Poverty is Xmas Grinch

COVID isn’t the only Grinch that keeps stealing Christmas – it’s poverty too.

When families go hungry, how shameful it is that we have a government which spends its time dodging questions about illicit parties while it presides, like Scrooge, over shameful, Dickensian levels of poverty.

The brutal truth for thousands of families is they didn’t have a party last year – and won’t this Christmas. Not because of Covid, but because they can’t afford to.

The Childhood Trust recently reported cruel benefit cuts and soaring living costs mean many will go hungry and thousands of children will go without presents.

In too many homes, Christmas for mums and dads has become a time of dread – kids watching TV adverts for toys, games and clothes they are unable to afford.

Not to mention food that is too expensive to contemplate.

Nationwide, volunteers have given time and energy to make Christmas 2021 come alive for children in struggling families.

DEPRIVED

But child poverty has grown every year of the last austerity decade. In 2011, Kirkcaldy’s Cottage Family Centre – on my own patch in Scotland – delivered Christmas toys to 100 children recognised as deprived. By 2018 that had risen to over 1,000. This year there were 1,600.

And it is basic needs that have to be met – food, clothes and help with heating bills.

Steak pies have been a favourite Christmas hamper meal, but many families do not now have cookers. So for many, the only hot meal their children can get is fish and chips – and the Christmas gift has to be cold meats that don’t need heating.

The Cottage Family Centre has aimed to ensure no child goes without. Yet local charity will never be enough to make up for the £1,000 a year most families on Universal Credit are losing.

And, yet more shocking, this poverty is so preventable.

More than two out of three local children in poverty are in families with the breadwinner in work. But there are not enough high-paying jobs available in cities and commuter suburbs.

We cannot have another Christmas like this. 2022 must be the year when we reverse child poverty across Britain.