Poverty

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:48 pm on 6 February 2002.

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Photo of Baroness Andrews Baroness Andrews Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip) 3:48, 6 February 2002

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for creating an opportunity for us to reflect on what has been achieved. I also pay tribute to him as one of the architects of some of the most imaginative strategies that have been put in place for employment, and which are making such a difference.

My argument is that the Government have been radical. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hattersley, although possibly for different reasons, that they have not been redistributive. The Government have not made poor people richer by making rich people poorer. What they have done is to release resources and to direct resources to the poorest. And we are beginning to see the difference in what is happening to some of the poorest children in society.

The debate provides an opportunity to ask ourselves what makes a radical and sound social policy as a whole. I suggest that there are a few defining criteria. One is to tackle the causes of poverty and to break the inter-generational cycle of worklessness, hopelessness and powerlessness in young people. The second is to create a coherent framework, so that policies that tackle poverty directly and indirectly can work together to have the most beneficial effect.

The Government have begun to do both. That is the major difference that they have made. It is a cultural and political difference as much as a technical difference. That is what makes it radical. It has been cast in the European context and the language of social inclusion, which is relatively new in this country. That enables us to place the concept of raising incomes within a framework that demands that we deal with the relationship between poverty, health and education, as many noble Lords have already said.

I agree that by setting a target of abolishing child poverty within 20 years, the Government have taken a mighty risk. They have raised the profile of tackling poverty beyond the obsession of a few highly dedicated and highly skilled campaigners to make it the natural target of everybody who cares about social justice and about how government works. It will be a task against which the Government are measured.

It is fair to reflect on how far we have come on creating incentives for work as well as opportunities for work and on raising living standards in work. I shall take three examples of that process. We are moving towards an integrated tax and benefit system. A Bill will shortly come before your Lordships' House to introduce an integrated child tax credit system. That is a hugely challenging undertaking. It was discussed for decades, with endless academic papers and government initiatives on how it might be done, but it was never seriously countenanced because it was too difficult. We have begun that process.

The minimum wage was the target of a lot of negative propaganda for years, but it is in place and is raising living standards. It is not raising them high enough or fast enough in my opinion, but it has introduced a new ethic to the workplace on what is payable and how well it is paid.

We have also seen moves to tackle the poverty of that group of pensioners who for years were the largest and poorest group in poverty. Through the minimum income guarantee and now through the state pension credit scheme we have a genuine possibility of raising all poor pensioners out of poverty.

It has been difficult to make a judgment about the cumulative effect of all the measures that have been put in place since 1997, because the statistics flow at a glacial rate. They are very suspect, not to say slippery, and one has to look at a number of different triangulated points to get a fix on them. There is a major time lag between policy and effect. I never thought that the Government would be accused of doing good by stealth, when they are so much more frequently accused of over-egging their achievements to the point of beginning not to be believed, but they have done a great deal of good by stealth.

When making those judgments, it is not necessary to rely only on people who would say that, wouldn't they. Just before the election, the Child Poverty Action Group, which has been a critical friend to many governments—often more critic than friend—wrote:

"There is no doubt that when the election takes place there will have been a substantial reduction in poverty, particularly child poverty, by any measure you care to use. This is a great achievement—partly the result of a buoyant economy with falling unemployment, but mainly the result of pursuing redistributive social and fiscal policies".

We do not have the statistics that we would love to have to take us up to 2002, but we have a model drawn up by reputable academics, who have extrapolated data to estimate with confidence that 1.2 million children will have been lifted out of poverty. We have to say "Thank God", because, as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, pointed out, by the middle of the 1990s, after 20 years of redistributive policies flowing in the other direction, Britain had the highest child poverty rate of any country in the European Union and one of the highest in the industrial world. Even after two years of a Labour Government, that situation appeared not to have shifted much.

Significantly, in contrast with other governments, which had managed to use social policies to protect and improve the living standards of children, our governments had not done so. Children were poor not because of global economic trends, but because of the failure of policy makers. We have made a start on reversing that, tackling the causes of family poverty and making the right framework.

As many noble Lords have pointed out, we have also tackled the inexorable link between the failure to thrive and the failure to learn. In that respect, I warmly welcome yesterday's Ofsted report and the statement that there has never been better teaching in this country, as well as the expansion of those initiatives that are directly targeted on the poorest children in the most disadvantaged areas. I hope that those initiatives will not be national projects, but will become national programmes. For too long, we have been a nation of projects and not a nation of sensible and sound policies. Those policies will address the real but diffident talents of children who do not think that they have a right to a place at university.

At the same time, the Ofsted report rang loud warning bells about persistent and growing truancy, much of which is condoned by parents. That illustrates perfectly the difficulty of framing education policy outside family and social policy as a whole.

Tempting though it is, there is no time for a debate on the links between educational failure and poverty. It is diagnosed beyond dispute, but some interesting recent research suggests that the impact of child poverty depends in some ways on the age of the child in poverty, but more certainly on the length of time that the child spends in poverty. As Robert Walker put it:

"While poverty in childhood may not always be a significant problem, poverty throughout childhood most certainly is".

If that is so, we need to look carefully at where and how we intervene to break the cycle of poverty and what instruments we choose to support families. Extending Sure Start and making extra and differential help available for families with primary and adolescent children are part of the answer.

We may agree that economic and social policies are having the intended effect of lifting families out of poverty, but we must ask how far and how fast that is happening and at what point it will make a significant and permanent difference to families.

The New Deal is achieving a lot on behalf of lone parents, who now make up such a significant proportion of society. We know that 122,000 lone parents had found work through the New Deal by last October. They need more accessible education and training and they need to know that, in due course, the childcare strategy will help to provide them with support not just for formal care but—as I hope—for the informal care that many of them have to draw on. Lone parents have to be very careful about where they put their children and whom they trust.

To adapt a phrase, much has been done and much remains to be done. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, called for serious money and other noble Lords have called for serious thought. I call for serious action to sustain and maintain the momentum that I think we have established towards closing the gap. If we have coherent policies, we can have equality as well.