Last week’s analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, suggesting a 700,000 increase in child poverty by 2020, was depressing, but unsurprising. The long-tail effects of the government’s austerity measures, and the winnowing both of the value of, and entitlements to, benefits make such an outcome pretty well inevitable. But I certainly cannot agree with the IFS that the figures mean that the target to eradicate child poverty by 2020 may have outlived its usefulness.
That’s a dangerous line of thinking to pursue, a gift to a government whose policies are making the lives of the poorest harder – it lets them off the hook. Targets drive behaviour, they force policy attention on effective solutions. Even the government’s own advisers have privately admitted that without the child poverty target (which, after all, enjoys cross-party support), efforts to reduce child poverty would slip off the policy map.
But it’s clear the solutions this government favours take an individualised rather than a structured approach to the causes and drivers of poverty. Human behaviours (such as addiction, long-term benefits receipt, poor parenting, or relationship breakdown) are seen as the drivers of poverty. Solutions that find favour are therefore focused on changing individual behaviour, with an emphasis on the personal responsibility of poor people to ‘turn their lives around’.
Such an approach was clearly in evidence at the all-party group on poverty addressed by Iain Duncan Smith last week. A number of excellent projects and programmes showcased the work they do with some of the most excluded and marginalised. It was heavy-duty, highly interventionist, long-term and resource intensive stuff – and there’s no doubt that it’s achieved some impressive results.
But the experience of poverty stretches much more widely than simply those with the most chaotic lives. Lack of employment opportunities, soaring living costs just for the basics, or the ill-health that prevents someone from being in work don’t require behaviour change to lift a family out of poverty, they demand a different, structural, response.
The government really doesn’t get this – even when it thinks it does. It talks up the Work Programme, intended to prepare more out-of-work people for employment, but its policies to secure growth and create new jobs are woefully inadequate – as Ed Miliband has been pointing out. David Cameron jumped on the bandwagon to complain about higher energy costs, but his solution? – insulate your home – sits ill when Warm Front funding’s been cut by his government. And welfare reforms that will remove contributory employment and support allowance from people with terminal illness after a year are cruel and unjustified.
Ministers are fond of a ‘no excuses’ approach to benefits recipients – there can be no excuses for government either. But this is such a dishonourable government. It demands behaviour change of individuals while ignoring its own role. Poverty fell under Labour as a result of deliberate policy choices; the present government must be responsible for the consequences of its policy choices too. That’s why poverty targets remain important. If government policy fails to deliver (or makes things worse), ministers can be held to account.
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Kate Green is MP for Stretford and Urmston and writes a weekly column or Progress, Kate Comments
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