One of the defining parts of this Labour government’s commitment to tackling inequality and deprivation has been our historic pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate it completely by 2020.
We have already made significant progress – we live in a more equal society than we did under the Tories, with 700,000 children helped out of poverty since the prime minister made the pledge back in 1998. Our commitment to extend opportunity across Britain has been matched by the determination of hardworking families to seize the new opportunities on offer and lift their families out of hardship.
While we fell short of our interim target to reduce child poverty by a quarter – generating a flurry of predictably negative headlines – we should ensure that Labour campaigners treat our mission to tackle child poverty as a success story, and a crucial dividing line with the Tories who have not matched warm words with a commitment to the target.
But the fact that, as it stands, we are not on course to reach our goal should also act as a wake up call that the policies which have helped unlock people’s potential over the last decade may not be what is right for the decade ahead.
That is why the welfare reform minister Jim Murphy and I asked independent welfare expert Lisa Harker to review the effectiveness of my department’s welfare to work agenda in helping lift kids out of poverty.
Ms Harker has produced an excellent and challenging report, Delivering On Child Poverty: What Would It Take?, which we must consider carefully in the weeks and months ahead.
I think the most striking thing she raises is that, while we have had considerable success so far in encouraging more lone parents into work, it is now the case that nearly 60 per cent of poor children in Britain live in couple families. Despite this, couple families are pretty much invisible to our employment services. While lone parents claiming income support are called into Jobcentre Plus and are offered the New Deal for Lone Parents, we do not currently offer a similar level of support for couple families.
The increased investment we have made since 1997 in improving the options available to lone parents has been the right thing to do; it has helped achieve an 11 percentage point rise in the lone parent employment rate which has made a significant contribution to reducing child poverty and improved the life chances of people for whom getting by and making ends meet is often a big struggle. But now Ms Harker recommends that we introduce a New Deal for all families and prioritise help for any jobseeker who has children.
In addition, she highlights an increasing need for jobcentres to maintain contact with employees once they have found a job – assessing whether the wages they are earning are enough to provide for their families and help them acquire new skills so they can progress up the career ladder.
And the report also stresses the need to do more to reach out to non-working partners in poor households where only one person has a job. If one in five of these potential earners decided circumstances were right for them to move into work, around 80,000 extra children could be helped out of poverty.
All of these issues, and others that Ms Harker highlights in her report, pose big challenges for our welfare to work agenda in the years ahead as we seek to speed up progress in tackling deprivation. But equally importantly, they raise big questions for the future direction of New Labour after Tony Blair stands down, when we will face the electorate having been in office for more than ten years.
Hardworking families have voted Labour in the last three elections because they saw we were on their side and had answers to the problems that mattered to them. We must never take that support for granted; at the next general election we must show once again that we are the party of the many not the few.
That is why it is absolutely right that we are now discussing how we renew the promise we make to the British people in the years ahead. My commitment to renew Labour’s welfare to work agenda in the years ahead so it maximises its child poverty impact can be an important part of that; I would welcome your views on this report as we prepare our official response.
This all sounds great as tackling child poverty has been one of Labour’s boldest moves. However, in relaity a lot of low income parents struggle especially single mums, and childcare plays a big part in this. If you can’t afford a childminder and only get a couple of nurses free nursery it becomes very hard to go back to work, and sometimes you only end up earning a little more when you have paid for the childcare. There should be a national childcare service as only this will really allow poorer families to get back to work.
Some of the poorest kids are in care and I am not sure what you are doing to help these kids.
Labour has done well – and needs to be congratulated for its fight against poverty.
We need to remember why the fight against poverty – and inequality – actually matters though.
All too often people argue that if all incomes are rising, then it does not matter how wide the gap is between the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the income range.
Yet research by Richard Wilkinson proves this wrong.
Wilkinson points out that the higher the level of inequality, the worse the effect on our physical and mental health. More equal societies are simply healthier; they also tend to have lower levels of violence.
Wilkinson’s books ‘The Impact of inequality’ and ‘Unhealthy Societies’ prove that more equal countries are better. Their presentation of the facts is devastating!
It is a fact that poverty and inequality also impact social-mobility. Egalitarian societies do better! Denmark has better social-mobility than the USA.
More equal states have better levels of trust, generally. Robert D Puttnam has also found that more equal societies tend to have a better quality of democracy too (‘Making Democracy Work’).
Michael Marmot has written well on this subject, with his excellent, factual book: ‘Status Syndrome’.
Labour is right to put an emphasis on fighting poverty.