News

Committee chairman Labour MP Frank Field said the shortcomings were causing “untenable” human and financial cost.

Free meals and activities for children in the North End, Prenton, Tranmere, and Rock Ferry, between Monday 19th and Friday 23rd February 2018

The committee, chaired by the Labour MP Frank Field, said it was “so impressed and moved” by the 4,000-plus individual submissions it received after asking for people’s experiences of the system – a record number for a select committee inquiry – that it decided to publish a separate report highlighting them.

700,000 people working in the gig economy over the past year were paid less than the legal minimum because they are labelled “self-employed” by the companies for whom they work. By labelling their workforce in this way, companies are free to offload to individual workers all of the risks and responsibilities usually taken on by employers.

“They [ministers] have produced no evidence to back up the key, central economic assumption of the biggest reform to our welfare system in 50 years. William Beveridge [the founder of the welfare state] will be rolling in his grave,” the committee chair Frank Field said.

The Government has today published its response to the Taylor Review of modern employment. That Review was commissioned by the Prime Minister on the back of Frank’s report, Wild West Workplace: self-employment and the gig economy, published in September 2016.

The Government’s planned cuts to school budgets in the Liverpool City Region are disproportionately concentrated on the poorest areas. This is the major outcome of a review of the latest Government announcement on school funding that purported to protect schools in the poorest areas.

The company’s system of charging drivers if they cannot cover their round has been described as appalling by the chairman of the House of Commons’ work and pensions committee, Frank Field.

Frank Field MP announces an inquiry into long-term support for survivors of modern slavery, with a call for written evidence and case studies.

BIRKENHEAD MP Frank Field is demanding an urgent meeting with Marks & Spencer bosses after the retail giant announced plans to close its store in the town centre as part of a restructuring programme.

In December 2017, 2,369 patients – 21.6% of all patients who arrived at A&E; that month – waited longer than four hours before being admitted, transferred or discharged.

Frank Field, chairman of the APPG on Hunger, said: “Beneath the radar there are malnourished older people in this country spending two or three months withering away in their own homes, with some entering hospital weighing five and a half stone with an infection, or following a fall, which keeps them there for several torturous days, if not weeks.”

The all-party parliamentary group on hunger says social isolation caused by bereavement, illness, immobility or confinement – such as through the loss of a driving licence – are the main causes of a largely “hidden” problem of elderly hunger in the UK.

A cross-party group of MPs and Peers today issues a rallying call to the Government, to look more closely at the problem of malnutrition in the elderly which is set to cost the NHS and social care £15.7 billion a year by 2030.

It comes after a bill by Labour’s Frank Field to make authorities enable such services failed to win Government support.

Regulators and pension schemes under scrutiny from MPs investigating £900m deficit

‘Today marks the biggest move in over 100 years by a government specifically committing itself to a programme of work to eliminate child hunger. There’s much more work to be done now through the government’s pilot schemes and research, but a major step has been taken today to end hunger as we have known it in the school holidays and, in so doing, massively to improve the educational prospects of disadvantaged children.’

Frank Field, chairman of the Commons work and pensions committee, said that he would be writing to the Pensions Regulator and the trustees after seeing coverage of the issue in The Times.

The key finding of a major study, that mothers with very young children report greater levels of unhappiness if they work full-time, should serve to reshape the political debate on equalising children’s life chances.

Supported by a cross-party group of MPs, Sir Oliver Letwin and I are attempting to build a lifeboat for the British government. A motion we tabled before Christmas recommended that the immediate financial challenge should be met by raising additional hypothecated funds; and the long-term challenge should be met by reforming both the national insurance contributory base and local precepts along progressive lines to fund a National Health and Social Care Service.

Frank Field said that he would add it to a wider investigation by the parliamentary committee into companies that leave big holes in their pension pots before having to be rescued.

In October after a Globe petition backed by almost 10,000 readers, and delivered by Frank Field MP, David Allison agreed to review charging staff members £10 to park at Arrowe Park Hospital.

Frank Field, whose story of a hungry constituent moved Heidi Allen to tears, says he is seeing destitution, not poverty

‘The Church made a major error on George Bell. The same authorities have now publicly said they did. There should therefore be quiet satisfaction and pride that a body so important can publicly correct itself. If only this could be replicated more, we’d be a happier nation.’

The 13 MPs who signed the letter, all from Labour, were led by Birkenhead MP Frank Field

Frank Field, the work and pensions select committee chairman, said that the civil servants were “unhappy” about universal credit, the scheme combining six means-tested benefits into a single payment, which has been beset by criticism that it pushes claimants into debt and arrears.

Frank Field shared the harrowing story of a local family whose young son was so hungry he chose a lunch pack over toys

MP Frank Field, who leads the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, has written to the Prime Minister as he warned there’ll be further ‘guerilla war’

Frank Field, the chair of the work and pensions committee, said it would be usual to receive about 100 responses, but the inquiry had been deluged by people sharing stories about being denied disability benefits or battles to keep their entitlements.