UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 683-i
HOUSE OF COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE THE
CHILDREN,
SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE
CHILD
POVERTY
ED BALLS, YVETTE COOPER, BEVERLEY HUGHES, JAMES
PURNELL and STEPHEN TIMMS
Evidence heard in Public
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Questions 1 - 82
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Children,
Schools and Families Committee
on
Monday 9 June 2008
Members present:
Mr. Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Annette Brooke
Mr. David Chaytor
Mr. John Heppell
Paul Holmes
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr. Graham Stuart
Lynda Waltho
Examination
of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rt hon. Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State
for Children, Schools and Families, Rt
hon. Yvette Cooper MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Rt hon. Beverley Hughes MP, Minister
for Children, Young People and Families, Rt
hon. James Purnell MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and Rt hon. Stephen Timms MP, Minister for
Employment and Welfare Reform, gave evidence.
Q<1> <Chairman:> May I welcome this rather large ministerial
team to our proceedings? The occasion
is historic, and I cannot remember any Select Committee ever having such a
large number of Cabinet and other Ministers. I apologise to Stephen Timms.
We were not sure whether he was coming, but we are delighted that he is
here, and he will receive a name plate in a moment. I also welcome-I shall not give titles-Yvette Cooper, James
Purnell, Ed Balls and Beverley Hughes to our proceedings.
Secretary
of State, you will orchestrate from your side who comes back and when?
<Ed
Balls:> Within the realm of the possible.
<Chairman:> I will
override you if and when necessary
<Ed Balls:>
I will back down immediately.
Q<2> <Chairman:> I want to remind you that when you gave
evidence to this Committee last time
you said that your role and the Department's future would depend on what
leverage you could bring to the job in persuading other Cabinet members to
agree with you and to work together.
Having reminded you of that, I invite you to say a few words to open our
proceedings.
<Ed
Balls:> Thank
you, Mr. Chairman. As you say, it is
unprecedented to have so many Cabinet and other Ministers before one Select
Committee. The credit goes not only to you and to your investigation into the
children's plan from around Christmas, but to Fiona Mactaggart, whose hard
questioning at the time led to the idea that we needed to investigate the issues
across Departments. It is appropriate that the Committee that looks at the
Department for Children, Schools and Families should be the first to
investigate the new machinery, and in particular our long-term actions on child
poverty.
It
is central to our new Department to tackle the long-term causes of poverty and
to promote the well-being, health and happiness of every child. I am sure that,
when the Chancellor appears before the Treasury Committee, he is scrutinised on
the details of Budget decisions. It is right that our Department should be
questioned by you on the long-term impact of our policies on child poverty and
child well-being. It is also the case that, in both the short term and long
term, this is very much a collective endeavour. The child poverty public
service agreement targets are jointly owned by my Department, the Department
for Work and Pensions and the Treasury. That is why, when it was suggested that
we should have such an inquiry, we thought that it was right to have Cabinet-level
representatives from the DWP-we have James here as well as the Minister for
Employment and Welfare Reform, Stephen Timms-the Chief Secretary to the
Treasury, and Bev Hughes, who is Minister for Children, Young People and
Families and attends Cabinet for discussions of all matters to do with children
and child poverty.
This
is very much a joint endeavour. As we discussed when I appeared last time, we
cannot achieve any of our long-term goals with regard to child health,
well-being, happiness and progress without close co-operation with other
Departments. In the creation of the new child poverty unit, we have seen that
degree of close co-operation. I know that you will want to talk to us about
that today. Also, the document "Ending child poverty: everybody's business",
which we published on Budget day, was a joint endeavour of the three
Departments-Treasury, DWP and DCSF. On re-reading it over the weekend, I have
to say that it is really good document and shows the degree of intellectual
rigour and policy understanding that is in that joint unit. Because of the
joint work, we were able to make the progress that we made at the time of
Budget 2008.
We
are all driven by the fact that the levels of child poverty have been
unacceptably high in Britain. In 1997, it was at the highest level of any
European country. There had been a doubling of child poverty from the previous
18 years. In the past 10 years, we have had the largest fall in child poverty
of any European country-a fall of 600,00 children living in relative poverty.
We were all disappointed when the last published statistics showed a small rise
in child poverty. That is why we were determined to redouble our efforts, and
that is what happened through our joint work at the time of the Budget. It was
a significant step forward in the short term.
Last
year's Budget measure will take out 500,000 children from poverty over the next
two or three years. Also, the money that was put on the table-again, in a joint
way-for the long-term work has been another step. Some £125 million has been
made available to finance pilots over the next two years. Those pilots will
consider a range of different issues around work, parenting, child support,
child development and the take-up of tax credits. The Budget document, both
short and long term, showed the joint work of the three Departments.
As
the Committee knows, the households below average income statistics for
2006-07, which include figures on child poverty last year, are due to be
released tomorrow morning. We as Ministers
are aware of the content of those statistics, but the protocols of the
independent national statistics organisation mean that we cannot reveal those
numbers to the Committee, much as we would like to. The timing of the release of those statistics tomorrow was made
by National Statistics, independent of us and after the timing of today's
hearing had been decided. I apologise
that we cannot get into that detail, but I hope that we will be able to look at
the long-term issues that arise from our track record on child poverty over the
last 10 years and the last Budget.
As
I said, we are determined to redouble our efforts. It is a moral imperative for our country that we meet our targets
to abolish child poverty in a generation and halve it by 2010. That commitment is shared across all
Departments. We work and discuss those
issues regularly and closely and we are pleased that you chose this issue for
the DCSF Committee to investigate today.
Q<3> <Chairman:> Thank
you, Secretary of State. Some of us
were on a previous Committee and know quite a lot about the job in terms of the
schools part of the remit. We were
determined that, with the new Committee covering children and families, we
would do it thoroughly right across the piece.
We are already well into a major inquiry about looked-after children and
children in care, and we will be meeting with some of you during that
inquiry. We were determined that, if
the Government were correct in establishing the new Department, it should be a
lead Department with a remit to cover all children's issues-we are terribly
disappointed that there is no one from Health here. That is teasing you a little, Secretary of State.
<Ed
Balls:> It was not possible to fit them in.
Q<4> <Chairman:> It was not quite possible.
This
is an historic day in the sense that we cannot have the stats that you would
like to give us tomorrow, but we did have a rather disturbing report-published
this morning and leaked in the weekend press-from the children's commissioners
in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland on this subject. It is rather strange. The Government are committed to ending child
poverty and, many of us would say, have started to tackle it in a workman-like
way and have achieved very much. I was
at a Carnegie Foundation and Sutton Trust seminar in New York the week before
last, where many of the American researchers doing international research were
full of praise for what the UK has been doing and has achieved. How do you balance the voices that say that
very serious beginnings have begun on this matter when compared with what the
children's commissioners said this morning?
How would you answer that?
<Ed
Balls:> First, I would say that we have made
substantial progress but that there is a long way to go. That is true whether you are talking about
the raising of school standards or reductions in child poverty. We have probably exceeded our expectations
of the progress that we could make in the years that we have had, but there is
still further to go.
Secondly,
this morning the children's commissioners made it clear that the creation of
the new Department, the bringing together of policies for children and young
people into one Department, and the joint responsibilities regarding crime, sports,
poverty and children's health are a substantial step forward and a way of
integrating policy better. They said
that the majority of children are happy, doing well and thriving, and they are
right about that. In our society, the
danger is that we tend to talk down the achievements of our children and young
people, when there are many great things being done across the country by
children in school, in volunteering and more widely. It was also pointed out that we still have a high level of
children who are incarcerated because of youth crime. That level has stayed stable but is still higher than in some
other countries. We are very focused,
as a new Department, on improving the quality of children's education, on
resettlement when children leave imprisonment and particularly on tackling the
causes of youth crime. That is exactly what our Department is all about. We are
responding to the concerns that many had, including the children's
commissioner, in the agenda that we set out in the children's plan. We cannot
write the headlines or the stories, and I would anticipate that the children's
commissioners themselves would have been disappointed with some of the negative
ways in which their comments were reported. Overall, the picture is very
positive for children and young people in our society, but there is still some
way to go to make this the best place in the world for children to grow up in,
and that is our Department's mission.
Q<5> <Chairman:> Thank you for that, Secretary of State. May I
switch to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions? I was considering the
Department for Work and Pensions today. We are very lucky to have this session
on the back of a very good report by our sister Committee, the Select Committee
on Work and Pensions. You gave evidence to its inquiry. May I say that from
reading that report, it seems that plunging into poverty is very easy for
someone who becomes a single parent unit? That applies usually to a female
single parent. How can we ever address that?
In
the area that we know best, educational assistants earn £13,815 on average.
Retail cashiers and checkout operators earn £11,700. Other educational
assistants earn £10,698. Are we ever going to be able to crack poverty if
single parents have to rely on such low wages? I am talking not just about
people working in classrooms as classroom assistants but about people working
at the checkouts in Tesco's or Sainsbury's. Are we ever going to crack this?
