RESPONSE FROM JOHN HYLAND  OF THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Good evening,

Thank you for writing to me about fossil fuels, poverty and food banks.  

Like you I am deeply concerned about rising hardship and the need for food banks in our community and across the country.  

Under this Conservative Government, households experienced the biggest fall in living standards on record. Living standards will be worse at the end of this parliament than they were at the start.

Soaring energy bills, food prices and housing costs are overwhelming millions of families and pensioners. We need a Government with a plan to tackle this cost-of-living crisis, but instead the Conservatives have made it so much worse because they just don’t care. 

Their cost-of-living crisis has plunged a million more people into poverty – many of them children. Tens of thousands of families have been made homeless. Many more families are relying on foodbanks – including some of the hardest working people in our country and people are seeing their living standards plummet at a faster rate than ever before.

Liberal Democrats have set a target of ending deep poverty within a decade, and will establish an independent commission to recommend further annual increases in Universal Credit to ensure that support covers life’s essentials, such as food and bills.

We are the only party that is serious about tackling child poverty. Children do not choose to be born to parents who already have other children and it is unfair to design the system that punishes them.  We would remove the two child limit and lift half a million children out of poverty.  Liberal Democrats would also remove the benefits cap as it disproportionately affects people with higher housing costs, larger families, and those who have family-members with additional needs.

Liberal Democrats would extend free school meals to all children in poverty.

When children are hungry at school, they make less progress, have poorer behaviour and have worse health outcomes.  For some children, a free school lunch may be the only healthy, cooked food they get - or even their only meal of the day.  

Liberal Democrats will also help with the cost of living crisis by:

• Cutting energy bills through an emergency home insulation programme, and provide incentives for installing heat pumps that cover the real costs.

• Bringing down the cost of food for the long term, by increasing the farming budget by £1bn a year, to support nature-friendly farming and food production.

• Supporting renters by immediately banning no-fault evictions and making three-year tenancies the default, with rent increases capped at the rate of inflation during that three-year period.

• Supporting  workers in the social care sector: boosting the minimum wage for care workers by £2 an hour, as a starting point for improved pay across the sector.

• Supporting low-paid apprentices: guarantee they are paid at least the National Minimum Wage, by scrapping the lower apprentice rate.

• Supporting gig-economy workers: setting a 20% higher minimum wage for people on zero-hour contracts at times of normal demand to compensate them for the uncertainty of fluctuating hours of work.

• Supporting motorists in rural and areas who face higher fuel costs by expanding Rural Fuel Duty Relief.

• Supporting all workers when they’re off sick by fixing the broken Statutory Sick Pay system by:

  • Making it available to the more than one million workers earning less than £123 a week, most of whom are women.

  • Aligning the rate with the National Minimum Wage.

  • Making payments available from the first day of missing work rather than the fourth.

Climate change is an existential threat. Soaring temperatures leading to wildfires, floods, droughts and rising sea levels are affecting millions of people directly, and billions more through falling food production and rising prices. Urgent action is needed – in the UK and around the world – to achieve net zero and avert catastrophe.

At the same time, sky-high energy bills are hurting families and businesses, fuelling the cost-of-living crisis. Russia’s assault on Ukraine has reinforced the need to significantly reduce the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels and invest in renewables – both to cut energy bills and to deliver energy security.

The Conservative Government has failed to act with anything close to the speed or ambition these challenges demand. The independent Climate Change Committee warns that the Government is not on track to meet its legally binding targets.

Liberal Democrats are committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2045 at the latest.

We will take the bold, urgent action needed to tackle climate change, cut energy bills and create hundreds of thousands of secure, well-paid new jobs. Together with innovative British businesses, we will make the UK the world leader in the clean technologies of the future. We will help households meet the cost of the transition to net zero and make sure everyone benefits from it, leaving no one behind.

We will:

• Make homes warmer and cheaper to heat with a ten-year emergency upgrade programme, starting with free insulation and heat pumps for those on low incomes, and ensure that all new homes are zero-carbon.
• Drive a rooftop solar revolution by expanding incentives for households to install solar panels, including a guaranteed fair price for electricity sold back into the grid.
• Invest in renewable power so that 90% of the UK’s electricity is generated from renewables by 2030.
• Appoint a Chief Secretary for Sustainability in the Treasury to ensure that the economy is sustainable, resource-efficient and zero-carbon, establish a new Net Zero Delivery Authority to coordinate action across government departments and work with devolved administrations, and hand more powers and resources to local councils for local net zero strategies.
• Establish national and local citizens’ assemblies to give people real involvement in the decisions needed to tackle climate change.
• Restore the UK’s role as a global leader on climate change, by returning international development spending to 0.7% of national income, with tackling climate change a key priority for development spending. 

On an international stage, we would:

• Ensure that the UK’s international development spending is used effectively and with a primary focus on poverty reduction, as we reverse the Official Development Assistance cut, including by: 
  • Putting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals at the heart of the UK’s international development policy.
  • Funding genuine partnerships that are rooted in local needs and developed on grounds of mutual respect.
  • Ensuring that the use of the international development budget continues to be consistent with the OECD/DAC rules and guidelines, and with UK legislation, and in particular its primary purpose should remain the economic development of, and poverty reduction within, the partner country.
  • Recognising the role of education as a force for good, and committing to spend 15% of ODA on education in the world’s most vulnerable areas, especially focusing on girls and young women.
  • Increasing the proportion of ODA committed to tackling climate change and environmental degradation, in line with our commitment to climate justice.
  • Tackling the growing global crisis of food insecurity and malnutrition by increasing the proportion of ODA committed to delivering life-saving nutrition interventions.

Thank you once again for taking the trouble to write - if you would like to learn more, check out the Liberal Democrat manifesto here: https://www.libdems.org.uk/manifesto