FOUR BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A NEW CONSENSUS ON POVERTY

This is an extract from a speech given by Douglas Alexander to the Child Poverty Action Group’s AGM today – 8 December 2010.

“I think there are four building blocks for a new consensus on poverty that I hope at least some of the supporters of this Government could sign up to. But at the same time, we need to make sure this Government is held to account for their efforts to end relative child poverty, not some easier to meet definition of poverty, and that the 2020 target is a commit ment of every mainstream political party in this country.

“Firstly, work remains the best route out of poverty. Even if we do eventually get back to pre-recession levels of unemployment, the employment rates for some groups would still be far below those in countries that do better on child poverty than we do.

“Raising the lone parent employment rate to 75 per cent would take half a million children out of poverty, and that’s what has led this Government to go ahead with our plans to ask lone parents to start looking at part time work when their youngest child turns seven. And I’m willing to look at their proposals to change that age to five if they can produce a proper impact assessment and can show that they will match any toughening of conditionality with investment and support for affordable childcare.

“Secondly, social mobility is crucial, it’s driven by education and it’s the early years that matter most. While I didn’t agree with everything in Frank Field’s report last week, when he says that early years determine a child’s chances in life, he’s exactly right. Although it seems to be an area where Nick Clegg wants to draw some artificial dividing lines with Labour, the fact is that we are the Party of Sure Start not just as a response to the need for better childcare provision, but as a response to the need for better, integrated support to improve life chances for the poorest kids.

“The third building block is more contested; we have to reaffirm that inequality in our economy and our society matters. We have a relative poverty target in this country and there’s a reason why we do. One of the most striking features of the Unicef report last week was the finding that if, in Sweden, you took away all the progressive tax and benefit measures and just let the market determine how many children lived in poverty, you would still have a lower poverty rate than in the UK with all of our tax and benefit measures in force.

“The New Policy Institute study earlier this week, found that about half of the children growing up in poverty do so despite the fact that at least one of their parents goes out to work. In work poverty goes too easily unnoticed and is perhaps harder to deal with because it goes to the kind of economy we want to see in our country. For that reason, Ed Miliband is right to be advocating the living wage.

“Because we need to find ways, not just of moving people into work and then topping up their wages, but helping them get on in work, just as our growth strategy has to be based not just on creating more jobs, but creating more higher skill, higher value added jobs that command better wages.

“The final building block is the most elusive and, although it actually comes naturally to progressive politics, it’s one we need to reaffirm. Poverty isn’t experienced by atomised individuals acting as totally independent economic agents. Poverty is endured by f amilies and to communities – and building relationships and supporting families are central to any sustained assault on poverty.

“What does that mean? It means we have to be alive to the impact that the private economy and public policy are having on the quality of family relationships. Isolation and lack of community are vital determinants in persistent child poverty. It means we need to deliver pride and self respect for poor communities, not just jobs and income transfers. For that reason building relationships, being engaged with local institutions, learning to lead and work with others are indispensible aspects of reducing child poverty.

“The state and the private sector can create the space and time for people to come together, with policies from flexible working to allow people to have time off, to making the streets safe so that people feel they can attend a public meeting on a dark night in winter. But it also means we need to start celebrating, and value, the people who are taking action and assuming leadership roles in their own communities.

“But even the strongest policy consensus won’t get us to what we need. We have to find new ways to give voice to a campaign that makes backsliding, delay, or watering down of the commitment to ending child poverty too politically painful for this Government to contemplate. One of the best things about CPAG is that it has the word “action” in the title, and I know everyone here doesn’t want to wait until we start to see rising child poverty before taking political action. But it also means we need to find new campaigning tools and new language to try and recruit new advocates who haven’t been involved in this cause before.”