<James
Purnell:> I think that, yes, we can. That is precisely
why the minimum wage and tax credits are so important-so that there is a floor
on wages and so that tax credits can top up people's wages. We believe firmly
that getting people into work is their best route out of poverty, but not the
only one. We try to get as many people as possible into work but, as we made
clear in the document that was referred to earlier, we also have a strategy for
getting people who are not in work above the poverty line. We need to do both.
The
point that you made about New York is interesting. I was there talking to Mayor
Bloomberg's deputy mayor about the matter, and they are considering their
definition of child poverty. They found the very idea of having a target based
on relative poverty quite surprising, because you are effectively always
running up a down escalator, but I think that it is right to have that target,
even if it means that sometimes, as you say, the headlines are difficult. It
means that more children can be lifted out of poverty, because it is a tough
target to meet. It is the right target to meet, because we believe that poverty
is partly about material deprivation, but it is also about the amount of income
that you have relative to everybody else.
Q<6> <Chairman:> Let us move, then, to the Chief Secretary. Is
it not a problem for an incoming Government to have such bold aspirations? Are
not a Labour Government always going to be criticised, if not crucified, for
lagging behind what we said we were going to achieve? You must look at what
this will really mean for this country's public expenditure and recoil in
horror at the thought of how much money it will take to really achieve the rest
of this goal.
<Yvette
Cooper:> In fact, the money that we are investing in
children's life chances and opportunities for the future, and in support for
families on low incomes, has immense returns in those children's opportunities
in life later on and in what happens to them not just in the next couple of
years but in 10, 20, 30, 40 years to come. That is why I think that this is the
right target and the right approach for us to have. Yes, it is challenging-make
no mistake about that. We know that if we had done nothing for the past 10 or
11 years and simply uprated the 1997 tax and benefits system, we would have
seen 1.7 million more children in poverty as a result. We are having to do a
lot to address wider economic or social trends, but it is right that we should
do so and that it should be a priority across Government. It is far better to
have a challenging target that stretches us and everyone in the Government who
has to work to it than to have a target that we can meet easily and that, as a
result, will not make as much difference to as many families and children
throughout the country.
Q<7> <Chairman:> We talk about raising aspiration. I am not sure that the Secretary of State
for Children, Schools and Families totally appreciated the report on testing
and assessment, although he thought that it was thorough. When we start investing in a particular goal
in respect of public policy, we see that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit
that is easier to do something about.
We have some easy, good returns and perhaps some good press releases,
but the second and third ways of getting to the more difficult areas of poverty
become harder. Will it not just be more
and more difficult to get the rest of the children out of poverty?
<Yvette
Cooper:> In
the document to which Ed referred, we set out the need to start working now on
how to reach the 2020 target and to look at different approaches, piloting and
ways in which to do things. It cannot
simply be about tax credits, hugely important as they are. It must also be about addressing some of the
causes of family poverty or people being on low income. That is why we want to go further and help
more people into work and also look more widely at some of the pilot programmes
that the DCSF and the DWP have been working on particularly, so that we can
learn lessons to be able to inform the next decade about progress, too.
Q<8> <Chairman:> Thank you for that, Yvette. Stephen, I refer to one of the things
running through the DWP report for me as a Member of Parliament for a Yorkshire
constituency. I am picking on you
because you are the only Minister here who represents a London constituency. We boast that London is now the leading city
in the world. Indeed, people said that
when I was in New York. Yet, the DWP
report says that, in inner London, the problems of child poverty are the very
worst. Why is that? In the richest of cities, why do we have the
greatest problem?
<Stephen
Timms:> It is a very striking contrast. The London Child Poverty Commission drew
attention to that in its report a couple of months ago. The number of jobs in London over the past 10
years has gone up by about one sixth, but the employment rate has hardly
shifted at all in that period. The
employment rate in London as a region is the lowest of all the regions. Bev Hughes and I are working together at the
moment on a policy response to what can be done to shift those numbers. It means primarily helping many more people
living in London get into the jobs that are being created here. There are barriers and difficulties, but if
we look at comparable inner city areas around the United Kingdom, the picture
is quite similar. London is not unique
in that respect. What is different is
the fact that London is a region, and that the scale of the worklessness leads
to the figures that you have rightly highlighted.
Q<9> <Chairman:> Lastly, Beverley Hughes, can I ask you a
brief question about children's centres and the activity in the country in
respect of new initiatives and after schools clubs, in particular? It really stabs you in the heart if you read
in a report that certain aspects of provisions seem as though they are only for
poor children, so they are being stigmatised.
Does it worry you that the kind of provision that we are giving to
extend the support to poor families could become stigmatised and defeat the
purpose?
<Beverley
Hughes:> First, I appreciate the fact that you have
seen-as I knew you would-that those broader policy initiatives are very much
part of the Government's approach to ending child poverty. That approach includes the nationwide
network of children's centres that we will have shortly, every school offering
extended activities and, indeed, giving local authorities a clear role in
relation to a local commitment to child poverty-many have now taken up that
role through local area agreements and so on.
In terms of sustaining whatever approaches we introduce, such as fiscal
measures and the like, it is critically important that we get in very
early. We know that children from poor
backgrounds, who may be very bright cognitively, none the less can fall behind
children from wealthier backgrounds by the age of 22 months, so it is important
that we have strong early years policies.
Children's
centres and extended schools, by definition, will be universal services. We will have a children's centre in every
area by 2010 and there are almost 3,000 already, starting off in the most
disadvantaged areas. Now that the level
of provision is substantial and has reached a critical mass in both children's
centres and extended schools-half of all schools are now extended; half of
secondary schools and three quarters of all primary schools-the challenge is to
ensure that in the context of a universal service, the most disadvantaged
children reap the most benefit from those services. In relation to children's centres that means that the outreach is
strong, that we use health visitors to identify families whose children can
benefit, and that we make sure that those families are introduced to children's
centre services. I visited a children's
centre in a disadvantaged part of Liverpool last week and saw there the work
that was being done to make that happen.
However, there are certain groups, particularly teenage mothers, who do
not easily find their way to children's centres-we know that; it is quite
daunting if you are a very young woman.
That is why we have provided more funding for two extra outreach workers
in every centre. We are working with
health staff, who are often already accepted by such families and are the first
point of contact. Such staff can ensure
that those people get into children's centres and that their families benefit
from the services.
<Chairman:> I think we
have warmed you all up. I am, after
all, the warm-up act in this Committee.
Let us start drilling down.
Q<10> <Mr. Heppell:> I noticed that in your introduction, Ed, you
talked about joint responsibility, joint ownership, joint endeavour. I must say that many years ago, in 1981, I
had a bad experience with joint working.
We set up a sub-committee called joint education, social services and
leisure, recognising that the boundaries were blurred between all of
those. Although we probably did some
good things in our initial enthusiasm, in the end the director and chair of
education tried to protect their little empire; the director and chair of
social services protected their empire; and leisure services protected their
empire. I will not say that the
sub-committee was a failure, but the bottom line is that it ceased to
exist. What will be different about
your joint working? You have a joint
responsibility for the delivery agreement PSA 9. What are the mechanisms for negotiating the policies around that
area? How do you come to decisions on
those and how do you execute those decisions?
A few examples of how that has worked would be helpful-one from your
Department and one from the Treasury.
<Chairman:> I got a wink
from Yvette to say that she wishes to open up on that question. Is that all right with you?
<Ed
Balls:> Definitely.
<Chairman:> I hate to come
between the two of you.
<Yvette
Cooper:> I think that the best example is the way in
which we worked in the run up to the Budget.
The child poverty unit is in place, which has staff from all three
Departments and works on child poverty across the board. In particular, we have the work for the 2010
target and the PSA target, which has a PSA board of officials-every PSA target
has a board of officials to monitor progress.
That board meets quarterly, includes all three Departments and is
chaired by the Treasury. We also have
joint responsibility, as you say, for the longer term, for the 2020 target
too. So there is a huge amount of close
working between the three Departments, both in the child poverty unit itself
and in other parts of our Departments that support the child poverty unit and
need to work with it.
The
Budget document that Ed referred to earlier was drawn up very much by the child
poverty unit. It was published as part
of the Budget documents. Not only were
the three Departments so closely involved in drawing up the document but they
were involved in the discussion of the analysis behind the position on child
poverty and the position for different groups, and drawing up different options
too. Therefore, when the Chancellor
came to make the final decisions on fiscal and tax measures, which obviously
will always be his decisions as part of Budgets and pre-Budget reports, he was
informed by the joint analysis and by a series of discussions with other
Ministers-DWP and DCSF Ministers-as well as by the kind of official-level work
that had gone on.
Q<11> <Mr. Heppell:> I am just wondering if there is a different
viewpoint from the Departments. Is that
how you see it operating?
<James
Purnell:> That is exactly how it operates. In a way, it would be wrong to pick out any
individual examples, because that suggests that this is an occasional thing
that happens. Actually, we get joint
policy advice and the great virtue of that is that it is based on the same
analysis of what the evidence shows and what the implications of the policy
are, and then we get advice coming up to us.
