Social exclusion has been a concern of the government since it was elected in 1997 but the landscape of social exclusion has changed, in good part because of Labour’s record.

We came into office determined to reduce unemployment, lift children and pensioners out of poverty and introduce a minimum wage to tackle poverty pay. Many of us can remember the campaigns for low-paid workers like security guards earning little over £1 an hour and having to work horrendously long hours simply to make ends meet.

Since then, over 2 million more people have found jobs; incomes for most people have risen by 2 to 3 per cent a year in real terms; child poverty has been reduced by 800,000; pensioner poverty by around one million; and a minimum wage has been introduced which helps those security guards, and other workers like them, who used to work for a pittance.

And these are reductions in relative poverty. They are based on a moving – and rising – poverty line of 60 per cent of median incomes. As the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE has said: ‘The package of support for low-income working families with children is now one of the most generous in the world.’

So the picture is much improved since 1997. But despite that progress, we all know there is still deep-seated exclusion in some communities. Some children are still born into families with profound problems including alcohol abuse, drug abuse and mental illness. Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen 11 per cent to a 20-year low but are still the highest in Europe. Educational outcomes for looked-after children are better than they were but only 11per cent of such children get give good GCSEs compared to 56 per cent among all children. And our system struggles to treat adults with multiple problems such as mental health problems and alcohol and drug addiction, which can lead not only to chaotic lives for them but also have a harmful wider impact on local communities.

My colleague Jim Murphy has rightly argued that Labour has to remember it is a party not just of delivery but of great causes. The extension of opportunity to those cut off from it in the past is precisely such a cause.

The Social Exclusion Action Plan published earlier this month focused on key groups where social exclusion is deep seated: young children born into vulnerable families, looked-after children, teenage mothers and their children, and adults with mental health and other problems which sometimes lead to lives in chaos.

The plan drew heavily on UK and international research to expose how disadvantage at birth and in the very early years can lead to multiple problems for young people later in life. It set out how children in the most disadvantaged five per cent of families can be up to 100 times more likely to experience multiple problems at the age of 15 than the children of the most engaged and advantaged 50 per cent of families.

Taking a life cycle approach, it placed additional emphasis on the importance of the very early years in children’s lives and proposals for greater intervention at an early stage. Drawing on international evidence about effective programmes, the plan proposes demonstration projects based on the nurse-family partnership model where midwives and health visitors would maintain sustained support for vulnerable families from pre-birth right through the first two years of a child’s life. This kind of programme has been evaluated to show positive results such as improved health, safer home environments, fewer cases of child neglect and fewer problems later in life.

Yet it is this kind of targeted and enabling early intervention – designed to ensure support is available so that the misery and pain that deep-seated social exclusion can cause to individuals, families and communities is eroded – which was caricatured in the run up to the publication of the plan.

The allegation, mainly from the right but also from some on the left, is that all this is ‘nanny state’, that it implies ‘foetal ASBOs’ and that it is a ‘Big Brother’ form of interference in children’s lives.

It is right that we should discuss the proper boundaries of the state’s role in this area. After all, we could simply abandon the field and leave well alone. But if we are serious about extending opportunity, why wait until the odds are already stacked against a child? Early support of the kind we are talking about could make a major difference to children’s life chances.

The plan is also clear about the need for multi-agency working. Although it bases some of its interventions on the skills of public professionals such as midwives and health visitors, it also reaches out to the voluntary sector, to local communities and to those suffering from social exclusion. Each has a part to play in tackling social exclusion. And it makes clear that while the state has a duty to extend opportunity, individuals and families have a responsibility to take up opportunity.

The action plan is work in progress. It has helped to shift the debate and it will enable further policy innovation and learning. The key next step will be to see the plan’s analysis and principles reflected in future policy and, most importantly, in the allocation of resources.

But thinking more broadly about our future challenges as a government and party, there are some lessons to be drawn from the discussions we have had both with academics, professionals and those who suffer multiple exclusion.

First, where they exist, we have to be honest about the shortcomings of the traditional delivery models of the welfare state. The old systems did not always deliver their promise of equality. The most socially excluded can fall between the cracks of existing services. Take one striking finding from our work: the likelihood of a mother being visited by a health visitor actually rises with income. Far from there being a trade off between empowerment and equity, our reform strategies should see empowerment as a way of tackling inequalities.

Second, services must be designed around the needs of the individual not the system. It is easy to think that an idea like personalisation is simply an attempt to satisfy the rising expectations of the affluent. In fact, those with the most complex needs are sometimes those most badly failed by silos, and those with the most to gain from empowerment and opportunity.

Third, we must be clear that what matters is what a service achieves. In this there is a crucial difference between the parties in the debate about the roles of the state and the voluntary sector. The Conservatives have made much of their view that there should be a greater role for the voluntary sector in tackling social exclusion and less of a role for the state.

Labour, certainly New Labour, is pragmatic about who delivers services. Public service is valued but the emphasis is on outcomes. In an area like social exclusion it is clear that diversity fosters innovation and improvement, but that there is still too much resistance to letting new providers in. We know that as well as the many public servants who do a great job, organisations like NCH with family support projects or the Revolving Doors charity with adults leading chaotic lives, can also be highly effective in delivering services. But crucially, what is not at issue for Labour is the state’s overall responsibility for trying to secure the desired result.

The right, on the other hand, see the voluntary sector as replacing the state in terms of responsibility, not just delivery. Their vision is a means of withdrawal of state responsibility in major areas of public life. Beneath the PR, this is David Cameron’s agenda and the agenda of his Social Justice Commission.

Most of all we must keep returning to the basic New Labour combination of ambitious progressive goals and radical, evidence-based policy. The emphasis in our plan on early intervention and parental support and responsibility is backed by evidence showing it works and it is our duty to act. In doing so, we are trying to turn people previously seen as doomed and marginalised into the empowered authors of their own destiny. Isn’t that the kind of goal that brought us into politics?