Speeches by Kendall.

“Both will remain available. This is about enabling local authorities. I have to be honest: many of them have already begun to do that. The reason why I am very interested in this is that in my own city we have begun to shift some of that funding within existing rules. We are enabling that, because if local areas believ…”

“Overall, it is essential that people have confidence that every pound being spent goes to those who really need it and have the right to that support. I do not think it is acceptable that we inherited a situation of £7.4 billion of benefit fraud specifically a year. I am really proud that, through the fraud and error B…”

“It was a pleasure, as always.  ”

“As I mentioned earlier, one of the things we found that particularly plunged families into poverty in Leicester was white goods going wrong, so as part of our local poverty strategy we are trying to set something up where people can get decent white goods as a replacement instead of getting another one on loan, with mo…”

“I am less in favour of ringfencing because local authorities often know best how they can support things locally. We will want some clear objectives and outcomes, but in terms of how that money is best spent—to come back to Horsham—they will know best locally what they want to spend it on. I am not into the business of…”

“This has been a really big, important thing for me since coming in as Secretary of State. We have now secured the first ever three-year funding settlement for what is currently the household support fund, but we want to turn that into a crisis and resilience fund. That now includes discretionary housing payments. That …”

“One thing I would say is that, if you have a discussion in Horsham about these problems, we genuinely want to hear from local experience about what might make a difference. If you are having a housing summit and some of these issues are discussed, feed it into us—feed it into Angela Rayner’s Department—because we want …”

“I just want to emphasise that point. Housing is a massive issue in my constituency, in Leicester. It is the single biggest issue for my constituents. I am only too aware of the pressures on local authorities, but, ultimately, we have to start shifting the focus on to precisely what the permanent secretary said, which i…”

“They will.”

“Absolutely, and we are already doing that. It will continue until and beyond when the strategy is published, but particularly, as I have said, on the employment support side, we have a big manifesto commitment to devolve more, so that we get it right in Wales. We are working closely with the Welsh Government on that. B…”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“An important part of the work of the child poverty taskforce is to make sure that we take action in every part of the United Kingdom, including in partnership with the Welsh Government and the Scottish Government. We have had meetings about this topic with all the key players, including voluntary sector organisations. …”

“This is really important to me personally. I used to chair something called Feeding Leicester, a programme to end hunger in my city. That emerged from a survey that we did back in 2018, which showed—this was even before covid—that one in five kids in our city were worried about having enough to eat every single day. Th…”

“We want to get this right. We understand that there will be funding implications, and it is really important that we spell out a comprehensive strategy. But we have not had slippage on tackling child poverty. We are putting that into action.”

“Would you like me to answer the question?”

“I think action speaks louder than words. We have taken action to tackle child poverty—”

“You said that there was slippage. I think we have taken action and made a down payment on tackling child poverty.”

“It will be in the autumn—I cannot give you an exact date. I do not believe there has been slippage in this Government’s determination to tackle child poverty. We have introduced a fair repayment rate in universal credit to stop people being plunged into debt. We are introducing free school meals for all children in hou…”

“We are obviously thinking seriously about pension freedoms. There are big decisions when you gain access to your pension about how you make the best use of that for what are longer retirements as we live for longer. Knowledge is power. However, we have to make sure that the plumbing, as you refer to it, and the informa…”

“If people have been defrauded of their money, we want them to get it back. We have to make sure that we do that as effectively as possible. What happened here was that actually we were not getting as much of the money back as we wanted, so a change has been made. I want to make sure that this is tackled properly, and w…”