from helping or supporting us?”
Caroline Rice: We talk a lot about equality. I would like to see a lot of talk about equity as well. Equality across the board does not look the same. Some people need a lot more, especially in rural areas where we are far away from things. For example, universal credit is doing a review of my claim at the minute. They have tried to ring me three times. They cannot get through on my phone. I have had three appointments. I have had to make an appointment to go and sit in a house that has a landline so that they can talk to me. It is a barrier. That is why I talk about equity in terms of our public services, our services and stuff. We need to get people to that level where equality kicks in.
Jonathan Paul Roberts: I would just say that I hope they have seen positives out of engaging with us so far, and I would ask them to try to keep people with lived experience involved in terms of delivering it, seeing what could happen next and developing the next strategy or the next steps to the strategy or policy more broadly, where issues have been raised.
For Government more widely, the default setting should be to engage with people with lived experience when you are designing policy. There needs to be some thought given to how that becomes part of civil service standard practice, whether or not Select Committees have some sort of standard practice around that as well.
Credit needs to go to Changing Realities for the way that it has worked as a brokerage system for getting people with lived experience here. There is stuff that goes unseen. There is almost this approach where we have a space to vent with them; we have a space to share ideas and thoughts collaboratively; and then we turn up with Ministers or Select Committee members and hopefully we come across more coherent, less rant-y and more focused on the issues that matter. That is an important part in terms of engagement with people with lived experience going forward. We need to support and fund those organisations that can facilitate that.
One thing that I have noticed is that there are non-executive boards for every Government Department. When you look at who is on them, they are all people who have worked for KPMG or PwC. All credit to them, but there is no one with lived experience on those non-exec boards. If you put people with lived experience on those non-exec boards, there would be a constant pressure to think, “What have we done in terms of listening to people with actual experience?”
Chair: Yes, policies that are relevant to the people they are meant to serve. Thank you so much, everyone. Caroline, Jonny, Sahar, Sam, Rae, Ella and Tayyaba, thank you so much. Thank you to all the members as well. I am really grateful to you. It has really been a rich tapestry that you have woven this morning, and we will make sure that the points that you have made are incorporated into the report. You are absolutely right: co-production is the way forward. I am going to close the session now.