'Must read' — a debt we all owe to the poor

9th May 2008
By Donald Hirsch

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Nearly a decade after Tony Blair pledged to end child poverty in a generation, this most ambitious of Labour social goals remains close to the top of the political agenda. In one of the tightest Budgets in years, the chancellor has somehow managed to find an extra £1bn for low-income families with children.

The Work and Pensions Committee has just taken a long hard look at the whole issue of child poverty, its many causes and its consequences. What can a select committee report add to the mountain of analysis, the cacophony of calls for more resources and the steady stream of government documents that have accumulated around the ambition to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and halve it by 2010?

For one thing, it provides a good roundup of the progress made by these efforts and what more needs to be done.  The independence of such commentary is valuable but it nevertheless overlaps hugely with the government’s own roundup, Ending child poverty: everybody’s business, published with the Budget.  

A more distinctive contribution by the committee is to draw some careful but powerful conclusions about how the present strategy needs to be changed or improved.  Drawing on, but not in thrall to, evidence provided by a range of analysts and pressure groups, as well as that of ministers and civil servants, the committee makes some crucial points.

The most fundamental of these concerns the lack of a long-term strategy to maintain the relative value of benefits despite the aim to reduce relative poverty.  ‘Work is the best route out of poverty’ say ministers, but they have not yet shown how child poverty can be eradicated unless the incomes of families remaining outside work rise.

Some ministers appear to be saying that out-of-work benefits should be kept below the poverty line, but fail to explain how that is compatible with ending child poverty.  A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report shows that the existing uprating regime implies a long-term rise in child poverty, not a fall. The committee recommends that the government carry out a review of the system for uprating adult benefits, which have halved in relative terms since 1971, since that trend is undermining the child poverty strategy by affecting the overall incomes of families with children.

Of course, raising benefits for those left outside work will be more affordable if more people move into it. The committee, unlike many campaigning groups, accepts the government view that more lone parents should have to seek work in order to receive benefit. But once again it shows its independence by challenging the government’s method of imposing this obligation.  Putting lone parents on regular Job-Seeker’s Allowance is insensitive, it argues, and cutting off benefits would cause severe hardship:

There are real concerns that JSA conditionality cannot be adapted to reflect the complex realities of lone parents’ lives. We strongly recommend that the government, through personal advisers, applies personal conditionality with the intention of supporting lone parents to enter sustainable employment. Sanctions should never apply when there is proven lack of affordable and suitable childcare or where the lone parent is engaged in work-related education or training.

Indeed, the committee suggests a move away from a narrow view of work as a solution. Getting a job at any cost may be incompatible with looking for stable and worthwhile work and indeed fail even to get families out of poverty where wages are too low. The government too is moving away from ‘work first’, and piloting more ‘sustainable’ models, but the select committee goes further.

It cites evidence to suggest that a parent moving in and out of unstable employment can actually damage a child more than staying outside work by raising and then dashing expectations, and by giving the child a negative view of the working world.

The report is full of such insights and argues its case well. It praises the government for doing many good things, but points to significant areas where it is still getting it wrong.  A product of our cross-party committee system working at its best, the report deserves a good read by those with power and influence.  ­

Donald Hirsch, Poverty Adviser, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Filed Under: , Poverty, Unemployment, Benefits
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