Some of those issues, as Yvette said, will be decisions for the
Chancellor; the rest will be decisions for us to take together. So, with the pilots that we announced
alongside the Budget, they are being taken forward by the child poverty unit
and we will take collective decisions on how to manage them. So it is a seamless process, not just every
now and then if there is a crisis or a particularly high-profile initiative; it
is all the way through. Regarding
anything that impacts on child poverty, the child poverty unit gives us joint
advice.
Q<12> <Mr. Heppell:> May I explore that a bit further? Because there are effectively two
Departments and the Treasury in the CPU, is it not the case that the Treasury
has almost like two vetoes? You can
veto something at the CPU stage or at the councillors stage. Am I reading that wrongly? I mean, if there is a dispute, who would
resolve it within the CPU?
<Ed
Balls:> I think that, in some ways, it is the other
way round. The Treasury is responsible
for meeting the 2010 and 2020 targets, but it cannot do that unless it also has
the support of the DWP getting single parents into work and our Department
supporting child care through children's centres and then the long-term
education work. So I think that it is
as much the Treasury ensuring that we rise to the challenge in terms of our
contribution of policy, rather than the other way round.
The
other thing that I would say is that in different policy areas, you have
different ways of doing joint working, but the one thing that does not work is
simply having a committee or a Minister with a title and assuming that that
will make a difference. As I said when
I came to the Committee last time round, we have a number of different kinds of
joint responsibility. So, in the case
of youth justice and the Youth Justice Board, every policy decision is now
being made and signed off jointly by our Department and the Ministry of Justice
on the operation of the youth justice system.
That is a very intense form of joint working, probably going further
than we have ever gone before. On
something like children's health, we are closely working on the strategy,
involving our Department and the Department of Health, but a lot of the levers
will be pulled by primary care trusts around the country and by hospitals and
GPs.
In
the case of child poverty, it is more a case that the Treasury has some
powerful levers through tax credits and the way that the system operates; DWP
has some in terms of the way in which the Employment Service operates, and we
do in terms of the way that children's services and the education system
operate. None of us individually can
meet our objective, but if all of us do our part then collectively we can meet
the objective. There, what actually
matters is whether or not there is a common set of goals; whether or not there
is a common set of analysis, and whether or not there are accountability
structures within Government, which is what the PSA boards are about, and
outside Government, which is what this Committee is about, to ensure that if
any of us are recalcitrant that becomes quickly known, understood and dealt
with. However, it is less about joint
decisions and more about ensuring that everybody does their bit, because there
is not one lever that meets the objective required; there are a number of
different policies from different parts of the policy world coming
together.
Q<13> <Mr. Heppell:> The Chief Secretary said that there were
representatives in the CPU from the DWP, the DCSF and the Treasury.
<Yvette
Cooper:> Yes.
Q<14> <Mr. Heppell:>
Okay. So what is the logic of
having the CPU in the DCSF? Why is that
not in the Treasury or the DWP? Is it
just convenience?
<James
Purnell:> It
could have been in any of the three. I
do not know which of the officials who brief us are originally from the DCSF or
the DWP. What Ed says is absolutely
right: this happens in many different policy areas. When we did school sports together, we received joint submissions
and took joint decisions.
Q<15> <Mr. Heppell:> If
the targets are not met, who should I blame?
To whom can I go and say, "You are responsible"? Where do I look, if things are not working? Is there a joint responsibility? I see James nodding.
<Yvette
Cooper:>
Ultimately, the Government share responsibility for a series of
things. PSA targets are set out as part
of the spending review to ensure results on the key things that the Government
have focused on. For example, the
Treasury has the lead responsibility for the PSA 2010 target, but the programme
and target are shared. Of course, you
will hold all of us to account, which is exactly why we are working
together. We all need to work together
in order to deliver results.
<Ed
Balls:> It is
different between 2010 and 2020. The
former is much closer, and the underlying causes are harder to address in a
short period. Raising the proportion of
single parents in work in 2020 will be very important. Many of those single parents currently will
be aged five and upwards and in school.
What will matter is what happens in their primary school teaching and
secondary schools. Will they stay on at
school? Will they get a skill and an
apprenticeship? What kind of family and
parental support will they get? What
will happen when they become parents and try and balance that with work and
family life? What will that mean for
what they get from the Employment Service and the way in which the child care
element of the tax credits interact?
Those things will be decisive in determining the teenage parent
employment rate in 2020. Whether we get
there will depend on whether we make the rights calls for seven-year-olds as
well as on whether the Employment Service is delivering for teenage parents in
10 years. In that sense, it genuinely
is about holding us to account for the long-term decisions that we make now.
Q<16> <Mr. Heppell:> One
last thing-in some respects, this is obvious: if, for instance, you could see
that you were not reaching the 2010 target, would the Treasury be willing to
release further resources to get you there?
I know that that is like asking, "How long is a piece of string?" Would the influence of the two Departments
be stronger as a result of the CPU?
<Yvette
Cooper:> In
the Budget, we found an extra £1 billion to support action on child poverty and
a series of measures that have come in.
That is a time when the fiscal position is tighter than it has been in
previous years and comes on top of the measures in the pre-Budget report and the
Budget. Those policy announcements and
the previous Budget will allow us to help 500,000 children out of poverty. That is a result of making that extra
investment and, in part, of being able to use the additional revenues from
alcohol duty. We found revenue there to
be put into helping out of poverty families with kids.
Obviously,
you would not expect us to speculate on future pre-Budget reports and
Budgets-that is not the way that we approach tax and fiscal measures. However, the Treasury has demonstrated a
very strong commitment to investing money in supporting children growing up on
the lowest incomes. Giving evidence to
the Treasury Committee, only last week, the Chancellor said that we must not be
deterred from our child poverty targets.
They are hugely important to us.
Q<17> <Chairman:> We are having
to revert to first names because it is too complicated. Yvette, I do not want to accuse you of
trying to pull the wool over our eyes, but the evidence of the Select Committee
on Work and Pensions is that, according to the DWP, it is intended that the CPU
"will make more efficient and effective use of the talents and expertise of the
staff in the two Departments to take the Government's child poverty strategy to
its next stage of development." Witnesses to the Committee welcomed the CPU,
but some expressed concern about its remit and specifically about the "lack of
Treasury involvement." Come on, that is
not quite how you-
<Yvette
Cooper:> We have changed the position since that
evidence was given, and three Treasury officials are now part of the Child
Poverty Unit. They are not co-located
in the DCSF, but they attend all the weekly team meetings and are part of the
programme of work so that all three Departments can work closely. They were, previously, working very closely
with officials in the CPU, but as part of the work that we did in the run-up to
the Budget, and given the close working that we had and needed at that time,
the Chancellor decided it would be right to have Treasury officials be part of
the CPU as well.
Q<18> <Chairman:> What about ministerial involvement?
<Yvette
Cooper:> Yes, there was ministerial involvement as a
result, because, the CPU and the PSA board-a board of officials that meets
quarterly-reports to a tripartite group of Ministers, which includes Ed and
James and is chaired by the Chancellor.
Q<19> <Chairman:> Was that a
result, James, of the Select Committee report?
Did it have any influence?
<James
Purnell:> Yes; Ed asked Alistair and Alistair agreed-I
was at the meeting.
Q<20> <Chairman:> It is nice to know that a Select Committee
has that influence.
<Ed
Balls:> To be honest, from last June, that was how it
was at the ministerial level. De facto,
the CPU was working so closely with Treasury officials that it was the best and
most logical way of doing things. That
was the conclusion that we all reached, as James said, after a particular
meeting with the Chancellor. It had
become common practice anyway-we simply made it formal.
<Chairman:> Thanks for
that; it has cleared matters up. We are
now going to move to the measurement of child poverty, on which Graham will
lead.
Q<21> <Mr. Stuart:> Before we move on, may I ask a question on
this issue? Following the Select
Committee, the decision was made to have three Treasury officials be part of
the CPU, but they are not based with the CPU in the DCSF. Why is that?
<Yvette
Cooper:> It is important, given the way in which these
issues need to feed into pre-Budget and Budget discussions, that they have close
links with other officials who are working on wider tax, benefit and HMRC
issues. The issue is not where their
desks are, but the way in which they work together. They are commonly and frequently at meetings together and will
continue to be so.
Q<22> <Mr. Stuart:> What do you think made the DWP and DCSF so
focused on desks, then? Did they make a
mistake? Was it an error to put people
together and have a single stream of advice when they could all have sat at
separate desks around Whitehall and worked together seamlessly?
<Yvette
Cooper:> No; they have been working very well together
since the CPU was set up and they continue to work very well together.
Q<23> <Mr. Stuart:> They might find it easier to work together if
they sat in the same unit as equals, if it is genuinely a meeting of the three
Departments-is that not fair? It is odd
to have officials come in from the outside to attend meetings.
