By setting up a social justice policy group on his first full day as the new Tory leader, David Cameron attempted to bury his party’s legacy of tripling the number of children living in poverty. He has also tried to renounce Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’ mantra and rightly recognised that poverty is a ‘moral outrage’.
The Child Poverty Action Group welcomes this belated conversion to the cause of social justice, but the Tories must now back up their rhetoric with reality. Cameron must be prepared to put his money where his mouth is, because the 3.5 million children who are currently living in poverty need financial support and not just warm words.
Behind those warm words there is very little substance or detail. Although Cameron has argued against means testing, he does not say what he would replace it with. He attacks tax credits, but fails to explain how he would help parents struggling to feed and clothe their children. Cameron claims to be committed to social justice, but how does he square that with his shadow chancellor’s support for the most regressive of measures, a flat tax?
The only policy he has suggested is ‘setting the voluntary sector free’. Voluntary and community organisations obviously have an important role to play – a role that has significantly increased over the last decade – but they cannot substitute the safety net of the welfare state, a good education, affordable childcare and support into well-paid work. So while Cameron is right in wanting to support and work in partnership with the third sector, he is mistaken if he expects it to deliver public services on the cheap or fill the gap created by having a smaller state.
People in poverty do not want the government to back off, but to help and support them more. A modern welfare state has to protect people while opening up opportunities so that they can fulfil their potential. Slashing existing government programmes like Sure Start or the New Deal and simply expecting the voluntary sector to pick up the pieces would be disastrous.
Iain Duncan Smith, who is chairing the social justice policy group, would be wise to listen to people who are living on the breadline and the service providers who deal daily with the consequences of poverty. However, once he presents his findings, he faces an uphill struggle to persuade the party to make poverty a priority. As IDS complained just two years ago, getting his Conservative colleagues to engage with his social justice agenda was ‘like shining a pencil torch into a dark void’.
Tory MPs and grassroots members are not the only ones who will need persuading. If Cameron’s Conservatives are to convince CPAG and others fighting for those who are worst off in society that he is serious about our agenda, he should sign up to the Labour government’s bold pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. For Cameron, it would be a true test of his commitment to social justice.
The Conservatives may disagree with the idea of targets, but having such a benchmark has focused ministers’ minds and helped organisations like ours to keep the pressure on.
They may also contend that tackling poverty and social exclusion is about more than money. It is of course about opportunities, decent housing and local environment, good quality healthcare and education too; but having the financial resources to feed and clothe your children, pay for school trips and allowing them to fully participate in society is vital.
Having signed up to this historic goal, Cameron should then publish a detailed action plan saying how he would achieve it. Will he support tax credits? Will he maintain Sure Start and the planned expansion of affordable childcare? How will he help to increase opportunities for people to return to work? How will he ensure that those who will never be able to work have a dignified life above the poverty line?
And how, when Cameron will not match the government’s future spending commitments, let alone go beyond them, will he afford this? We cannot judge whether Cameron’s conversion is genuine until he has answered these questions.
If he does this and comes up with real solutions to the causes and consequences of poverty, CPAG will be among the first to applaud him. But if he fails to pass the child poverty test, Cameron’s talk of social justice will be shown to have been empty words. And the Tories will find it impossible to erase a legacy that tripled the number of children growing up in poverty.