Scottish Labour pledges £175m ‘anti-poverty fund’
Jim Murphy says cash freed up by abolishing bedroom tax in UK would be used to end reliance on food banks
Jim Murphy has pledged to set up a £175m “anti-poverty fund” in Scotland using cash freed up by abolishing the bedroom tax in the UK, in a fresh attempt to win back disaffected Labour voters.
The Scottish Labour leader said the fund would be used to end reliance on food banks, which his party said had grown by 1,100% in Scotland due to welfare cuts such as the bedroom tax and an inadequate minimum wage.
The SNP-led Scottish government has allocated around £104m a year to welfare support programmes to offset the impact of UK government policies, including £35m a year to repay money taken from claimants hit by the bedroom tax, as well as a £33m Scottish welfare fund to support anti-poverty charities and emergency payments.
Labour’s proposal will not involve new money. Murphy said the £175m fund would come from the £35m a year saved for the Scottish government if Labour wins the election and scraps the bedroom tax.
Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, who was in Glasgow to unveil the policy with Murphy, said: “A UK Labour government scrapping the bedroom tax means more money in the Scottish budget to support and protect those have borne the brunt of five years of the Tories.”
Murphy linked the initiative to Labour’s broader policy programme to raise the minimum wage to at least £8 an hour, enforce a higher living wage for government contractors, ban zero-hours contracts and cap energy bills.
“The bedroom tax is a shameful Tory experiment that has gone painfully wrong for so many. In a few weeks only Labour can defeat the Tory government that imposed this unfair tax on our poor, our vulnerable and our disabled whilst cutting taxes for millionaires and looking the other way on tax avoidance,” he said.
Eilidh Whiteford, the SNP’s work and pensions spokeswoman in the Commons, accused Labour of hypocrisy. Last week, she said, Reeves had implied that the party had little interest in people on welfare and had backed deeper cuts in welfare spending.
“This announcement from Labour is completely contradicted by their record in backing cuts to disabled benefits, to freezing child benefit, to means-testing the winter fuel allowance and to committing to £30bn more cuts in the next Westminster parliament,” Whiteford said. “Meanwhile their rhetoric on zero-hours contracts stands in contrast to their failure to act on the issue at any point in the 13 years they were in office – despite promising to abolish the practice in 1995.”
Labour’s trailed the SNP by 17 points in Scotland in the latest ICM poll for the Guardian. The poll found Scottish voters were unimpressed by the argument that each extra SNP victory over Labour in the May elections could damage Labour’s chances of forming the next government.
Only 29% of voters agreed that the election of fewer Labour MPs would make it more likely David Cameron’s Tories form the next government. With most voters expecting a hung parliament, 42% of voters said Cameron would be no more likely to form a government, because the SNP would not form a coalition the Tories.
The poll found that 44% of voters would back an SNP-Labour government pact – a proposition that the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, is under intense pressure from his own MPs and the Tories to reject – and 9% wanted a formal Labour-SNP coalition government.
Barely half (51%) of Scottish voters recognised Murphy, according to the poll, compared with 83% who recognised the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon.
