When, in the Victorian era, Britain began to focus for the first time on the problem of poverty, it was largely down to the work of two great social scientists: Charles Booth, the shipping magnate, and Seebohm Rowntree, the chocolate manufacturer. Both, in their different ways, believed that poverty was essentially about money. In time, as prosperity increased, it could be abolished. They would be shocked to learn that more than a century later, in a country six times richer than when they began their work, where government spends 48 per cent of national income, the poor are not only still with us, but their numbers have multiplied beyond all expectation. Over recent decades, the Left and centre-Left’s answer to poverty and inequality has been to spend more money, to redistribute from richer to poorer. Yet this central social democratic ideal is being tested to the point of destruction. Over the past 13 years, the government doubled all its key budgets; in real terms, overall public expenditure rose by more than 50 per cent. Few people would argue that the solution to the complex social and economic problems Britain faces is even higher spending. This is why we need to change the terms of debate – and why, as a Labour MP, I have agreed to lead the Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances announced by the Prime Minister yesterday. Labour, just as much as the Coalition, needs to rethink its position. The aim is to ensure that a debate that has been largely obsessed with how much money is being spent, gives way to one that concentrates on the consequences of each tranche of taxpayers’ investment? One of the most important tasks will be to ask whether we are defining poverty in the most sensible way. I was a minister when the last government set its audacious target of abolishing child poverty by 2020. At no point was I asked for my view about how this could be achieved, even though I was billed as the minister for welfare reform. In fact, I learnt about the policy by watching Sky News. Had I been asked, I would have argued for a target that was achievable. The 2020 goal isn’t. Any candidate sitting GCSE maths should be able to explain that raising everybody above a set percentage of median income is rather like asking a cat to catch its own tail. As families are raised above the target level of income, the median point itself rises. Not surprisingly, therefore, no country in the free world has managed to achieve this objective, not even in those Scandinavian countries whose social models many of us admire. The review will need to define a more meaningful goal in terms of income, and to link it to the non-monetary factors that are crucial to the successful nurturing of children. The aim will be to provide an index that helps voters concentrate on how successful we are in improving the chances of poorer children. A focus on arbitrarily moving families from below to just above a chosen income level must be replaced by a focus on what happens once that line has been crossed. Is government expenditure geared towards helping such children move up the ladder towards prosperity, or is hovering around whatever poverty line is chosen all they can hope for? Consider Sure Start. This was one of Labour’s great initiatives, aimed at cutting into the cycle of deprivation that trapped all too many children in poverty. But the recent transformation of Sure Start into Children’s Centres signifies a major change in the programme: its focus has shifted from the poorest to all children. If our society’s aim is to widen the life chances of poorer children, is this a sensible and defensible change? Similarly, what is to be gained by requiring Children’s Centres to report on a myriad of targets that no civil servant, let alone minister, reads? Shouldn’t their work be geared to ensuring that every child reaches school with all those qualities necessary for making learning possible? There is, therefore, a pressing need to rethink our approach to poverty, and to the state. We should remember that higher spending has not always been a progressive policy: one of the reasons Gladstone was seen as “The People’s William” was because of his resolute drive to cut taxes, which were then derived disproportionately from levies on the consumption of working people, and spent to the advantage of the better off. If the review is successful, the debate over poverty will give way to a dynamic approach that looks at how we ensure that each individual is able to achieve their best self. And taxpayers will be in a position to judge whether government expenditure – at whatever level – is geared to this outcome. Frank Field is the Labour MP for BirkenheadPoverty is about
much more than money
Increased public spending
doesn’t always help
poorer children to succeed in life,
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Frank Field is the Labour MP for Birkenhead
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