Gareth Snell

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I have sat through many similar debates about communities that have challenges. They are often cathartic but also a Top Trumps of misery in which we each seek to parade around the acute nature of the challenges we face in our communities, not because we want to say how challenging things are in our communities, but because the funding situation the last Government implemented basically meant that unless we could demonstrate that we were the poorest of the poor, the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged, or in some way an outlier from statistical norms, we got nothing. The barrel was left empty or, as described by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Mrs Brackenridge), we had to go through the ignominy of begging bowl politics. We were put into competition with our nearest neighbours, and ended up trying to deprive them of what they needed so that we could get a little more of what we needed. That often led to a lack of joined-up working among communities whereby we could have had structural and societal change in the places we all call home and love and represent. Instead, we ended up trying to demonstrate why Stoke-on-Trent should get something and Derby should not, because we are slightly poorer than Derby is. That has to fundamentally change, because the systemic problems that we face in our communities—which derive from poverty, if we are being entirely honest—are going to be solved only if we are able to come together collectively, with a national programme of investment that targets the root causes of those problems and allows communities to have the skills, resources and opportunities to build themselves up. There is a catalogue of concerns in Stoke-on-Trent: we are first for fuel poverty, routinely in the top 10 for child poverty and food bank usage, and in the last year our Lord Mayor had to raise £50,000 to pay for kids to have beds in our city. That is a symptom of a struggling society—one that was let down by the last Government and one that I hope, under the leadership of the Minister and the new Labour Government, we can start to turn around. We owe it to a generation to tackle poverty head on, so that we do not have more debates about how disadvantaged we all are.