I told Matt Hancock the hospitality industry needs more support – apparently he’ll ‘get back to me’

The government has lost control of the virus and huge damage is being done to the economy – the time for the health secretary to casually ‘get back to me’ is long gone

Health secretary Matt Hancock met with MPs from the West Midlands on Monday (PA)

On Monday, along with MPs from the West Midlands, I Zoomed into a meeting with the health secretary Matt Hancock to hear about the fate of the city of Birmingham. I was given a full hour’s notice of this meeting, which would reveal what all of my constituents would face.    

I guess, as we’re in the middle of the country, we should have expected to be in the middle tier, and so it was. I was the first to ask a question. I wanted to know what support would be given to our hospitality industry; until this point, venues had been able to serve up to six customers from different households, but now they would potentially see a massive decline in business, as people were not allowed to meet. Matt Hancock told me that there was only to be business support (of the sort that I was talking about) in those areas that were in the highest tier, such as Merseyside.

I suggested more should be done; there is in fact a £1.3bn discretionary grants scheme that could be reopened to allow local authorities to respond to the needs of the businesses and workers in their area. He told me he would get back to me.  

The truth is that the time for him to be able to casually “get back to me” is long gone. The relentless incompetence of the government this summer means there is no time for him to get back to me. Now that the government has lost control of the virus, huge damage is being done to the economy. I cannot see another way other than a “circuit break” to reset and to slow the spread. But alongside this we need to ensure we’re protecting workers, those bearing the brunt of the government’s failures over the last few months.

Matt Hancock insisted on this call that people could still work and that the government was doing all it could to protect workers. Another colleague asked if he realised that people in hospitality are workers too, with bills to pay. I guess that’s the rub; the government seems to think that people who work in small food and drink businesses are all students on a gap year, or youngsters doing summer jobs, because… well, I guess that is, for many of them, their experience of the world. It is not mine.    

Take my mate, Alistair, who runs a small local cafe, while his wife works in a local bakery. They have three young children, rent their home and have a couple of others who rely on their entrepreneurship for their own livelihoods. They got by in the first half of this year helped by the schemes available; and, responding to Covid-19, they changed their business model and rearranged their establishments. They dutifully made everyone who came in do the track and trace, sometimes having to cross the polite line of customer service in order to enforce government guidance. They did their bit.

Matt Hancock retorted on our call that the government had done more for hospitality than nearly any other industry (obviously he was discounting the seeming industry in massive government contracts given out to Conservative chums with little need for results). The government resting on the laurels of previous support schemes will do little to help with the rent, energy and insurance bills, which are piling up right now.    

Monday came and went, and my inbox filled with scared small businesses and people terrified for their jobs. Then, today, the reality of what this all means where I live slapped me in the face as I opened the report from children’s charities and Loughborough University on rising child poverty rates. I read that, in the part of Birmingham I call home, more children live in poverty than don’t. The rising costs of rent and housing is what the report blames for the 12 per cent increase, in just three years, of children in my constituency falling into poverty.    

I think about Alistair and his three kids. He is a classic self-starting businessman, innovating and striving to support his family and the local community. Without proper support for people like him, we will certainly see another sky-rocketing of child poverty in the months and years to come. I sat at my desk in Westminster and put my head in my hands in despair. It didn’t have to be like this.    

Yes, the pandemic is unprecedented – not even I can blame its appearance in our lives on a prime minister who seems more intent on cracking mother-in-law gags than weeping about the poor children in our country. But I can blame him and his kin for the fact that poverty where I live has spiralled over the last three years. The pandemic has and will push people over a cliff that they should never have been on the edge of; and as they fall off, there isn’t even a garden bridge to catch them.    

My despair turns to fury because Alistair and so many others needed the government test and trace scheme to work. They needed our local council to have power and resource to manage local outbreaks months ago. They needed more support when they were put in “tier two” with very little notice.

Politicians – blue and red alike – of Birmingham, bishops, lords and the Chamber of Commerce have begged the government to support these businesses in our tier-two city, who are being damned by a thousand ever-changing restrictions.    

Without adequate support, I can think of at least three more children who will end up in the figures on child poverty. They are not just statistics to me; they are kids who I have picked up when their knees were scraped. Without better governance in our country I don’t know how I will soothe their tears. Perhaps I could tell them a mother-in-law gag.

Jess Phillips is the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley