What’s the extent of child poverty in Britain today?
There are a number of ways in which you can measure poverty: absolute poverty, persistent poverty and relative poverty. If you use the relative poverty measure, then there are about three million children in poverty, which is one of the highest figures in Europe. By 1997 it was three times as much as it was in 1979. The other important thing that I think is worth noting is that 80 percent of children who live in households where no-one is in work live in poverty. There is a very clear correlation between workless households and poverty. When we came into office one in five households had no-one in work. It’s now been reduced but, as I keep saying, an anti-poverty strategy that doesn’t have work at it’s heart won’t work. Again if you look at where these children are, it is well documented that children of lone parents, usually because they are not in work, tend to be poorer than children where one or both parents are in work. If you don’t sort out the lack of work problem, you won’t sort the poverty out.
But what about those who can’t work?
Work is not the only strategy. Critics will say everybody can’t work and we have always accepted that lone parents, by definition, face a barrier that two parent families don’t. So we have increased the amount of money that we pay for children under the age of eleven by nearly 80 percent. We are increasing cash payments and Child Benefit has gone up since 1997. But you can do all that, you can increase the amount of money that helps compensate for people being out of work, but if you really want to deal with the causes of poverty you’ve got to look at the fundamental underlying cause of child poverty in this country which has been worklessness.
Do you think that talk of ‘eradicating’ child poverty may raise false hopes, as the 1960s ‘war on poverty’ in America did, and may lead to a backlash as people think it can’t be eradicated so what is the point in trying?
Eradicating child poverty was a very demanding target to set ourselves. One of the virtues of a ‘war on poverty’ is that you can carry on fighting that war for as long as you want and I suppose you can claim victory at whatever point you want as well. Eradication of child poverty is a pretty definite target and we have a definite time scale: eradication in 20 years and halving it in ten. People say 20 years is a long time away, but it’s not actually when you consider the scale of the task we are up against. It’s too easy for people to say poverty is inevitable so let’s not even bother trying. This is the fourth largest economy in the world. This isn’t just a moral question, it isn’t even a question of social justice; it’s actually an economic question. It is incredibly wasteful in society to have something like three million children growing up in poverty. There is a large correlation between low income, low educational achievement, lack of expectation, lack of ambition, and lack of skills. This means that if you are born into an environment where you have all those problems and all those disadvantages you will find it much more difficult to get on in later life. There is a huge payback not just for the individual, but for us as a society from the eradication of child poverty. This takes time and there’s got to be a range of strategies to do that but if you don’t eradicate child poverty and the causes of it, you won’t just hold back those individuals, you’ll hold back the whole country.
But doesn’t the 20 year target not mean consigning another generation of children to poverty?
No. It’s not as though nothing is happening. We said in the manifesto that we will eradicate it in 20 and we will halve it in ten. We publish the Opportunity for all report every year to show what we are doing year on year. What’s encouraging is that many outside commentators, independent academics, have said the government is moving in the right direction now. In each Budget so far measures have been put in place to lift more and more people out of poverty; raising the Income Support allowances, the Children’s Tax Credit, the Working Families’ Tax Credit. All these measures are having an effect on lifting people’s level of income. It is also about education, raising people’s skills and expectations and health measures like Sure Start. In the last Opportunity for all report there were about 300,000 less children living in workless households. Year by year we are making an improvement. It is a long march but we are on that march.
What measures are the government employing to achieve this aim?
A range, you need to do a number of things. Income is clearly very important. If you’ve got money in your pocket, doors open. The heart of our anti-poverty strategy is work. There’s a million more jobs in the economy than there were four years ago. Through the job centre plus network and the new benefit regime we are introducing, we are making sure that there is a work focus right from the start and we are making changes to make sure work pays. What we are saying to people is we know you may have difficulties, there may be barriers but we will do everything we possibly can to help you get back into work because it’s got so many benefits. We have put a lot of money into schools and skills. Although it will take time, standards in primary school are increasing, standards of literacy and numeracy are improving. Measures like Sure Start, which is just being developed, are designed to make sure you tackle some of the underlying problems that people face right from the start. In the past where I think governments failed was because they did a health initiative or an education initiative or an employment initiative but these things are all linked.