<James
Purnell:> There are all sorts of effective ways of
working together. As I said, when we did
school sport together we had people from different Departments working well
together. That works well and is
absolutely right. We want those people
to be bumping into people in the Treasury corridors, so that they can lobby
within that structure as well. I am
sure that we can give you a report on exactly where people sit if you like.
<Ed
Balls:> It is also important to understand the
position of the Treasury in this, and I think we do. As Yvette said, these are the Chancellor's decisions to take in Budgets,
and there is a degree of confidentiality and secrecy around the Budget
process. I think that the Treasury
would, understandably, be concerned if officials who are working on very
sensitive issues-as they will, as Treasury officials working on child
poverty-were frequently having papers brought over or sent to a different
Department. The Treasury has a
different way of doing things, because
of the Budget process, and I think we understand that, but it does not stop
people working really closely together.
In my experience of doing Budgets for 10 or 11 years, I would say that
there was a greater degree of willingness for the Treasury to engage in work on
child poverty issues jointly now, because of the unit and co-location.
Q<24> <Chairman:> Beverley,
with your particular job, what do you think of this? Is it working as well as you thought it might?
<Beverley
Hughes:> I think it has made a very big
difference. I worked with the previous
Minister for Work and Pensions, as it was then, over the last 12 months without
a formal remit on child poverty.
Obviously it was an area of great interest to our Department, the
ability to bring officials together like this.
I think that the momentum that the establishment of the unit has created
and the shared focus have been very substantial. I think it is a big improvement.
<Chairman:> Are you ready
to move on, Graham?
Q<25> <Mr. Stuart:> I am ready to ask my next question, Mr.
Chairman, if you have finished.
Beverley Hughes has just talked about momentum. The Secretary of State
has said that we have exceeded our expectations over the progress we could make
in the time that we have had.
Tremendous. Could I ask the
Chief Secretary by how much you can beat the 2010 child poverty target?
<Yvette
Cooper:> We have obviously made considerable progress
so far. The figures that we have
already referred to show that, had we not done anything and simply uprated the
tax and benefits system in 1997-
<Mr. Stuart:> You have
already said that.
<Yvette
Cooper:> We would have seen 1.7 million more children
in poverty as a result. The measures
that we have announced in the Budget take us significantly further, but there
is clearly further to go. We know
that. We know that we have a very
challenging target.
Q<26> <Mr. Stuart:> How much could you beat the 2010 target by?
<Yvette
Cooper:> That is why we have work under way in the
child poverty unit at the moment on how we can go further and looking at what
more we need to do, in terms of both the 2010 target and of the 2020
target. That is work that we continue
to do.
Q<27> <Mr. Stuart:> Could
it be a 55% reduction, or 60%? What do
you hope for?
<Yvette
Cooper:> We continue to work towards our target. Our target is to halve child poverty by 2010
and to eradicate it by 2020. That is
what we are working towards.
Q<28> <Mr. Stuart:> How much will it cost to meet the 2010
target?
<Yvette
Cooper:> We obviously set out measures in the
Budget-£950 million, I think-that help us meet that extra half million over the
next couple of years. That important
additional investment was made possible by the measures set out in the
Budget. We are continuing to look at
what further measures we can do. We are
continuing to look at what further progress we can make. There is work, for example, that the DWP is
doing in terms of how we get more lone parents into work. Clearly, the more people that we can get
into work, the greater the impact that that has. That obviously makes a very big difference, because, as we all
know, your chance of being in poverty drops substantially as soon as parents
move into work. That work is underway
as well.
As
I answered John's question earlier, what you would not expect me to do is to
speculate about future fiscal measures or future pre-Budget report
decisions. What I can say is that there
is an immense amount of work under way through the child poverty unit and
across the Government on what further progress we can make.
Q<29> <Mr. Stuart:> But the point of having a publicly declared
target of this sort is precisely in order to allow the people, the electorate,
to speculate about future decisions of bodies such as the Treasury. It has been announced that-we have five
Ministers, and various members of the Cabinet, sitting here today to tell us
how-you are all committed to meeting the target. So you have told us to speculate-we can expect child poverty to
be halved, on current measures, by 2010.
What is the speculation about?
<Yvette
Cooper:> Indeed.
We have also set out a series of measures that helps us move towards
that, and also a series of principles, which guides our future decisions as
well. Those continue to be,
particularly, supporting people into work, wherever that is possible, and looking
at the opportunities for children, but also at what more we need to do to help
families who are on low income across the board. We set out the principles that we operate under, and we have also
set out a series of measures, which will raise family income over the next two
years. It is not simply the measures
that have already come in, but also measures that will come in this year and
next year, October of next year as well.
But what I cannot do is to speculate on future pre-Budget report
decisions, and I know that you would not expect me to do so.
Q<30> <Mr. Stuart:> So you cannot promise that you are going to
meet the target. You are coming here
today, formally, to a meeting on child poverty, to say that whether you will
meet the target or not is pure speculation.
<Yvette
Cooper:> No, we have said that we continue to be
strongly committed to our target. In
fact, the Chancellor said to the Treasury Committee only last week, "I do not
think we can be deflected at all from our objectives in relation to child
poverty". The Chancellor has set out a strong signal in terms of his personal
priority. He did that in the Budget,
but he has also signalled that priority for the future as well.
Q<31> <Mr. Stuart:> But that is
slightly different from telling us so close to the deadline that you are going
to meet it.
I
shall ask you another question. if I may, Chief Secretary. It is possible to meet the target through
expenditure, is it not? A sizeable
number of children have been removed from poverty as a result of that
Budget. So if the money is spent, the
target can be met: is that true?
<Yvette
Cooper:> It is clear that that £1 billion will help us
increase child benefit and child tax credit and will help in terms of a
disregard for child benefit in relation to housing benefit and council tax
benefit. Clearly, putting that
investment into helping those families will help lift some 500,000 children out
of poverty. We are going to be able to
deliver those results over the next two years.
Q<32> <Mr. Stuart:> So it could be done if the money were
spent. Are you saying yes or no to my
question?
<Yvette
Cooper:> We have always said that this is partly about
the financial support that we give to families, but it is not just about
that. It is also about whether we can
help parents into work and whether we can deal with child care issues and
access to child care. It is also about
whether we can do more in terms of dealing with the long-term problems,
including, for example, the fact that parents with low skills may have trouble
earning a higher income.
<Mr. Stuart:> We are 18
months away from 2010.
<Chairman:> Let the Chief
Secretary finish her answer, then you can come in. Yvette, have you finished?
<Yvette
Cooper:> Many different things affect our ability to
make progress on tackling child poverty.
We have demonstrated a strong commitment not simply to talking about the
importance of tackling child poverty, but to putting large sums of investment
into helping families in the short term and into some of the long-term measures
that DCSF and DWP work particularly on that help families into the future.
Q<33> <Mr. Stuart:> I should like, through you, Chairman, a
straightforward answer to my question.
As the Minister said, hundreds of thousands of children will be removed
from poverty as a result of the measures in the Budget. So it is possible to do so through
expenditure, putting aside the long-term issues about getting people into work,
improving educational opportunities and the like, which will be playing a
peripheral role between now and meeting the 2010 target, although they may have
a much more significant role in the eradication of child poverty by 2020. Could the Chief Secretary just confirm that,
if the money is put in place, it is possible to meet the 2010 target? That means a decision by the Treasury, not
performance by DWP or DCSF.
<Yvette
Cooper:> I disagree with your premise. Part of the reason why we have made progress
so far is because we have seen a drop of around 400,000 children living in
workless households. That has been
hugely important in terms of our being able to make progress and lift families
out of poverty.
Yes,
the amount of financial support we are able to give families through child tax
credits and child benefit is also important.
That is why we announced significant increases in those things as part
of the Budget, but we set up the child poverty unit because, in the end, we
cannot address the problem of child poverty in Britain purely through measures
to do with financial support; we also have to address some of the root causes
of child poverty, which means helping families into work and looking at the
next generation of parents, who are currently in school age 11 or 12, and
seeing what more we can do to help them raise their skill levels so that they
are able to earn more in future. Our
commitment to eradicating child poverty is unprecedented, compared with
countries right across the world. It is
a huge commitment, but we should not underestimate its scale and significance
and the need for everybody to be part of working towards that, rather than have
one Department or one measure dealing with it.
Q<34> <Mr. Stuart:> For the
purposes of the 2010 target, is the definition of relative low income as 60% of
median income before housing costs still justifiable, considering the impact of
the credit crunch and the cost of housing in different parts of the country?
<James
Purnell:> Yes, because we have a basket of
measures. We have the relative poverty
measure and the absolute poverty measure. We also have the material deprivation
and low income measure. A third of those catch the effect of rising prices. It
looks at whether families in the bottom part of the income distribution can
afford a range of goods that would typically be seen as standard for people to
have. If there were any effect from the credit crunch on those families, it
would be picked up by that measure.
