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Mr. David Taylor: The hon. Gentleman is building an impressive charge on selective myopia. However, is he not also revealing amnesia on a grand scale in relation to the proposals on pensions in the manifesto on which his party fought the election? The Liberal Democrats' commitment to pensions was significantly less than ours. Indeed, we have already exceeded our aims in three years of government.
Mr. Foster: The hon. Gentleman is wrong and has selective myopia. He clearly did not read in its entirety our documentation on the additional increases that we would be prepared to make to pensioners over 75 and, indeed, over 80. I urge him to watch this space for further developments.
At least we are developing thinking on giving pensioners even better support. The Conservative party's offer is disappointing. Expert analysis of its recent announcement on pensions shows it to be nothing like the exciting bonanza that Conservative Members would have us believe. In reality, that bonanza amounts to a magical
increase of 43p a week for pensioners, once their free television licences and winter fuel payments have been removed, and reductions have been made in many areas of the budget, with money being taken from the new deal for lone parents and the social fund budget being slashed.The Government's myopia on the north-south divide is even more staggering. The Prime Minister recently sought to persuade us that there is no such divide, despite all the statistics. Disposable income per head in the north-east is almost a third lower than that in the south-east. Seventy-five per cent. of households in the north-east receive some form of welfare benefit, compared with only 63 per cent. in the south. Jobs in the north-east are growing at a rate of 1 per cent., compared with 12 per cent. growth in the south-east, and so on. Today, the Office for National Statistics demonstrated that, whether rich or poor, people in the north of England are more likely to die early than those in the south. Even so, the Prime Minister still wishes to deny the existence of the gap.
Ms Julia Drown (South Swindon) rose--
Mr. Foster: I shall not give way, as I have little time in which to finish my speech.
The Minister referred to housing and expressed concern about keeping elderly people warm. However, what have the Government done about the 5.4 million people living in fuel poverty? They appear to have solved the problem for 1.1 million by doing nothing other than changing a definition. Since their time in opposition, the Government have changed their position and magically removed 1.1 million people from the total of those in fuel poverty. However, millions are still in such poverty and we are not doing enough about that. We could do simple things, such as setting a lower rate of value added tax on house renovation and new build, so that people do not pay the full VAT rate when they try to repair their crumbling buildings.
Finally, on transport, people in rural areas are suffering from many problems, such as closures of shops, post offices and village pubs. The poorest in those areas do not have access to a car and depend on rural transport, but the Government are spending £270 million less on public transport than the Tories were when they left office.
Thinking must be far more imaginative if we are to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor and tackle the poverty of those living in rural and urban areas. The Government promised us that 1999 would be a year of delivery. However, it appears that their cheque is still in the post and, sadly, we must still mind the gap.
6.45 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Ms Beverley Hughes): Whatever the Liberal Democrats' intentions in choosing this subject, I can tell them that Labour Members very much welcome the chance to debate equal opportunities and inequalities in our country because nothing exposes the dividing lines between the political parties more than inequality. It is one of the key lines along which party policy divides, thereby enabling people to see clearly the different values, principles, approaches and prescriptions on which Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat politics are based. Inequality takes us
back to the basic politics that each party stands for. Today we have certainly seen those basic political positions set out in stark contrast, and that is helpful.The Tories, in so far as they even recognise inequality, clearly see it as the natural order and something that they do not have to do very much about--except of course to make it worse, as they did when they were in government. The Liberal Democrats still have the old-style handout mentality. They would give people a crutch but would not tackle the fundamental processes in society that lead to inequality. That is the first-aid approach of sticking on a plaster in the form of extra cash but failing to face the hard choices necessary to remedy some of the causes of inequality.
The Liberal Democrats do not understand that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand--not because we say that they do, but because that is what people want. That is what we want, and people who experience inequality are no different. Cash on its own will not lead to long-term change. People want opportunities that enable them to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than being beholden to a benefits system.
Labour, by contrast, understands the deep-rooted causes of inequality and the fact that it is not one-dimensional because inequality in unemployment and income connects with inequality in health, educational underachievement and housing, and even in the length of one's life. Some Liberal Democrat Members recognise that. Opportunity is not distributed equally in our society, and while some groups have a wealth of opportunity, others have opportunity poverty. For too many people, where they are born, their family and their circumstances at birth are still powerful determinants of where they end up in adult life.
The way to tackle the fundamental change that is needed is therefore the hand-up, not the handout. We must ensure that the systems that we can influence--education, the economy, health and housing--enable all people to grow, to develop and to grasp the opportunities that exist.
The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) was the only Opposition Member to acknowledge the extent of inequality that we inherited after 20 years of Tory Government. Inequality widened and deepened substantially under the Tories. In 1997, the mortality of infants born to unskilled parents was still almost twice that of those born to professional parents. Those in the lower half of the income distribution received a quarter of all total income--which is also the amount that the top 10 per cent. received.
More than three in five children were living in a household where neither parent was in full-time work and where the income was below 60 per cent. of the median. Fewer than one in 10 individuals living in a household headed by people with black, Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi origins were in the top fifth of the income distribution. Local education authorities with high proportions of children eligible for school meals had significantly lower GCSE attainment levels than those with low free-school-meal eligibility. Perhaps the most chilling statistic of all is that an unskilled man had a 20 per cent. chance of surviving past retirement age and seeing something of his old age, while a professional man's chance of doing so was 80 per cent.
Those are not Government statistics; they come from the Office for National Statistics report on social inequalities, which was published last month. Their importance lies in the extent of inequality that they reveal over the period to which they relate and in what inequality means both for people and society. My hon. Friends the Members for Harlow (Mr. Rammell) and for Corby (Mr. Hope) gave some graphic and human detail of what inequalities mean for peoples' lives and how the Government are trying to address them.
The quality of life for each of the individuals and families affected by such circumstances is poorer than it should be or need be. There is a lost opportunity to make a better life for those individuals and their families. The children concerned face an uphill struggle to realise their potential, and many never do so. There is also a lost opportunity for society as a result of the failure to capitalise on the wealth of talent and human resources that is available to us. There is therefore a failure to maximise the growth potential and strength of our economy.
The policy of the Liberal Democrats on inequality has become clearer today, both in the Chamber and from the contributions of the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Inverness, West (Mr. Kennedy) on the "Today" programme this morning. He said that their approach to inequality is, first, that we should be putting more money into state education, welfare, the health service and pensions, for example. Secondly, he said that we should be promoting the liberty and freedom of the individual and liberating the community at the expense of the state. The only sense I can make from that is that Liberal Democrat policy is merely to throw money at problems and then leave matters to sort themselves out.
The right hon. Gentleman's comments this morning on his own experiences were perhaps more revealing. He said:
- I will take you to my own personal circumstances. I went to a local state primary school, a local comprehensive secondary school, the University of Glasgow and then on a Fulbright scholarship in the United States. I did all that on the basis of competing on a fair and equal basis with other candidates.
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