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“make a lasting difference to the community by offering new experiences and giving people opportunities that they may not otherwise have had”.
“will boost people’s health, confidence and well-being, enhance the local environment, promote family learning and offer better employment prospects.”
All 3,500 residents will be eligible for courses, events, classes and schemes to bring genuine changes to their lives and their community.
Many other communities like Gamesley are divided and deprived—one could even say “dysfunctional.” Gamesley has its difficulties but I am delighted to say that the trustees of the CDF whom I took there in the summer were impressed with what they saw.
It is widely believed and acknowledged on that estate that a Labour Government have given those people hope and provided opportunities to make their community good and even better in the future, through not only supporting the measures that I outlined, but through investment in child and working tax credits, creating jobs with a national minimum wage safety net, and providing for pension credit, the winter fuel
allowance, Sure Start, police funding and investment in—to coin a phrase—human and social capital.
By empowering those communities to take responsibility for their future, we promote social inclusion. In future elections, those people will know exactly who has helped them and who they need to vote for to ensure that the support continues.
3.22 pm
Mr. Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth, East) (Con): It is a pleasure to participate in the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) on a passionate and thoughtful speech. His views about the importance of the local role in tackling social exclusion and enhancing communities are shared across parties.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries), who made a passionate and powerful speech about the importance of education. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) also made a notable contribution through his interventions and his speech. Hon. Members of all parties can learn much from his thoughts about some of the initiatives in Nottingham, which could be established in other parts of the country.
Social exclusion is a relatively new term in British policy. It refers to poverty and low income, and some of the wider causes and consequences of that. The Government have a definition, which covers unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime, bad health and family breakdown—a myriad subjects, crossing several Departments, which shows the importance of the debate. All of us come across many of those concerns in our constituency surgeries. They affect the groups of people that we are discussing.
To give credit where it is due, the Government have their heart in the right place when they focus on the problems of social exclusion. However, I am worried that we spend so much time thinking about helping people out of the trap that we do not do enough to prevent them from getting into it—and that is what I should like to concentrate on today.
The Government set up the social exclusion unit in 1997. Its priorities were the issues that I outlined. The unit has published a series of reports on neighbourhood renewal, rough sleepers, teenage pregnancy, young people who are not in education, training or employment, truancy and exclusion. Much of the focus is national and not based locally, whereas the hon. Member for High Peak placed great emphasis on a local focus.
The Cabinet Office report put into context the size of the group that we are talking about. Its report of September 2006 said that about 2.5 per cent. of the population were labelled as socially excluded. My concern is that we do not focus enough on prevention, as opposed to treatment, in respect of the people caught up in the process. Unemployment is on the rise, as are prison numbers and family breakdown. Obesity, binge drinking and taxation of the poor are on the rise, and so is truancy. Those are all important factors, showing that we are not necessarily winning the battle
against social exclusion. We need to tackle the dismal statistics and ask why so many people are falling into the trap.
I shall deal with employment first. The tax and benefits system is confusing and does not lend itself to helping people out of the poverty trap. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) referred in his opening remarks to research demonstrating that the poorest households in Britain are now paying a higher share of tax, but getting a lower share of benefits, than before the present Government came into power. If the poorest one fifth of households paid the same share of tax and got the same share of total benefits as they did in 1996-97, they would have been about £530 better off in 2004-05. The poorest one fifth of households pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes than any other group. That must be tackled.
More than 1.2 million young people are not in full-time education, and it is costing the Government in failing to prevent that from happening. The Government have put forward many initiatives that are well meaning, but are failing. The new deal was cited in the Minister’s opening remarks, but that is not a good example of money being well spent. A staggering £4.6 billion has been spent on the project annually, yet about two thirds of people going through it do not gain any form of employment. Homelessness is another mark of social exclusion. Levels of homelessness are starting to decrease, but they went up from 102,000 in 1997 to 135,000 two years ago.
Child tax credits are another concern in the context of trying to ease the burden on poor families. The Chancellor put forward that initiative, which again was well intentioned, but about two thirds of people affected in Bournemouth are receiving the wrong payments. More than 4,700 cases were overpaid—individual cases where too much money was paid, which then had to be paid back. A further 2,700 cases were underpaid by a total of £104 million. That causes confusion and misery for the families affected, yet the Government’s intention was, I agree, well founded.
Living in temporary accommodation is another yardstick. The number of households living in temporary accommodation has risen by a staggering 139 per cent. since 1997. Those figures are unacceptable.
We had an interesting debate on Monday about which crime statistics can be believed. It can be agreed that unemployed people are almost twice as likely to be victims of violent crime. People living in the most deprived areas of England and Wales are twice as likely as those in the wealthiest areas to be victims of violent crime. It means that once people move into that category, it is difficult to get out of it. The same applies to burglary. People renting accommodation or living in social housing are more than twice as likely to be burgled than owner-occupiers.