Q<35> <Mr. Stuart:> The TUC estimates that 3.8 million children
are living in poverty on the basis of an after-housing measure as opposed to
the Government's 2.8 million figure on before-housing costs measure.
<James
Purnell:> That is a Government figure actually-the 3.8
million.
Q<36> <Mr. Stuart:> Okay. Without intervention, are the outcomes
for the additional 1 million children identified by the TUC likely to be any
better than for the acknowledged 2.8 million children in priority?
<James
Purnell:> The measures that we take will affect both of
those. In fact, both of those figures have fallen by an identical amount-by
600,000. We target both. The reason that we have those three measures is for
the very fact that poverty is multidimensional and we want to have a set of
measures that capture how a family is doing relative to other families.
Clearly, if children at your school are able to go on school trips that your
children cannot go on, or if they have certain advantages that your children do
not have, or certain things are expected to be standard in your community and
you cannot have them, that can be shaming for the children involved, so we have
a relative poverty measure for that. We have an absolute poverty measure to see
how we have done since we started out on this target, and we have a material
deprivation measure because that captures a common-sense idea of what it is to
be affected by low income.
Q<37> <Mr. Stuart:> Critics would say that the Government have
announced their targets for eradicating child poverty in a generation-they
announced their targets for reducing it by a quarter and then a half-and that
in a spirit of self-congratulation they have since applauded themselves for
their ambition. Mostly, what has happened is that those children who were
statistically just below the line have been lifted up over the line. When the
25% reduction target was missed, the Government were not deterred from their
self-congratulation. They look like they are heading towards missing their 50%
target while they carry on telling themselves that they have done a great
job-for example, through the language you have used today about what a fantastic
and brave effort it has been. In fact, the poorest in our society and those who
are the hardest to reach-in other words, the people who it is difficult and
challenging to make a difference to-are missed. What reassurance can you give
us that the most seriously deprived children will see benefits before 2010?
<James
Purnell:> The reassurance that I can give you is that
that accusation is not true because the measures we have brought in do not just
affect people just below the poverty line; they affect everybody. Everybody
gets child benefit and everyone who claims it gets child tax credit. The vast
majority of that is claimed. It is not a choice between people just below the
poverty line and people in the deepest poverty; it is a question of tackling
both. Measures such as our changes to tax credits have lifted all of those
people further up. You then need to have a set of targeted interventions for
the people who face the biggest barriers. That is where, for example, the
family intervention project comes in, which we might talk about later if you
ask us about it. That is also where the social exclusion strategy and the
reforms to the welfare state come in. Those reforms will tackle the problems
faced by people who have the biggest barriers to work. You need to do both. It
is said that having a measure at 60% for median income means that you ignore
people at the bottom; actually it does not mean that at all because the
measures we have brought in have lifted all of those people.
The
final thing I will say on your point about the target is that I would much
rather have a tough target and be committed to a target, as that is an
important part of the test of whether people are serious about the issue. I
would rather have a tough target that lifts more children out of poverty
because it is such a challenge to achieve, than have something that is easy to
achieve and helps fewer children.
Q<38> <Mr. Stuart:> But it is also important that the Government
are held to account. If they say they will meet a target, there should be
brickbats for making that promise, announcing it, basking in the glow of
positive publicity for such a positive act, and then failing to deliver. It is
important that the Government do not just wriggle and roll on the punch and
suggest that they should not be given any grief. I do not want to cause a
division around any table-Cabinet or otherwise-but my key question relates to
this. The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families indicated to us
previously that-I hope that this is fair-for 2010 it would be on other
Departments, and we understood that to mean the Treasury, notwithstanding the
importance of educational opportunity and getting people into work. Fundamentally, to meet 2010 would be about
the Treasury. Will the Secretary of State
comment on that?
<Ed
Balls:> Both comments were made in January, and they
were made in the context that, as I said at the beginning, there was a small
rise in child poverty in the most recent figures, which disappointed us. I said then, and we have all said since, as
has the Chancellor, that it is important to redouble our efforts. What happened was that the Budget included a
package of measures, a small but important amount of which-around £125
million-will help in the long term; £1
billion was for action through tax credits and child benefit particularly,
which will have an immediate impact. I
said in January that in the short term those measures would have the quickest
impact, and the Chancellor delivered with a £1 billion package. It turned out that my prediction in January
was correct.
We
have been careful not to be self-congratulatory. The fact is that in 2004 we did not meet the target-we just
missed it-and I remember that in our earlier discussion I said that if you set
ambitious targets and get as close as possible and try really hard, you can
either throw your hands up in the air and say that it was all a betrayal, or
you can redouble your efforts because it is really important to get there.
We
have had the fastest fall in child poverty of any European country since 1997,
which is a source of pride, and a good thing.
We started from the highest level of child poverty in any European
country in 1997 following a doubling of child poverty, which was a matter of
shame. That is the difference.
Q<39> <Fiona Mactaggart:> Secretary of State, you referred to
the fact that between 1979 and 1997, child poverty probably trebled for Britain
to reach the top of the European league.
What do you think about the fact that we have overtaken only three
countries in that league, despite all the effort that we have heard about? That connects to James's point about running
up down escalators but, nevertheless, we are still not even in the middle of
the child poverty league.
<Ed
Balls:> That spurs us on, but also reflects the scale
of the challenge that we started to face.
The fall has been the largest in any European country, so we have been
able to do more than anyone else. If
you start with a big challenge, it takes time.
I
have the same issue in education, because 638 schools have below 30% GCSEs,
including English and maths, which is below the acceptable standard, and we are
addressing that tomorrow. In 1997 it
was 1,600 schools-more than half of all secondary schools. Do you look at that and say, "638 is not
good enough"-I do-or do you say that reducing that number by 1,000 since 1997
is real achievement? I think it
is. We have further to go because we
started with very substantial problems in our education system that had to be
fixed. The same is true in work,
support for work, margin incentives, and support for families. That takes time, and it is hugely expensive
and very long term, but we are going in the right direction and it is important
that we are not thrown off course as a country.
<James
Purnell:> Perhaps I could add that the fact that we
have been one of the most successful economies in that group has also made it
harder because the target is relative to median incomes, and if the economy is
doing well, the down escalator is going even faster. The fact that our economy has done well has made the challenge
even greater, and that is combined with the fact that, as Ed says, there was a
long way to go at the beginning.
Q<40> <Fiona Mactaggart:> If it were just our economy doing well
and not hugely unequal incomes following our economy doing well, it would not
necessarily have the same effect, would it?
<Ed
Balls:> These are median incomes.
<Yvette
Cooper:> We have deliberately chosen a relative
poverty target, which is important. This
is effectively about unfair inequalities that can face young children as they
are growing up and in their chances in life.
The poorest families have ended up being £4,000 a year better of as a
result of our changes to the tax and benefits system and so on. That is hugely important, but we have also
had growth in the economy as a whole and all sorts of changes, and we know that
there is an increasing return to skills. As part of a global economy and
technological change, people with higher skills will do better. People who have
no skills at all are at risk of falling further behind. That is why this is
partly a long-term way to address the skills gap that exists for many parents
as well as a consideration of what more we can do in the short term. The fact
that we face such wider social and economic challenges in how the economy works
and in the importance of skills does not mean that we should not try. It
actually means that we should try harder. That is how we have been trying to
respond over the past few years.
Q<41> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I am very interested in what works at
different levels. The evidence that you have given us shows that there are a
number of strands, including those people in the most serious poverty. One
thing that there is pretty compelling research about is the happiness of
children and adults in the most deprived families. It suggests that actually,
there is not a direct correlation between happiness and deprivation, except in
that very bottom group, where there is a profound and substantial correlation
just because people have so little money that the situation is most serious.
It
seems to me that despite the progress that we have made, one reason why Britain
is not scoring better on child happiness and so on in the United Nations
measures is the group of children who are still substantially deprived. What
are we going to do about them? I can see that the DCSF outdoor play strategy is
designed to connect to the basket of measures about access to outdoor play, but
what other things are we doing to ensure that those very, very deprived
children are happier and get chances of success?
<Ed
Balls:> May I take you down that road by referring to
the pilots that we announced at the time of the Budget? For example, one thing
that we are looking at is a child development grant, which would be extra
support for mothers on the lowest incomes with children aged, say, two, if they
are coming to children's centres, and if their children are getting their
vaccinations-if they are doing the kind of things that we are trying to
encourage more mothers to do with their children. There is a direct route
through the child development grant to try to match resources to that kind of
activity, which can often be good at laying the foundations for children to be
successful in later life.
The
work that we are doing on the child health strategy is about trying to ensure
that we identify early children with health or, particularly, mental health
issues and address them. I would say that our Department in general is about
trying to spot the likely causes of unhappiness, of getting involved in crime
or of leaving school, and trying to adjust them at a much earlier stage. That
is where the leadership that Bev provides is important, because it often means
intervening in the earliest years, before children have even started in the
schooling system.
