 I recently appeared on BBC Politics Show to discuss the serious issue of child poverty. The Buttershaw estate in Bradford was once dubbed the cheapest place in Europe to buy heroin. Although life has improved, a number of young people from the estate worked with Save the Children to put together a short video highlighting what life is like on the Estate. The aim of the video was to raise awareness of child poverty on the estate and the impact it has on young people.
This video raised two things for me personally:
- What these guys are experiencing on a day to day basis
- And shows me that, actually, Society is broken and we need to fix it. Brown’s Big Government agenda is clearly failing on delivery of the child poverty agenda.
The young people involved in the video and interviewed on the Politics Show strongly believed that we can break the cycle and the next Government needs to talk to young people to make sure it can “fix Britain.”
They went on to say there are “loads of different factors of why people are in poverty; crime, drugs, benefits and we need to look at them all individually.”
When challenged on Conservative plans to cut public spending, I made it clear that yes, we will cut public spending, but not front line services. We need to get rid of this lottery bidding process created by Brown’s Government which makes people forced to bid for grants with a time limited agenda as the only way to bid for money. We need to give sustainable funding direct to where it belongs; on the front line to those who know how best to spend it. | 
