30/1/02 Inner Cities
Adjournment Debate – Inner Cities
30th Jan. 2002
John Robertson (Glasgow, Anniesland): It gives me great pleasure to secure this debate, and I want to focus on how we should strive to break the cycle of poverty in our inner cities. Poverty manifests itself in a number of ways: lack of access to good-quality housing, poor health, high levels of unemployment, low rates of pay, high crime rates, and poor educational performance. Unlike the Tories, the Labour party believes that poverty breeds further poverty, that unemployment can lead to crime, that living in poor, overcrowded housing can result in poor health and have a detrimental effect on a child’s education. Each aspect of poverty is linked, and we cannot effectively tackle one aspect without tackling all of them.