<Beverley
Hughes:> On your general proposition, Fiona, which is
tremendously important, although there is obviously no perfect correlation
between happiness and the indicators of children's well-being and low income,
there are none the less some very strong, more general correlations. Children
in persistently low-income households are shown to be in much poorer health and
they are more likely to be obese. Children in workless households report
feeling much greater stigma, and they feel a positive benefit of
parents-interestingly, particularly mothers-going into work. That relates
particularly to when lone mothers go into work but also to couple families.
Therefore,
there is some important evidence that the well-being of those children in the
poorest families is actually related to income and can be lifted if parents get
into work, not just because of the higher income and benefits to quality of
life but because of psychological well-being and the reduction in feelings of
stigma. Many mothers in work entry schemes in children's centres speak to me in
an emotional way-it makes me feel very humble-about how, when they get work, it
impacts on the whole family, particularly on their aspirations for their
children and their children's aspirations for themselves.
<James
Purnell:> I was going to make the same point. It
underlines the reason why welfare reform is so important. If we break that
cycle of inter-generational worklessness, not only do families have more money,
but their self-esteem goes up and the life chances of the children are
transformed as well. We have 1 million fewer people on out-of-work benefits
compared with 10 years ago. The more that we can do on that, the more that we
can help to deliver the agenda. I am talking about not just the agenda for 2020
but for 2010 as well. We think that our reforms of lone parent conditionality
will lift 70,000 children out of poverty. Welfare reforms can make a big
contribution towards those goals.
Q<42> <Fiona Mactaggart:>
Yet we know that social mobility for this generation is slower than for
previous generations. Why is that?
<James
Purnell:> We do not know that yet. You will have to
wait 20 years to find out what happened to the children.
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
Okay. I am saying the 1980s compared with the 1970s. <James Purnell:>
Given what we were talking about with regard to child poverty over that period,
it is not surprising that social mobility for that generation-they are now in
their 30s-was slower. That is why we believe in this so passionately. If you
want people to have fair life chances, that will not happen if they are poor
when they are growing up. It is not just about poverty, but about education,
health and the whole range of things that we have been discussing. A sine qua
non of it is ending child poverty to give people fair life chances.
Q<43> <Fiona Mactaggart:> Knowing that is one of the key things
that I find difficult and frustrating. I can tell that there is a degree of
commitment. This is not just an aspiration but a target that you are keen to be
accountable for. Knowing what is happening, however, is sometimes confusing
because of the way in which changes are reported. We had the ritual at the
beginning when you said, "We cannot tell you the present figures". That is ONS
rules, and we recognise that having an independent statistical service means
that you have to tolerate those rules. In the "Opportunity for all" strategy
report, which is published by your Department, there used to be a pretty good
way of seeing how these different changes mesh together. You could see the
difference in the income for those on the lowest level, and what the progress
was on the whole target and so on. It seems to me that this is a really
important piece of information for holding people to account. Unless you get,
in a single place, a pretty accurate report on progress, we will not be able to
do the job that we are trying to do today of holding the different Departments to
account for the different things that need to be done. For example, there are households in poverty
because of no work, and there are households in poverty because of low public
sector pay. Arguably, a different tactic, or policy delivery, is needed to try
to change the circumstances for their children.
<James Purnell:>
In effect, two parts of that document have been separated. We now have a joint
policy statement and approach that is set up in the "Ending Child Poverty"
document. We published all the data in the "Opportunity for all" report.
Everybody can still access that data, as they will tomorrow. I do not think
that people will find it hard to find those figures. If you want to recommend
that we go back to that, we will consider it. When I questioned my officials
they said that the document had run out of steam. They were under the
impression that people had stopped taking an interest in it and had abandoned
it. We did not have an ideological reason for doing that and we would be very
happy to reconsider the matter. It is better to have a document that has the
joint strategy of our three Departments rather than, as a matter of ritual,
present our "Opportunity for all" document, in which we have to reiterate what
our policy is.
Q<44> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I agree. I thought that the document
that was published in October was good and that it accounted very well. The
point is that we need to have progress reports. It is the same with
children. We can have a document that
says, "Right, this is the level that we expect children to achieve at Key Stage
2", but we then need to know whether
the children are achieving it, in what parts of the country they are not and
what we are doing about it. We need a
pretty comprehensive report to make a difference to such things. If you are running up or down an escalator,
you really need the best information possible in as real time as possible to
know when things have made a difference.
Graham
suggested that you may have just picked the low-hanging fruit. You refuted that suggestion, but we need to
know the number of different bits that are making a difference.
<James
Purnell:> If we write to the head of the Office for
National Statistics and ask what would be appropriate, given the new regime, we
can send you a copy of the letter that we receive, and you can make a
recommendation based on that and we shall consider it favourably.
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
Thank you.
Q<45> <Chairman:> Some of you will know that we have had
brushes with Departments in the past about changing the statistics in annual
reports that make it impossible to get a linear analysis.
<Ed
Balls:> The pre-Budget report provides an opportunity
for that. We have also made a
commitment to the Committee to produce a report on the children's plan one year
on, before the end of the year, which will set out our progress on all our
joint objectives. It is another
opportunity for the moment. We cannot
make the assessment, as you rightly say, without the most public and
comprehensive analysis of the evidence.
Perhaps we should think about the pre-Budget report, our joint work
through the child poverty unit to update and publish information, and our
children's plan one year on document, and think about how we shall sequence
them in the autumn. The autumn is the
right time to come back to such matters.
Q<46> <Fiona Mactaggart:> Do you think that you would work as
hard at the issue if it were an aspiration rather than a target?
<Ed Balls:>
No. We would, but a target is quite a
different thing. It is something that
we would not say in an airy-fairy way that we would like to achieve at some
unspecified time, measured in an unspecified way and delivered by unspecified
mechanisms and charities. We would say
that it is something that we shall do.
We would define it, measure it, set a timetable, and we would be held to
account for it.
Q<47> <Chairman:> We want to move on, but I shall come to the
Chief Secretary, and perhaps Beverley will come in. You have been describing help for families in poverty-whether
in-work poverty or not in work. Do you
think that there is a feeling out there-it is certainly the feeling that I get
when I visit schools-that there is a tax credit fatigue and a yearning for
people just to be able to earn a wage that does the job? Do you not think that there is tax credit
fatigue? Beverley said that people have
greater self esteem if they are in work.
Is there an intermediary stage at which it is nice to have a job, even
if you are in work because you have been helped by tax credits? Is it not even better to earn a salary that
frees you from all that?
<Yvette
Cooper:> As you know, we introduced the minimum wage,
and that is important. To operate
without a minimum wage could cause all kinds of problems. We need it for underpinning purposes. Equally, families face additional costs when
they have children. Children bring
additional expenses with them. It is right
that, as a community and as a whole, we should support that. That is why the principle of child benefit
was introduced many years ago. The
child tax credit really builds on that principle, but it does so in a way that
helps us to target child poverty. It is
the principle of progressive universalism where we do a lot to support all
children, but it is particularly for those families on the lowest support. Yes, you need the minimum wage. Yes, you need to help people earn more by
improving their skills and help them
gain skills to get better-paid jobs and to stay in work. Some of what we have been looking at in the
pilots is about how to keep people in work, so that they do not just get a job
for a little bit and end up losing it.
That can cause all kinds of problems.
We
must also recognise the cost of buying extra clothes for the kids or all those
costs that come with a family with young children.
Q<48> <Chairman:> But do you not sometimes get a little tired,
Chief Secretary, of a global company
operating in your constituency that pays about £13,000 a year? It gets £1,000 a year if it takes on an
apprentice. All the subsidies seem to
be going to the employer rather than the employee. It is a pity that some major companies do not pay a living
wage.
<Yvette
Cooper:> You sound like you have a particular company
in mind in your constituency.
<Chairman:> I might have,
but we will pass on from that. It is an
irritation about wanting a fair wage for people.
<Ed
Balls:> It is important to look at what the minimum
wage and tax credits together provide for somebody in work. Adding those two things together for someone
who is in work ends up with an effective minimum wage for a couple of well over
£7 an hour, but over £12 an hour for a single parent. That could never be achieved by the minimum wage alone, but the
minimum wage and tax credits together are an incredibly powerful way of
boosting in-work earnings-the effect of the minimum wage is much higher.
<Chairman:> That is
interesting. You have just put that
more succinctly than I have heard it put for a very long time. We will move on. Paul will lead us into the work first approach to child
poverty.
Q<49> <Paul Holmes:> This is following on from where we have just
left off. If the core of the strategy
for tackling poverty is work first, how do we deal with the problem that in a
lot of cases it is not working? A total
of 50% of children in poverty have a parent who works at least part time, and
21% of children in poverty have a parent who works full time. In a two-parent, two-child family with one
parent working on the minimum wage, they could work 50 hours and still be £67
below the poverty level. Does work
first actually work?
<Chairman:> Stephen
Timms. It is about time we got you in
against him.
