Changing the law to help low income families, Crawley Observer Column, Wednesday 23rd October 2024

While MPs are necessarily involve themselves in many things to serve their constituency, constitutionally MP’s have one role: making laws. Generally this is limited to voting on bills as they work through Parliament, but occasionally MPs have the opportunity to put forward laws of their own.

Every year 20 MPs are randomly selected to have the chance to introduce a Private Member’s Bill (PMB) and I was lucky enough to secure eighth place in the ballot this year. While I had no set plans on what I would like to legislate, I felt strongly that my bill should be one which addressed a challenge facing the town.

This is not without limitations. The chief enemy of a PMB is time, there is very little time allocated to hear them meaning that you need to keep the legislation as simple as possible to avoid it running out of time before a vote. In addition, they are unable to authorise new expenditure, meaning that you need to ensure whatever you are seeking to deliver can be introduced without requiring a money bill.

One of the biggest signs of societal failure over the last 14 years has been the growth of child poverty, with over a third of the children in Crawley now growing up in poverty. Yet, for a range of reasons only half the number of eligible families in Crawley currently claim Free School Meals, this not only has an impact upon household incomes, but due to the way the Pupil Premium is calculated it deprives their schools of income. To address this I am introducing a bill to enable the auto-enrolment of all eligible children for Free School Meals, unless they actively opt-out.

It is a simple change and as all the relevant funding is already authorised it doesn’t fall afoul of financial restrictions, yet it will help low income households and their schools. Even so, it is unlikely that there will be sufficient time to pass the bill, however I firmly hope that by highlighting the importance of this policy area it is something the government will take forward in due course.