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I shall now move on to people of working age, because I want to pick up the point that I made to the Minister earlier. The numbers with low or no qualifications have been dropping, although they are still bad among ethnic minority groups, and they are appalling among people with disabilities, for whom
poverty rates, at 30 per cent., are twice those for the non-disabled. That is worse than 10 years ago. I am sure that that was not the Government’s intention; I suspect that they are ashamed and will want to put it right.
The evidence shows that work alone is not the solution; I cannot say that often enough. Poverty among working-age adults has not been reduced; it remains unchanged. Some 6.2 million working-age adults are in poverty, exceeding the figure for pensioner poverty and child poverty combined. In-work poverty has become a major problem, with many people, because of withdrawal of benefits and the imposition of taxes, facing effective tax rates of 60, 70, 80 or even 90 per cent. That is a significant problem, and the Government need to address it.
It is a problem that has been made worse by the overcomplicated tax credit system. We need to move to a simpler system to reduce both that problem and the extraordinary problems that some of my constituents have been facing in respect of tax credit errors having been made that are not their fault, and it then becoming almost impossible to get the system corrected. I now have one of my members of staff working almost full-time on tax credit problems, because we find they can be resolved only on the telephone, and even then there have to be multiple telephone calls and multiple pieces of paper are produced as information is got wrong. People who are already on very low incomes and in difficult financial circumstances are told that they owe thousands of pounds through no fault of their own, and those sums are then reclaimed from the very payments that are meant to be helping them out of poverty. I might add that in the process they are hit with illegal bank charges that pile up further hundreds or even thousands of pounds of debt; because such people are not paid the right amounts at the right time, they get hit with bank charges. They can get the money back, but few people realise that; I will raise that issue next week in an Adjournment debate.
Hywel Williams: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point about tax credits. Does he agree that that is a particular problem in rural areas, such as my constituency, where there are high levels of self-employment and therefore a high proportion of people making use of tax credits—and where there are often low incomes generally in any case?
Matthew Taylor: The hon. Gentleman is right. I represent a poorest-income county. We have very high levels of self-employment because there are few other employment opportunities. We have one of the highest levels of self-employment and small businesses in the country, but we also have low incomes and high levels of social exclusion and other poverty issues. The Government have, to a degree, recognised some issues to do with rural poverty, which the previous Government did not. That set of circumstances is probably why we have a particularly high case load of problems to do with tax credit—and, indeed, with the Child Support Agency.
I might add that those problems are not being helped by the process currently under way of closing front-line offices where the staff dealing with them work; I am thinking in particular of Inland Revenue cuts. That means that people lose the front-line accessible office in their own town, because of a centralisation process that dictates that everything should be in main towns, and does not recognise the kind of rural communities that the hon. Gentleman and I represent.
On the issue of the life cycle, £2.9 billion of means-tested benefits are unclaimed by pensioners. The evidence shows that much of that is because of overcomplication, and some of it is because elderly people often do not want to make claims as they find doing so demeaning; they want to be able to survive on a pension that once upon a time they were told would look after them in their old age, but which is now simply inadequate.
Last April, Age Concern estimated that 2 million pensioners do not get the council tax benefit that they are entitled to; that amounts to £1.1 billion, or £540 for each pensioner. I do a lot to encourage people to get what they are entitled to. There are other pensioners whose circumstances put them just over the margin for such benefit, and who pay £1,000 or so in council tax out of annual incomes of only £12,000, £13,000 or £14,000.
The Government—and the Conservatives, if they want to support the continuation of the council tax system—have to recognise that if we have a local income tax we will get rid of all the benefits and the claims, and people will simply pay according to their means. Any party that argues for maintaining the council tax system—as Labour certainly does, and I understand the Conservatives do—has to recognise that a direct result of that is a complex benefit system that many find difficult to get through, and which particularly penalises pensioners, both because they might not claim and because benefit is phased out so quickly that even people on low incomes are now faced with bills averaging well over £1,000 a year.
