00:00Labour believe that the way to end poverty is give money to people in poverty and give them more money until they're not in poverty anymore.
00:08This has never worked. The best way to get children out of poverty is for their parents to have jobs and for those jobs to pay well.
00:19But Conservatives also need to challenge bad metrics and wrong assumptions that create a flawed policy.
00:25Let us start with the metric of relative poverty which Labour use.
00:31Relative poverty just tells you what proportion of households earn below 60% of median income.
00:40That is not a measure of poverty at all.
00:43It is a bad measure because in a booming economy, as incomes rise, more people can be classed as being in poverty even though their real income is rising.
00:56And then during a recession, like we had under the last Labour government where GDP collapsed and unemployment went through the roof,
01:04relative poverty fell even though we were all poorer.
01:08So it is not enough for us to challenge the policy.
01:11We have to challenge the thinking that underpins it.
01:14We need something better.
01:16I have long said that Britain is at risk of becoming a welfare state with an economy attached.
01:23While under Labour, there will be an economy to attach for much longer, not the way that we're going.
01:28So in Hackney alone, 1,000 families on benefits with five or six children stand to gain ÂŁ74 million from the lifting of the two-child benefit cap.
01:41Some of those families will be getting more than ÂŁ14,000 a year.
01:47At the budget, income tax thresholds were frozen.
01:51So do you know how many people's thresholds were frozen just to pay for those families in Hackney?
01:58We're not talking about the whole country, just the families in Hackney.
02:02The number we have found is 340,000 taxpayers.
02:09That is where that threshold money is going to come from.
02:13340,000 taxpayers to pay for just 1,000 families.
02:18It's no wonder people are angry.
02:21At the same time that those on the minimum wage are agonising over whether or not they can afford another child,
02:29people on benefits will get paid an extra ÂŁ3,500 for every child they have
02:36because Labour is lifting the two-child benefit cap.
02:41We know that worklessness is often passed down through generations.
02:45Last year, just last year, we saw the fastest increase of children in workless households that we have ever had.
02:55There are now more children in the UK growing up in households where no one works than the entire population of Estonia.
03:05That is correct.
03:06That is correct.
03:06More people, more children growing up in a household where no one works than every single person in Estonia.
03:14This is crazy.
03:15This is crazy.
03:15This is crazy.
Comments