You have talked about the importance of making the eradication of poverty a popular cause. How can others outside the political arena help the government achieve its aim?
I think by showing people that it makes a difference. This is a political campaign in which rhetoric only takes you so far. For most people what they actually want to see, as in many other parts of the public services, is that it’s better now than it was in the past. It’s not that long ago that there was mass unemployment. People could see the waste and they paid for it; their taxes were going on the dole, they were not going into schools and hospitals. It is a long process, it’s a slow process, but the government has to show that this is money being well spent. Any anti-poverty strategy that doesn’t have work at its heart won’t work because it wouldn’t have public support. As a department we spend a third of all government spending. We have spent £4 billion less this year than we were doing three years ago. That is money saved from the dole basically and it’s available for all my colleagues to spend on their projects.
Many people have said that during the election campaign the government perhaps didn’t talk enough about poverty and what it had done to reduce it.
I always find this puzzling because we do talk about this. I think it is fair to say that its reporting has somewhat diminished, but I think we should shout from the roof tops what we are doing to counter poverty and also what we are doing to extend opportunity. We are opening doors to people and their families and their friends and we should never tire of shouting about it. If you look back to the mid-1990s, when we were in Opposition, we were cautious, we talked down what we were doing because we hoped to be able to do a lot, but we couldn’t be sure and we didn’t want to raise expectations. Now I think it’s somehow got into people’s perceptions that we didn’t want to talk about these things. But if the Labour Party stands for anything, I am sure it must stand for fairness, it must stand for giving everybody the best possible chance in life and, for as long as there is poverty, there is the denial of opportunity.
Some of the government’s measures, like Sure Start and the New Deal for Communities, focus on specific geographic areas of deprivation. What about children who don’t necessarily live in deprived areas but are still facing poverty?
The employment measures, the tax and benefit measures, are clearly available to anyone who qualifies for them whether you live in areas that are regarded as deprived or not. The increase in allowances for people who are unable to work and are on Income Support are very targeted measures that will go to people no matter whether they live in a very affluent part of the country or whether they live in a deprived estate. As resources are always limited, if you are going to do something like the New Deal for Communities it makes sense that you do it in those areas where there are real deep-seated problems.
Often the money that is given in order to remove children from poverty goes to parents. Is there any guarantee that parents will spend the money on children. Would you not do better to invest the money in health and education?
You need to do both. But the state can’t stand in the shoes of individuals. Individual responsibility is a central part of any society and it’s not for us to stand in the shoes of a mother or father and say you should spend the money on this item of clothing or this item of food. People have got to be responsible for themselves and it must be a decision for the household how they spend their money. There is a lot of research evidence that most parents will make sacrifices with regard to their own spending in favour of their children. You’ve got to get the balance right, but you need sufficient money going into a household.
Many people would say that the poverty faced by children in Britain, you talked about relative and absolute poverty, is not remotely comparable to that faced by children in Africa. So what is the government doing to tackle child poverty on a global scale?
You’re right, you can’t make comparisons. There is no comparison and, of course, we need to tackle both. We are doing a lot through aid and Clare as been at the forefront, as has Gordon, in playing our role there. Failure costs the state an awful lot of money so it’s in people’s own narrow self-interest, no matter what the circumstances are, that we don’t have poverty and that we have as many people as we possibly can in work. The classic argument is that social justice and enterprise are both essential parts of reducing poverty in Britain and it’s the same on a global scale. You will never be able to have an increase in world prosperity for as long as you’ve got poverty. Tackling poverty in those countries is, of course, on a completely different scale to what we face in Britain. But the argument for our own country, and on a global scale, is that poverty is inefficient, it is a bad thing and you need to do something about it.