News of another real issue for the Government emerged yesterday, when the Commission for Social Care Inspection highlighted the social exclusion suffered by the growing number of elderly people who live alone, and who need comparatively little support. Councils all over the country have phased out the support extended to those whose needs are low or moderate, and no longer visit once a week or once a day to give them a wash or just to check that they are okay.
People whose needs are high get good support. It is improving all the time, and the Government have done well in that regard, but the lack of adequate funding means that local councils all over the country have reduced support for those whose needs are not so great. Cornwall was one of the last to offer that sort of help, but even it has had to cut it recently. No council can afford to help elderly people whose difficulties, although real, are not as severe as others’. As a result, the CSCI said, those elderly people suffer even greater exclusion, and are forced to rely on family or friends—if they exist, or are in the neighbourhood.
The Department of Health has confirmed that social care is improving in many areas. That is true for people with high need, but concern remains about the possible
effects of rising eligibility criteria. Sufficient resources must be allocated to health and social services so that the necessary support can be provided, because an expression of concern by itself will not help anyone.
Incidentally, this country remains almost at the top of the winter deaths league, and that is something of which we should be ashamed. The Government have introduced programmes to tackle fuel poverty, but not enough has been done to prevent the many deaths that occur every year because people cannot keep themselves warm.
The hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) has already mentioned geographical exclusion, a subject that I have raised before with the Minister. Thousands of rural post offices have closed as a result of policies pursued by this Government and their Conservative predecessor. The result is that small numbers of people are very hard hit.
In rural areas, for example, one person in five is likely not to have a car. If a person is female, the one car in her household may be driven to work by her partner, whereas a person who is disabled or elderly may not be able to drive, and young people may not be able to afford to. For people in that situation, the loss of basic services such as post offices constitutes a type of social exclusion. That is compounded when bus services are closed or very erratic, as they are used by the people who need them most.
The people who suffer that social exclusion do not always show up in the poverty figures, as they live among relatively wealthy people—the ones whose second homes mean that locals have no houses to buy, or the ones with the good jobs who have moved to the country with their families for a better style of life. The people about whom I am speaking live in real poverty, with no access to the facilities available in cities. That sort of rural poverty is a growing problem in my constituency, and in Cornwall as a whole.
Neither this Government nor the Conservatives before them have had an adequate answer to the problems that I have described. With fewer and fewer people using services such as the local bus service or post office, the obvious response, from operators or the Government, has been to close them. That has created a stratum of very poor people in rural areas who are increasingly isolated and excluded, and whom the Government have simply ignored.
2.39 pm
Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North) (Lab): I am pleased to contribute to this important debate. My experience of social exclusion is based on several factors, among them the fact that, like every other hon. Member, I am a constituency MP. I represent an area on the outskirts of Nottingham, in contrast to the inner-city patch represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Mudie), but the outer cities suffer from great deprivation as well. My constituency is not ethnically mixed—essentially, it consists of former council estates with a white, working class population—but it too faces serious problems.
Secondly, my experience comes from being a local person, born and bred in one of those estates, who encountered even as a youngster, but also as a constituency MP, a number of the problems that have
been alluded to today. Thirdly, and this is where I will concentrate my remarks today, I have experience as chair of the local strategic partnership in my area called One Nottingham, which is charged with tackling deprivation and is doing its best to help regeneration in a city with a tight Victorian boundary, which means that the problems often appear even worse than the quite difficult problems that they are.
As chair of the LSP, I can regale the House with statistics about the difficulties in my area. Fifty-eight per cent. of youngsters are born out of wedlock. I make no moral judgment about that, but it is a structural phenomenon that needs to be addressed. One in seven young people who go to secondary school cannot read the first lesson that is put in front of them. My constituency sends the lowest number of youngsters to university. These and many other statistics underline why it is vital that social exclusion—as someone said, why do we not call it social inclusion?—is paramount on the Government’s agenda.
