Examination of witness (Questions 80 -
85)
TUESDAY 16 JUNE 1998
DR ALAN
MARSH
Mr Goggins
80. I am quite interested to explore a little
bit more about the severe hardship measures because whether you
approach the issue of poverty and inequality from an academic
point of view or whether you just talk to people who are experiencing
poverty, the thing which hits you is the very hidden things which
make people poor. They are very often hard to measure. You talk
about the incidence of problem debts. Often debt has far more
impact on a person's poverty than their actual level of income.
I just wondered from your studies what you could tell us about
that, how you measure it and what success measure might be appropriate.
(Dr Marsh) I would detain you too long if I were
to drag you through all 70 components of this measure. Certainly
we alighted on debt because combined with the failure to afford
things and coming onto other kinds of financial stress the thing
to concentrate on is not the presence of debt in the house—I
can introduce you to people in fabulous amounts of debt but they
service the principal so they are not poor—but petty debt
which you cannot repay is the bane of low income families and
puts them under tremendous stress and has all kinds of other effects
as well. It is important to note that it is the failure to service
debt which is the problem. On average this happens to families
on income support two or three times a year. They get into a position
where they cannot repay the debt. Ask any Social Fund administrator.
Quite often Social Fund loans are not given because people are
already in too much debt. As Richard Berthoud once said, they
were too poor to be helped.
Ms Stuart
81. At the risk of sounding a terrible philistine,
actually all I need to do to find out the fact that single parents'
health started deteriorating after the age of 33, that their problem
is their own health, their own behaviour all that, is go to a
couple of estates in my constituency. The real challenge is what
to do after this. There was an article recently in the Journal
of Paediatrics which said that if you start to look at parenting
behaviour and the way that cascades down the generations, that
kind of behaviour which is within families, that kind of bad health
behaviour, I am getting a sense of frustration of saying we are
all gathering this really nice information which tells us this
really nice longitudinal stuff. What do we do with it?
(Dr Marsh) Your visit to the estate would of course
have given you the same information I have been talking about.
It would not have quantified it for you nationally, it would not
have told you what the national size of the problem was, it would
not have told you how it interacts with other factors, it would
not tell you about response to other changes in their lives or
by how much. You asked me how you predict. You predict by making
these calculations and then within bands of confidence saying
if that continues then you will get more of this. You put numbers
to it and people who make policy in the Department of Social Security
need numbers as well as the description that they too could find
out with a visit to their local estate.
82. If we look at the work of the Social
Exclusion Unit which is looking at things like the worst estates,
that kind of recognition that there are some problems for which
you need national policies for which you need those kinds of benchmarks,
you need to know where you are moving from, are we not moving
to a position where we have to recognise that some of the hard
core social exclusion of real deprivation will not be solved by
national policies, will be solved by extremely targeted approaches
to very specific problems.
(Dr Marsh) The majority of people who are poor,
deprived, whatever, defined by the measures we have been discussing,
do not live in deprived areas.
83. Evidence.
(Dr Marsh) The majority of people who live in
deprived areas are not deprived.
84. I represent a constituency which everybody
assumes to be leafy Birmingham: Edgbaston. I know that if I look
at a couple of roads in a ward from the address I cannot tell
you whether I am talking about a £½ million property
or one of the tower blocks where 80 per cent of the mothers are
single parents on benefit. It depends what a deprived area is.
In the context of my constituency, I have solid pockets which
in terms of square mileage may be terribly small but to me they
are solid deprived areas.
(Dr Marsh) I agree with you entirely. There are
clear known estate areas in every part of Britain which need to
be reconnected to the rest of society. The infrastructure is breaking
down, we all know what is happening to all those bright estates
which gave us so much hope for a social future in the 1960s. We
must be clear. We have 1.6 million lone parents in Britain and
they do not all live on bad estates. What our nationally representative
research does for you is to show you the spatial distribution
of the problem, shows you how much of the problem might respond
to a direct interventionist local strategy and how much of it
has to be tackled in different ways.
Mr Wicks
85. That is an interesting dialogue and
it reminds me of another Labour Government in the 1970s and the
controversy about the area programmes and the spatial approach.
In thanking you, may I say on behalf of the Committee that we
found that a very valuable session, given your track record and
command of data? I was particularly struck by your emphasis on
severe hardship, because in a sense, although one is aware that
one could come up with a number of potential success measures,
perhaps several hundred if one wanted to, I suppose it is at least
worth asking the question as to whether there are two or three
or four key indicators or success measures in social security
equivalent to the well-known economic indicators. If you had any
other evidence or information which you would like to pass us
on severe hardship, either quantitative data or methodological
work, we would find that interesting.
(Dr Marsh) I should be glad to.1[2]
Mr Wicks: Thank you
very much.
2 A paper "The Benefit Fault-line" by Alan
Marsh from Unemployment and Public Policy in a Changing Labour
Market, was submitted but is not printed here. Back
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