Jodie Gosling

I thank my hon. Friend for her valuable intervention, and I absolutely agree. One challenge is under-skilled children who have left school without the right qualifications. As a result, they experience a lag in getting qualified and being able to access opportunities. In one of my wards, Chilvers Coton, over 65% of households—two out of three—live with one marker of deprivation. The majority of them are defined as living in deep poverty and destitution, and they are not able to meet basic needs. That is not my understanding of the word “eradicate”, and it appears that the strategy that was laid out over a decade ago actually perpetuated significant poverty, rather than eradicating it. Poverty eats into every corner of people’s lives. It drains people and grinds them down, and it makes every aspect of life harder. The physiological and psychological impacts are profound. As poverty has soared, we have seen healthy life expectancy fall by over four years, with cardiopulmonary conditions, diabetes and preventable death statistics among those affected by poverty well above the national average. Poverty strips people of their dignity and their power to shape their lives and livelihoods and those of the people they love. Living in poverty is a full-time job, as people juggle making sure that they can pay their debts, get their kids out, do the daily shopping—which involves having to look for the yellow stickers in the aisles—and deal with the chaos of managing arrears, evictions and sleepless nights, as they worry about how to just get through tomorrow. Despite that, the vast majority of Nuneaton households in poverty still work, with over 60% of affected households having at least one working adult. Poverty is also wasteful. It is expensive; it costs more to live in poverty because people cannot access cheaper supermarkets and might not have the data to order online—