<Stephen
Timms:> I think the answer is that it does. The risk of poverty for children in workless
families is almost 60% It is 14% where
one or both parents are in work. One
parent being in work makes a very big, positive difference to the risk of
poverty. You are right, there is still
an issue about child poverty in families where a parent is in work, but there
is a big, positive break in people's circumstances when a parent goes into
work. That is why it is so important
that we have made such a lot of headway in helping lone parents into work over
the past 10 years.
Q<50> <Paul Holmes:> Is there a danger that in the enthusiasm for
that, there could be examples where it becomes counter-productive? There is a better off in work credit which
is totally misnamed. As the Work and
Pensions Committee pointed out, it is a deception to tell people that they are
better off in work if that is not the case, or if a person would be worse off
once a time-limited benefit runs out.
The better off in work credit does not allow for the fact that you might
lose free school meals, transport benefits
and so forth.
<Stephen
Timms:> The better off in work credit is not a
deception. It has the great virtue of
being a straightforward calculation. It
allows people to make very personal assessments about other issues such as free
school meals and other impacts on their income. I would caution against trying to do too much in the better off
in work calculation-it is better to have a straightforward assessment and allow
people to make their own adjustments based on their own circumstances, in a way
that a job centre personal adviser might find it difficult to do.
Q<51> <Paul Holmes:> But how far can they make those
judgments? People look at what
transport costs they will have and what benefits they might lose, but do they
really have a choice? As the Work and
Pensions Committee argued in its report, the way that jobseekers allowance and
the sanctions that enforce it work means that people can be pushed in. People can be required to take jobs that
leave them worse off, and therefore it might not be many months before they
drop out of work again.
<Stephen
Timms:> There are a number of points there. First, the evidence is clear that-not only
financially, but as we have discussed also in other respects-families and
children are better off when there is a parent or parents in work. There is a significant impact on child
well-being from a parent being in work.
The gains from work are certainly financial but not purely so. On the better off in work credit, one of the
concerns I hear is that people would like those calculations to be more widely
available. The feedback I receive is
that people find them valuable, and we want to extend their availability for
that reason.
Q<52> <Paul Holmes:> It would obviously be valuable to have such
clear calculations available, but if the individual says that as a result of
doing something they would be worse off, they do not have a choice. They are forced into work through the threat
of sanctions anyway.
<Stephen
Timms:> I have made the point about the impact on well-being
from being in work, which is a very important one. However, one of our aims, of course, and you touched on this a
moment ago, is that employment will increasingly be sustainable, so that once
people are in work they will be able to have access to training and they will
be able to develop in their work, so that they can progress and their income
will rise accordingly.
So,
one of the very important things that we are working on at the moment is the
integration of skills support with employment support, so that when people are
getting employment help and help to get into a job they will be able to get
pointers towards appropriate training as well, in order that employment will
increasingly be sustained employment, leading to people being able to progress. In that way, they can raise their income as
well.
Q<53> <Paul Holmes:> None the less, the Work and Pensions
Committee raised the problem of churn fairly recently. In the last Parliament when I was shadowing
DWP, we had this argument constantly. That is the problem of people being forced into jobs: they are
worse off and they drop out of the job later, or the job is fairly short
term. You have said that there is a well-being
factor from being in work, but if it is unsustainable work that loses you money
and you drop out of it after three, four or six months, the effect will be
quite the opposite. There will not be a
well-being effect on the child; it will have quite a detrimental effect,
especially given the fact that, once people drop out of work, getting the
benefits to catch back up in that situation can involve quite a lengthy
delay.
<Stephen
Timms:> That is one of the reasons why this new focus
on skills and the work, which we are doing with John Denham's Department, is so
important-it will effectively address the problem of churn that you describe.
It
is important to note that, quite often, people go through a series of jobs
before they find a job that they are happy in, comfortable in and can progress
in. So, the fact that people go through
a series of jobs need not necessarily be a bad thing in itself. However, if that is an indefinite state of
affairs, I agree that it is a bad thing and there is evidence that that
situation can be quite damaging for the children in the family too. Nevertheless, as we are increasingly able to
focus on helping people to develop their skills, we will see them being able to
stay in jobs longer and progressing in them too.
Q<54> <Paul Holmes:> This is the last question from me. Developing skills has to be a fairly
long-term thing; it does not help someone this year who is unskilled and who
goes into a job where they are effectively getting a cut in their income,
because of loss of benefits, and then they are out of work six months later. The fact that they might get better skills
in five years' time, or three years' time, is not going to solve that problem.
<Stephen
Timms:> No, but skills training can happen very
quickly. Indeed, there is a lot of work
going on at the moment in pre-employment training. We are helping people before they reach their work in the first
place. There is a long-term Government
commitment to invest in skills. We have
announced just how much increased investment there will be in skills training
over the next few years and pre-employment training is one of the areas in
which that increased investment is going to prove very valuable.
Q<55> <Lynda Waltho:> I would like to look at the area of
women and work. Low pay is a particular problem and we know that the majority
of lone parents are women. Indeed, today's children's commissioners report says
in paragraph 120, on health and welfare, that Government's strategy to end
child poverty is not sufficiently targeted at groups of children at greatest
risk in particular. Then there is a whole list, within which there are
lone-parent families, children with disabilities and children with disabled
parents. That is a carers issue, which I would like to move on to afterwards,
perhaps with James.
So,
if level 3 or better qualifications are really what we need to get these women
aiming at, how can the Government facilitate access to that level of
qualification and education?
<James
Purnell:> I would argue that we are taking a segmented
approach, and indeed that is exactly what the "Ending child poverty:
everybody's business" document does. It
goes through that segmentation, asking what are the particular barriers that
people face. We recognise the
fundamental point that the commissioners are making, which is that there will
be different barriers faced by someone who has a disability from those faced by
someone who is a lone parent, and from those faced by someone who has both
those to overcome.
I
would say that we are taking a rather specific approach to lone parents. We have just announced that we will roll-out
the in-work credit for lone parents, which will mean that they are £40 a week
better off-£60 if they are in London.
As Stephen was saying, we have also announced that there will be pre-work
training, job trials to help people into work and, importantly, that they will
have an adviser after they have got back into work so that they have someone to
talk to if they have any concerns.
There will also be a discretionary fund that they can use with their
adviser if, for example, there is a problem with their child care-up to £300 to
help with any specific issues.
In
the medium term, we are looking at the employment retention and advancement
pilots that we are currently undertaking.
They are significant pilots of some of the approaches that we have
already rolled out and other things that we will look at in due course, along
with reforming lone parent benefits and moving parents of children over seven
on to jobseeker's allowance as a way of reducing child poverty by 70,000, as I
was saying.
We
have a specific approach for lone parents, as we have towards disabled
children, where we are trying to increase benefits uptake and looking at the
barriers to work that disabled parents also face. We will look at that in the welfare reform programme. Thanks to the document and the work of the
CPU, we have adopted exactly that segmented analysis and approach.
Q<56> <Lynda Waltho:>
I would like to extend that to carers.
This is slightly unfair, because I wrote you a letter today, James-obviously,
you will not have seen it-asking you about the carer's allowance and the
review, on which we are hoping for a response quite soon.
Generally,
it is felt that the carer's allowance can act as a barrier to work. At £50 or £55 a week, it is very low. However, to get it, a carer must work at
least 35 hours a week in care, which is about £1.44 an hour. Of course, many carers do not get financial
support because they want to work, so they are limited in the number of hours
that they can do. In terms of what we
can do for carers, the allowance is definitely a barrier to work. When can you respond to that? Have you formed any ideas?
<James
Purnell:> I
think that we are doing that this week.
I shall look out for your letter.
However, to put that in context, it is worth saying that the poorer
families will get income support and the carer's premium on top of that. I can put in writing to you exactly how much
that is, but I think it is about £80.
The poorest carers get that much, and then the carer's allowance is for
people higher up the income scale.
Q<57> <Lynda Waltho:>
Do you really believe that the "work first" approach to parents of
disabled children is the right one? I
am concerned that it is not.
<James
Purnell:> Where
children are on the higher or middle rate of DLA, we will not apply that JSA
regime. The whole point of the change
to lone parent benefits is to say that where parents can find reasonable work,
child care fitting around their children's needs and school hours and all those
things, we think it appropriate to give people an extra incentive to work. However, we want to introduce it flexibly so
that if, for example, a child is excluded from school, the conditionality will
not be applied. Furthermore, if a child
is disabled in that way, the conditionality will not be applied.
Sometimes,
people talk as if that is a great departure for Jobcentre Plus, but it is
exactly what we do now for people with mental health issues. It is much better to have a regime that
moves lone parents towards work more quickly, but does so sensitively, rather
than saying, as the system does at the moment, that a lone parent has to wait
until their youngest child is 16 before they have to engage with the
conditionality regime. I think that
that balance is too far in the other direction. Moving towards seven strikes the right balance.
Q<58> <Lynda Waltho:>
Are you confident that the system can be sufficiently sensitive? Disabled children have far greater needs,
and it is obviously much more difficult to accommodate them. Can the system be sensitive?