For me, the key thing is that we start to tackle causes rather than merely chase the consequences. That is where the debate has moved on to. We have seen today from the Front Benches—all parties have been responsible—that we chase after the difficulties and try to mitigate them, because that is what gets into the newspapers and what we get earache about. But we should take our political responsibilities even more seriously and work back to find out how we can prevent things from happening in the first place. It is evident now that the Government are addressing the problems in that way.
I guess that regression is a good way to look at this. All of us encounter the problems of crime, antisocial behaviour, poor educational attainment, health inequalities, and particularly poor levels of qualification. We say, “Why can’t we do more at this level? Why can’t we throw a bit more money here? Why can’t we have another hospital here or build a new academy?” If we are serious about tackling the problems, we have to look not only at what is going wrong in secondary schools and make them more effective, which our Government have done over the past nine years, but at primary schools, which feed the secondary schools.
We should look beyond the primary school at what happens from nought to five. Are we preparing youngsters to make the best of the now much-improved education system that is on offer? Further than that, we should go prenatally, beyond mere classes about what to do if one is pregnant and how to get a new baby. We should go beyond that to those youngsters who will become pregnant. We should give people values and life chances that they can pass on to their newborns. That will break the cycle so that problems are not constantly repeated in each generation, with yet another set of remedial measures required; ever earlier intervention, ever more effective and ever more inexpensive for the taxpayer and the neighbours in the locality.
So I very much welcome the focus given by the ministerial team to social exclusion. As someone suffering from jet lag, I think that my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office gave a sterling performance from the Dispatch Box. I would have
given a far better speech than I am going to give had I been able to do it at 3.30 am, so my right hon. Friend deserves great praise indeed. She and her ministerial colleague have brought the new focus, and it is very welcome, because all parties in the past have failed to tackle the issue in the way that we are now doing.
I open this up to all parties. I commend some of the efforts from the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister to raise the issues. I know that we all get into the party political game and condemn each other and pick on each other’s words. It is as wrong to condemn people with phrases such as “foetal ASBOs” or “ASBOs for embryos”, as it is to talk about “loving louts” or “hugging hoodies”. People in our constituencies deserve a more serious debate and I hope that Members on both Front Benches and on both sides of the House will provide it. I commend my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench for doing so, as well as officials in various Departments. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East was a bit tough on the social exclusion unit; in recent months, the many departments of the civil service have been working together in a way that I have not seen in all my experience in the House.
The debate is moving on; we are moving up the learning curve and I am pleased to see it. Departments are joining up as they never have before: the Home Office, the respect unit, the Department of Health and our Department for Education and Skills. I very much hope that as my right hon. Friend the Minister looks at public service agreements across the board there is more power to her elbow in respect of social exclusion and prevention, which is always difficult to measure.
Those things cannot be delivered from on high; they have to be mirrored locally in systems that can take up policy initiatives and give them the local sensitivity that will make them work. That is where local strategic partnerships and councils come into play. It is not a question of either-or; we need both working together. It is not a zero-sum game. If one part of governmental structure is effective, it does not mean that another part is ineffective. In a genuine partnership, we hope to create the best by joining all the bits together so that they equal more than the sum of their parts.
We can make a difference. One Nottingham has done remarkable things over the past year. We have refocused our efforts to tackle social exclusion and massively limited the scatter-gun approach, whereby money was sprayed across the community, and reduced 190 projects to about 60. We intend to go further so that we see some benefit from focusing our small but important resources.
LSPs include the health services, the police, the voluntary sector, local authorities and many others. Their mission is prevention, pre-emption and early intervention—three words that, in effect, are saying the same thing: we need to get in early and make sure that we have an impact at the beginning of the cycle, rather than mitigating the worst effects. We are developing theme partnerships in each sector—health, education, skills, crime and drugs—to make sure that everyone is working together. We are not merely taking good initiatives and improving them, which we can do using neighbourhood renewal funding, but as my hon.
Friend the Member for Leeds, East suggested, we are then getting them into the mainstream.
