Danny Kruger

May I start by acknowledging the very powerful speeches that we have heard this afternoon from the Members for Glasgow? I would not say that my view is that the people of Glasgow are generally well represented by Scottish Labour, but they have been very well represented in this debate. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Maureen Burke) for the way she highlighted the tragedy of low life expectancy and of poverty in general in her constituency. She mentioned Easterhouse, which occupies a particular place in the pantheon of Conservative thinking about welfare because my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) visited it 20 years ago and had his epiphany about what she described as the context of poverty. He described the interconnectedness of the different factors that drive poverty, which go so far beyond simple income poverty—issues around welfare itself but also joblessness, family breakdown, addiction and so on. The hon. Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) talked about the long consequences of deindustrialisation, which are relevant across our country but especially in places such as Glasgow. He also mentioned the consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East mentioned the stagnation of wages in her constituency. Low wage growth has been a problem across the United Kingdom since that time. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green became the Welfare Secretary in 2010, he introduced reforms that offered real, direct benefits and improvements in welfare and in worklessness. There were 1 million fewer workless households in 2020 than in 2010 and, after housing costs, 1 million fewer people in absolute poverty—100,000 fewer children, 200,000 fewer pensioners and 700,000 fewer working-age people in poverty. The last Government did make a real impact on poverty. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge some of the points that have been made in this debate. The fact is that the fiscal situation that we inherited and the choices made by the coalition Government meant that insufficient support was given to people who needed it, particularly as a result of cuts to local authority budgets and reforms to the DWP budgets. I echo what the hon. Member for Glasgow North East says about the neglect of Glasgow under the SNP since devolution and over the past decade, but I do not agree with her about the value of the reforms being introduced by the new Government. What we have seen is a rushed effort driven by the imperative to balance the books in consequence of a failed Budget last year, leaving a real crisis in the public finances that is now being felt by the recipients of benefits. The Government are balancing the books on the backs of the people least able to sustain that weight.