A picture is emerging: the Government are well intentioned, but the reality is that some of these initiatives are not working. Incapacity benefit provides another example: 2.7 million people of working age are claiming it—four and a half times more than the number of job vacancies in the UK. Economic inactivity is a useful yardstick for comparison with other nations around the world. In an Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development survey of 23 countries, the UK had the highest percentage of economically inactive men between the ages of 25 and 45. That shows the extent of the challenge that the Government are facing.
It is important to examine why we are in this position. Great emphasis has already been placed on the role of education. Three quarters of 16-year-olds from low-income families in England and Wales fail to achieve grades A to C in their GCSEs. Without those good grades, they find it difficult to get out of their present station in life and improve their position. Nearly 1 million children are estimated to be in poorly performing schools, according to the National Audit Office. That represents a staggering 13 per cent. of the school population. More worryingly, one third of all failing schools are in the most deprived 20 per cent. of our communities. This gives rise to another statistic with which the House will be familiar: more than 1 million children play truant every year. This is not the rosy picture that the Minister painted in her opening remarks.
On health, the Government have introduced targets in relation to life expectancy and infant mortality, and those are useful in grading areas of poverty and deprivation. On the basis of the Government’s statistics on health inequalities, they set targets in 2001 to reduce by 10 per cent. the gap in infant mortality rates between manual groups and the population as a whole, and to reduce by 10 per cent. the gap between areas with the lowest life expectancy at birth and the population as a whole. Those targets have not been met; the situation is worsening in both cases. The relative gap in infant mortality rates between the general population and the poorest social classes has increased by 46 per cent. since the 1997-1999 baseline.
Helen Goodman: Would the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that the mortality gap has widened not because the position of the people at the bottom of the pile has worsened but because it has not increased as much as it has for those at the top? Would he also acknowledge that all groups have improved their position under the stewardship of this Labour Government?
Mr. Ellwood: The hon. Lady makes her point, but my argument is that that is comparative to the general base. Her argument is therefore flawed. Those are targets set by her own Government, and they have not been met. She may smile, but the targets have failed. There is work to be done, and we are not getting there at the moment.
In December 2006 the Government published their document “Tackling health inequalities”, which the hon. Lady might care to cast her eye over. It makes it clear that there is a widening gap between the life expectancy of both males and females in the target groups compared with the wider population. That report was produced more than a month ago, but, interestingly, there was not one press release about it. That is a clear indication that the Government are not meeting their targets.
Mr. Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con): Is my hon. Friend aware of the rapidly deteriorating access to NHS dentistry? In many parts of the country, including my constituency, families from the socially excluded sector are unable to get the free treatment that they thought was available on the NHS.
Mr. Ellwood: My hon. Friend makes a valid point. That is yet another illustration of how the NHS provides different services in different parts of the country, which affects those very people—the 2.5 per cent. of the nation—on whom we are focusing today.
In July 2006 the Government’s chief medical officer slated the progress being made in the NHS, saying:
“There is strong anecdotal information from within the NHS which tells a consistent story for public health of poor morale, declining numbers, inadequate recruitment, and budgets being raided to solve financial deficits in the acute sector.”
That gives us an indication of one of the problems at the heart of what is happening to the 2.5 per cent. of the population whom we so want to help. If the NHS is forced to cut budgets, one of the groups of people that will be affected is those on low incomes, as my hon. Friend has just pointed out.
I intervened on the Minister earlier to talk about binge drinking, which is a matter of concern in Bournemouth. An awful lot of money has been pushed into the area to tackle this growing scourge that is affecting the United Kingdom. The accepted norm for the amount of alcohol that the young can drink is now much higher than when I was growing up. I put it to the Minister that it was evident that alcohol abuse was on the increase, but I am afraid that I did not get a clear answer. The Office for National Statistics states that since 1997 alcohol-related deaths have increased by 40 per cent.—an astonishing figure. Hon. Members may cringe, but I am not making that figure up; it is from the ONS. On the one hand, the Government are pouring money into stopping binge drinking, while on the other hand, late licensing laws are encouraging more drinking, thereby making the Government’s job all the harder.
The Government estimate that alcohol abuse costs around £20 billion a year. As many hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned, we could have saved that money had we taken preventive action much earlier. In addition, as was mentioned in the opening remarks, the overall 3 per cent. increase in sexually transmitted infections poses a challenge.
