Luke Taylor

The hon. Member highlights the gap between families who are eligible for support and those who just cannot quite make ends meet. Clearly, there is a challenge in making any measure completely comprehensive and ensuring that those in need get the support they require. When Beveridge wrote of his five great evils all those decades ago, he had in mind specifically the kind of poverty that we are talking about here—not just in material terms, but in access to living conditions that make a higher quality of life possible. In the decades since, we have clung to the findings of his report while slowly letting the meaning of those words decay, assuming that things such as freezing to death in one’s own home were evils conquered by the “white heat” of revolution. We were wrong, and squalor, by means of poor housing, insulation and lack of warmth, is back in Britain. It is here, not just in the homes of the poorest and most vulnerable, but all too often in the suburban houses of middle-income families and in urban flats where young people raise kids. That is to say nothing of parts of rural Britain, where very old, pre-modern insulation in housing is still the norm. For too many families and pensioners I meet, across neighbourhoods, ages and even incomes, this is the single most pressing issue in their lives. We do not need a new Beveridge report to tell us that—not that we are wanting for heartbreaking statistics. We can see it with our own eyes and hear it with our own ears, and we feel it in our bones when we knock on doors in our constituencies, time and again, day in, day out. When an issue gets to the heart of people’s quality of life in such a huge way, the state has a duty to cut through the roadblocks, take the lead and do something about it quickly. This Government, however, have taken too long to do so. The announcement last week of the warm homes plan is welcome; we Liberal Democrats have been pushing for it for years. Many organisations working in this space, such as the MCS Foundation, are relieved to see it finally outlined.