Poverty tsar: Poor could be forced into prostitution

WOMEN in Liverpool could be forced into prostitution by lockdown measures, Whitehall poverty champion dame Louise casey declared yesterday.

She said the end of furlough support for laid- off workers means parents will not be able to buy shoes or enough food for their children.

dame Louise said a ‘ period of destitution’ will follow when the furlough scheme finishes at the end of the month and is replaced with a subsidy that gives workers two-thirds of their normal pay.

She claimed: ‘We are heading into an unprecedented period.

‘We’re already in it and it’s going to get worse. and it needs a more cross-government cross- society response. do we want to go back to the days where people can’t put shoes on their children’s feet?

‘are we actually asking people in places like Liverpool to go out and prostitute themselves, so that they could put food on the table?’

dame Louise is the first major public figure to suggest that poverty means people cannot afford shoes for their children in nearly 40 years. In the early 1980s, david Jenkins, the former controversial bishop of durham, said the poverty inflicted by Margaret Thatcher’s government meant there were two brothers in Sunderland who could not go to school together as their parents could afford only one pair of shoes. The claim was met with widespread mockery and the family was never identified.

dame Louise said in her BBC interview that rishi Sunak’s replacement plans for the furlough scheme would not ‘cut it’.

The current scheme paid those laid off 80 per cent of their earnings – up to a limit of £2,500 a month. From November, the new scheme means those working more than a third of their usual hours will get 77 per cent of their pay, with a Government contribution of up to £697.92 each month. Workers at firms that have to close will be given 67 per cent of their usual salary, up to £2,100 a month.

dame Louise, who was head of Boris Johnson’s rough sleeper task force until august, said the subsidies for the unemployed were ‘not good enough’.

She said: ‘It’s like you’re saying to people, “you can only afford two-thirds of the food that you need to put on the table.” There’s this sense from downing Street and from Westminster that people will make do. Well, they weren’t coping before covid.’

and she also said Mr Sunak’s suggestion for workers in trouble to claim Universal credit was ‘unprecedented’ coming from a Tory chancellor.

dame Louise, 55, has been a highly-placed Government adviser since the early 2000s. Mr Johnson made her his senior homelessness tsar before she quit after the award of a peerage.

However, she is also an occasional loose cannon. In 2005, she delivered an expletive-littered speech to Home office officials and said: ‘doing things sober is no way to get things done.’

‘Put food on the table’