Gareth Snell

I absolutely agree. If the hon. Lady will bear with me, I will come to exactly that point later on. My constituency is often in the top 50 for social and economic deprivation, and we are often wholly dependent on the charitable sector picking up people when they are at their lowest and most in need. Charities often do the really hard work in getting those individuals back to a place where they can even begin to access statutory support services, such are the demands placed on them by the services with which they are seeking to engage. Let me take the example of supported housing. We talk quite rightly about giving people homes, but many of the people in Stoke-on-Trent who access the services that will be impacted by the national insurance contribution increases would not be able to live independently on their own in the months to come if it were not for supported housing. As the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) points out, that has a huge bearing on the acute cost at the presentation of final service. Last Friday, Voluntary Action Stoke on Trent, an excellent organisation run by Lisa Healings and her team, convened a meeting of local charities and the three Members of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent. Lisa helped me by compiling some of the specific impacts that the national insurance increase will have on charities and organisations in my community, and with the indulgence of the Committee, I will refer to some of them so that Members can hear the scale of the challenges that we face. The first relates to the citizens advice bureau in Stoke-on-Trent, which does a phenomenal amount of work. It will see an increase of £150,000 to its national insurance contributions. Although it will be able to mitigate some of that impact, the change will just mean that people wait longer for help, or, perversely, that more people will enter MPs’ caseloads and visit our surgeries because the CAB often signposts to other agencies when it cannot meet demand. The second largest impact I was told about is to the YMCA North Staffordshire, which will see its NI contributions rise by £101,000. That organisation routinely provides homes for young people who would ordinarily find themselves on the street, works with families to ensure that family units can stay together, supports community meal initiatives to bring together different Stoke-on-Trent communities, and does a lot of work on community cohesion, which is a particularly contentious issue in my city. A smaller organisation, Savana, which I must declare is run by my ex-wife, although we are still on favourable terms—