Obesity has also caught the attention of the media in the past few months, with Jamie Oliver’s initiatives receiving an awful lot of press coverage. Since 1997, the proportion of two to 15-year-old boys who are either overweight or obese has increased by 33 per cent., while according to the same criteria the proportion of girls has increased by 27 per cent. To put it in another way, 15 per cent. of children in the UK are considered overweight or obese. That problem affects the individual and the state in different ways. It affects the individual by causing an increasingly lethargic approach to life, and in some cases lower self-esteem and alienation. It also increases the risk of developing serious health problems in later life, including heart attacks and strokes. That has a knock-on effect on the
NHS. By failing to tackle obesity, we are committing a future Government to cover the health bill for such individuals.
We must tackle the root causes of ill health—obesity, sexually transmitted infections and alcohol abuse. Public health budgets are being raided to solve the NHS financial crisis. I want Government policy to focus not so much on dealing with consequences but more on making interventions beforehand. The origins of health inequalities lie in standards of living, family structures and employment, among other factors.
For me, education and family are the two critical pillars in a child’s upbringing. If we invest in the education of individuals while they are young, we will not only save the state huge sums of money but help those individuals to progress in life. For example, I would like to see class sizes reduced from the high figure of 30, to provide a more individual one-to-one focus from teachers or teaching assistants. Having visited a number of schools, and having seen the number of pupils with whom teachers must contend, I know that classes are often split in half: the teacher takes one half, and the teaching assistant takes the other. Pupils can then get the type of attention, whether one-to-one or as a group of 15, that is crucial to making them feel valued and to enabling them to learn in a better environment.
Tom Levitt: For the record, will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that it was this Government who brought primary school class sizes down to 30 or lower in the first place? The scenario that he has just described would not be possible without the investment in teaching assistants that this Government also provided.
Mr. Ellwood: I have no problem with acknowledging that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) said, there is no point in trying to collect points— [Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman would listen to my answer, he would hear that I very much support a number of this Government’s initiatives. However, on my visits to schools in Bournemouth, I have seen the effects of budget cuts and the knock-on effect on the standards of teaching. Let me illustrate that. When I go into a head teacher’s office, the first thing they do is point me to the top shelf, showing me myriad publications, laminated products and initiatives that have come from central Government telling them how to run their schools. Each one of those initiatives costs money, denying front-line teachers the money that they deserve.
Adult education is a great way to take someone out of their station in life so that they can do something else. The Learning and Skills Council has cut the number of courses in the UK. As it has recognised, 230,000 publicly funded courses have been cut. That has affected many courses in Bournemouth. Once they are cut, it is difficult to get them back up and running. If they are not cut, the onus for payment is on the individual. Often, the group of people with whom we are concerned today are not able to afford that.
Another area of interest is education in prisons. One thing that I wanted to ask the Minister about is a subject that has not been mentioned so far. Prisons have been in the public eye in the past few days, and my concern is that the overpopulation in prisons is having a knock-on effect on our ability to rehabilitate the people who affect communities when they get out.
Some of the statistics are shocking: 58 per cent. of all adult prisoners, and 72 per cent. of 18 to 20-year-old male prisoners, were reconvicted within two years of release. Those people are coming out of prison with nothing. They went into prison with one level of skills and came out probably having learned negative skills that they cannot put to use. We are failing to look after that population in our prisons to ensure that they are rehabilitated and able to be productive for our community. Instead they know no other way of life other than to commit another crime, reoffend and to go back into our prison system, costing every year around £38,000 per individual prisoner. A little education would help them to find a new niche in life and a new direction, so that they can make a positive contribution to the community that they go into. I would like to see—I am glad that the Conservative party has called for this—a greater prison drug rehabilitation programme, and increased education programmes as well as special education in our prisons.
I wanted to discuss the voluntary sector, which plays an important role, but I shall not do so as I know other hon. Members wish to speak. However, I would like to say that our leader, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), has made it clear that the Conservative party is committed to tackling the problems of social exclusion, and he has established the fact that creating “greater social justice” is one of the six big challenges facing Britain today. He said:
“We will consider how we can strengthen our society—and will develop ideas to empower the voluntary sector, to foster social enterprise, to increase the scope of community action and to encourage neighbourhood revival.
“I want my Party to be one that says, loudly and proudly, that there is such a thing as society—it’s just not the same thing as the state.”
Those are powerful words, and I hope that all Members on both sides of the House will agree what an important role that sector plays.
Labour's approach has been one of running things from high, introducing well-intended initiatives that are not working, but are causing increased bureaucracy. We are losing a sense of community in our constituencies, and that has an impact on the sense of pride and duty that individuals have. There is no easy answer to that.
We have covered an awful lot of subjects for which some initiatives have worked and some have not, but I am concerned about the benefits system, our savings system, the impact on marriage, and the role models individuals have—who they aspire to be like. I am also concerned about some of the initiatives that Labour has come up with. I have mentioned the licensing laws. Casinos are another. That simply encourages more spending, often by people with little money who are trying to get out of their station in life by taking a gamble.
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