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Cost of Living: Support for Young People

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Ali. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) for introducing this important debate. When we talk about the cost of living crisis, the impact on young people and children often gets missed. They are an incredibly important group, and they will grow up with their life chances stunted and their health impacted if we do not consider their needs.

In preparation for this debate, I reached out to some youth groups in my constituency to ask how their young people are coping. The Urban Youth Project in Pollokshields got back to me with a response from one of its young people:

“As a student who lives on his own and has a part time job to keep food on the table, how much longer can I afford to juggle both these responsibilities? Sooner or later I’ll need to choose, do I continue with University or get a full time job? At my age (20) I should be able to study in university as I worked hard to get in.”

It is worrying that people are now choosing whether to continue their studies or give up and just work, because they are finding it hard to do both. Another young person said:

“It’s all very well budgeting for rising costs if you earn in the first place. How much higher will these costs rise? My parents are stressed, my brothers and sisters are feeling the change in spending, it’s not nice. My parents both work hard and they are talking about second jobs. Does anyone in parliament need to consider that option? Didn’t think so.”

There are choices made in this place that impact people. Many of the people making those decisions and choosing those policy routes never have to live with them. A piece of Barnardo’s research out today said that 49% of its frontline workers have supported children, young people and families who have had to choose between feeding themselves or paying their bills in the past year. That is nearly half of people facing that choice, and it is only going to get worse.

I will talk about some of the ways in which this is affecting people, and some of the choices that families in my constituency are having to make. In particular, I note a report from Migrant Voice about visa fees. For many families, each application costs £2,500 every two and a half years. If a family is having to bear that cost every two and half years, there are choices that they are not able to make for their children. One witness that Migrant Voice spoke to as part of its work said:

“I can’t feed my kids due to the visa fees and borrowing money.”

At the very least, the Government could suspend those fees for children and give folk a break, because it is really quite difficult. That is a choice that the Government have. They choose to add those costs for families as part of the immigration system. It means that those young people do not get the same choices as their peers at school. Furthermore, there could be two identical families with parents working identical jobs and children of exactly the same age, but the Government deliberately put one family at a disadvantage by giving them no recourse to public funds status. Those families are not entitled to the same benefits and they have to work twice or three times as hard to put food on the table as their neighbours. They deserve support. It is a system that is basically unfair, and I see many cases like that through my constituency office.

This situation is not news because the then UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, noted in 2019 that UK Government policy changes since 2010 were unravelling two decades of progress on child poverty. The UK now has the worst poverty and inequality levels in north-west Europe. In the UK, 11.7% of people are living below the poverty line. That is significantly higher than in countries such as Iceland at 4.9%, Denmark at 6.15% or Belgium at 8.2%. These are deliberate choices leading to deliberate impacts on people.

We did not hear much from the Government yesterday about what exactly they intend to do about this situation. We have the largest real-term cut to benefits in a single year. We have families struggling to get by on the national minimum wage, and young people are significantly disadvantaged by the way in which it is staged. An under-18 or an apprentice is entitled to only £4.81 an hour. In comparison, a 23-year-old starting the same job on the same day is entitled to £9.50 an hour. It is age discrimination baked into Government policy, and I would be interested to hear why the Minister thinks discriminating against young people in this way is justified. Universal credit also deliberately discriminates against young people, and the Government should explain why that is the case.

I could talk for a long time about the Government’s policies and the way in which they impact young people, but I want to highlight a few things that are happening in Scotland, where we have a choice and we are making

a difference to the lives of young people. We have the young person’s guarantee, aiming to connect every 16 to 24-year-old in Scotland to an opportunity, which could be a job, apprenticeship, further or higher education, training programme, formal volunteering or enterprise opportunity, and that opens up opportunities to young people. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) mentioned, we have a greater free school meal entitlement in Scotland. We provide free period products for everybody, not just young people, but certainly that will help young people setting out in the world.

We have launched free bus travel for under-22s, which approximately 930,000 young people in Scotland are entitled to. The scheme could be worth up to £3,000 for a child by the time they turn 18, opening up horizons for young people and making it easier for them to get to work or their studies and to live their lives. This is just the start. Scotland has a vision for how we want to see young people go ahead in the world. We want to be the best country for young people to grow up in. What is holding us back is Westminster. What will give us those opportunities is independence.

6.13 pm