Short-term funding is the bane of the lives of those who are genuinely trying to tackle social exclusion at the grass roots. In Nottingham, we have attempted to come up with key projects, put real financial oomph behind them and make sure they work as effectively as possible. Our projects include tackling the 50 most difficult families in the city of Nottingham. We are teaching social behaviour in every primary school, as the antithesis of antisocial behaviour. We are building on the Government’s superb SEAL programme—the social and emotional aspects of literacy—the volume effort to ensure that every youngster has the emotional and social skills set that enables them to learn and which gives them the ability to resolve arguments without violence, thus allowing them to take advantage of what is on offer academically at primary and secondary school.
We have a welfare to work programme. Ours is the first LSP to adopt a city strategy, to make sure that people can get back to work—not forcing people, but making sure that they have the therapy and help that anyone needs if they have been out of work for a long time, giving them the self-confidence to overcome their initial anxiety or the depression they experience due to lack of self-worth. Those things are important.
My right hon. Friend the Minister alluded to the nurse-family partnerships. They have proven themselves over and over again—in Denver and in the work of Professor Olds and others. They represent, in effect, really good health visiting, with knobs on, to make sure that there is a personalised approach. That is the way that we need to go. I will flag up a warning to Ministers: even if we are determined to make those things work, it is important that they are taken on by the mainstream. We need to ensure that, while we support individual projects of that nature, which are incredibly valuable, we do not see the number of health visitors dribbling away at the other end so that such projects cannot become mainstream. I know that my hon. Friends are well aware of that.
This is all about person-specific stuff. Getting the community on side and involved is a phrase that I have heard used in today’s debate. Often the people we are talking about have no relationship whatsoever with communities. Often they feel antagonistic to even the idea of a community. They are the people we need to bring into the community. That emphasis on person-specific service is important. All those projects that I have described, which we are trying to undertake in Nottingham, are, in effect, not about swatting the mosquitoes, but draining the swamp. We need to ensure that those things are going to have a long-term impact.
There are many other issues that time prevents me from raising, but there are one or two points that I want to leave with Ministers. Above all, the issue is about helping not only to set the policy context, but to ensure that, locally, people feel that they can take projects up. People are still working in their silos. They are still afraid of losing control. Sometimes they may even be frightened of the success of a partnership. The Government as a whole need to ensure that those people, locally, feel that they are able to be entrepreneurial, to take risks and to do stuff. There is often pressure from other Departments to meet this
target and fill out that form. I speak with some experience. I became a chair of a local strategic partnership and was asked immediately to produce a local area agreement, a community strategy, and a floor target action plan, even though the organisation that I took over was in need of oxygen and life support. The perspective needs to be got right and there needs to be the necessary light touch. Often targeting will distort and rob initiative if we are not careful.
We must ensure that Ministers take on board the concept of prevention and of getting that recognised as part of a legitimate function of what we do locally. Prevention is often hard to measure and does not enable us to tick boxes this time next year. The Government need to make the space to recognise and value those institutions locally that seek to undertake prevention. Finally, I want to draw attention to the work of wave research, which features in the document being put forward. If there is one picture that sums it up, it is this—
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. Visual aids are not encouraged in the Chamber since it makes it difficult for the Official Report to record what the hon. Gentleman is talking about. I am afraid that he is going to have to use words.
Mr. Allen: I was merely trying to illustrate the point to your good self, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The photograph shows that a three-year-old who suffers neglect—who is not nurtured properly, not loved, and not given the right nutrition or the right stimulus—has a brain of a small size, whereas a child that does not suffer that neglect has a larger brain. That child is more likely to be empathetic and to be able to interact in society. That is a stunning measure of where we need to get to from where we are. This Government team, in particular, has made a tremendous start on the issue. Prevention is now seriously back on the agenda of all political parties. I wish everyone well in ensuring that the debate that we need to have is an all-party debate, as far as is possible, and one that is reflected in the localities.
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