<James
Purnell:> I think we would take those children out of
that system, so we would not apply the conditionality regime to lone parents
where there was a disabled child on the higher or middle-rated DLA.
<Ed
Balls:> It is important to say that when you talk to
disabled children's families, they say that they face major barriers to
work-more complex barriers than those for other families-but often they are
undeterred from wanting to pursue the work route. One of the things that we are doing in both the provision of
child care and the operation of child tax credits is to try to see what more we
can do to remove barriers for families with disabled children. They have a great desire to work if they can,
so long as we have a degree of flexibility and extra support.
Q<59> <Annette Brooke:> I would like to start with some
benefits questions, but I am heading towards child care. I shall put two different benefits questions
together, if I may, James. First, on
the child care element of the working tax credit, the Select Committee report
commented on its complexity and I have had reports that parents find the forms
difficult to deal with. Given the
problem of affordable, good quality child care provision, that particular
benefit is of great importance. Are
there any moves to simplify it and make it easier?
The
second benefit issue is something that came up in the work of the commission
chaired by Tom Clarke, when it examined benefits for families with disabled
children. Parents made the point that
the forms for disability living allowance were very complex and the commission
took away the view that the complexities should be looked at. My question is, can you simplify the forms
and the processes so that people in the position that we are talking about can
access the benefits to which they are entitled?
<James
Purnell:> I shall answer the second question
first. We are happy to look at the DLA
form. We keep all of our forms and
their simplicity under permanent review.
The difficulty is that the DLA is trying to cope with a huge range of
different types of circumstances-children, adults. A number of people over pension age claim DLA, as well as it
being about all types of impairment and disability. Necessarily, if you are going to have one benefit with one form
that will cover everything from autism to severe mobility problems, that form
will be long. If there are specific
issues that the Committee would like us to look at, we can certainly do
so. Your basic point is absolutely
right, but there is inevitably a trade-off between a form that is comprehensive
and therefore lengthy, or something that is much more simple and short, but
which would not cover as many different types of impairment.
Q<60> <Annette Brooke:> Perhaps I can just refer you to the
recommendation from Tom Clarke's commission.
<Yvette
Cooper:> I should like to draw your attention to a
document that we published recently on further reforms to the tax credit
system. In particular, there is a whole
chapter on reforming delivery of child care support through tax credits, which
is all about different options for simplifying the process and so on. Therefore, any views that the Committee had
on that would obviously be welcomed.
Jane Kennedy has been leading the work in the Treasury on that issue,
but I know that Beverley has been involved in those discussions also.
<Beverley
Hughes:> I was going to mention the consultation that
the Treasury has put out. The other
thing to say is that of the £950 million that was announced in the Budget, £125
million was specifically for a range of different pilots, to try to deal with
what many members of the Committee have been talking about today, which is how
we get to the harder to reach. One of those
pilots is testing different ways in which HMRC advisers can offer good quality
advice within children's centres, to try to simplify people's
applications. That is also a project
for HMRC advisers themselves because we feel that directly engaging with
parents in children's centres-sitting down with them, looking at the factors
for particular families and the things that parents find complex-will inform
our considerations of how best to simplify the process.
Q<61> <Annette Brooke:> I shall move on. Under the Childcare
Act 2006, which we both know well, April 2008 was the date when local
authorities had to show that they were offering a level of child care suitable
to the local area's needs. I do not
know whether there has been any evaluation of how much has been achieved, but
if there has been I should like to ask about the provision of extended schools
and holiday provision.
<Beverley
Hughes:> As you will remember, Annette, under the 2006
Act local authorities were given a duty to ensure that there was sufficient,
and sufficiently flexible, child care for working parents and parents of
disabled children. Actually, that duty
started in April 2008 and, in the lead-up to that, local authorities were
required to undertake their first assessment and to write that down, having
looked in detail at the demand from parents-not just the demand in quantum, but
the demand in terms of flexibility and affordability as well. Then they had to look at their supply and
produce an assessment of how far, locally, there was a match between what
parents wanted and needed and what was available and use that assessment to
stimulate the local market in one way or another to better meet the needs of
parents.
The
local authorities have just finished their sufficiency assessments. An organisation has independently been
looking at the quality of those assessments, some of which are good and some of
which are not so good. We will use that
experience to give further guidance to local authorities about how to improve
that process. In a sense, they are just
in the starting blocks now, having undertaken those assessments, and will go on
to use that information to inform what they do, in terms of the levers we have
given them, to start ensuring that what parents want is provided. In many areas, it is not so much that there
is not enough child care, but that it is not flexible enough. That is why we have pilots on the
entitlement in respect of three and four-year-olds, for example, to see how
mainstream reception classes, as well as private sector providers, can be much
more flexible. That is the main lead
now, together with the issue of affordability in some parts of the country.
Q<62> <Annette Brooke:> I do not know if it was the same
research, but an article in The Times
reported on Government-commissioned research by the National Centre for Social
Research. I shall be careful, because I
am not assuming that what I read in the article in The Times is true until the Chief Secretary says so. That article said: "In terms of older children, only 17% of parents are using the
much-vaunted after-school clubs. This
figure has not changed since 2004, despite" all the hype about "the 'extended
school' initiative". Is that factual?
<Beverley
Hughes:> That was not our research. I found that figure strange, to be honest,
because, looking at the statistics, there has been an amazing growth in the
number of holiday clubs, particularly, over the past few years. As I said earlier, about half the secondary
schools and many primary schools are now offering extended activities,
including child care. However, many
parents are feeling a gap in respect of secondary-age children in the 11 to 14
age range. In terms of the extended
school offer, primary schools have cemented child care as part of the range of
things they are offering as extended activities. Secondary schools do that less so. Initially, that was so because parents, in their responses to
school questionnaires, did not indicate that that was an issue in respect of
secondary schools, but actually that is emerging.
We
are doing some work with schools in London to ensure that we provide what
parents need in terms of child care in secondary school, including an assurance
that, if their child attends an after-school club, there is a proper register
and security and that it is not a loose arrangement just because children are a
bit older. We are working to ensure
that we can give proper guidance to secondary schools about how to ensure that
those extra-curricular activities after school are organised in such a way that
parents can be sure that their children are attending, are safe and are being
cared for while they are at work.
<Chairman:> I just remind
everyone that we are getting to the stage where quicker questions and answers
would be helpful. We have one important
section after your section, Annette.
Q<63> <Annette Brooke:> I will ask the Minister quickly. We have not really spoken about rural
poverty today. Obviously it is
important. The provision of extended
schools, with the problem of transport, is particularly difficult in rural
areas. Are you giving any special
attention to rural areas?
<Beverley
Hughes:> Yes.
<Chairman:> That was very
brief.
<Beverley
Hughes:> I will go into greater length if you wish me
to.
Q<64> <Annette Brooke:> Actually, I would not mind a little
more detail-I represent a rural area, with some of these problems.
It
is hearsay rather than evidence, but in deprived areas it has been said to me
that, where a payment is charged by the school for extended schools-I know that
some element of the child care tax element comes into this-very many of the
extended schools are failing, or falling, simply because they are not
sustainable, because of the low levels of income in that area. That starts a downward spiral, in terms of
keeping it going. Is that so? I would like a little more than yes or no.
<Beverley
Hughes:> Two quick points. First, there are a number of schools-we are clear about this-that
need a bit more help. We are trying to
make sure that they get it, in terms of how they can manage their total budgets
in ways that enable them to make the kind of cross-subsidies, if you like, that
would help children from disadvantaged families to take part in extended
activities. Some schools are doing that
very well. Secondly, we did include in
the children's plan a provision-I cannot remember how much it was-certainly to
enable 50,000 children from disadvantaged backgrounds to take part in extended
activities by directing those extra resources to schools in those areas, so
that they would have extra funding and could provide extended activities for
those children free of charge. So, we
are doing both of those things-helping schools to use their budgets better, but
also some direct funding, specifically for the purpose that you outlined, to
enable disadvantaged children to take part in activities free.
Q<65> <Annette Brooke:> I have recently asked a parliamentary
question about extended school provision.
The answer was that the information was not collected centrally. Surely it is very difficult to monitor what
is happening if there is not some collection of information.
<Beverley
Hughes:> It is not true to say that we have no
information. We have the Training and
Development Agency, which is, if you like, our field force, out there, working
directly with local authorities and schools, making sure that when an authority
tells us that a school is fully extended, for instance, that it is, and that
the range of activities meets the core offer.
It is working directly with schools to support them in delivering the
extended activities. But it would be
too onerous to ask schools to provide us with a whole range of statistics as to
what they are providing and how many children are taking it up. We are trying to strike a balance. I certainly am very clear that I need to
know enough that when I say to you that half of all secondary schools are
offering the full extended offer that that is right. I can tell you that I am really prodding the system to make sure
that I can do that through the TDA. But
to go beyond that would be very difficult, in terms of asking schools to
provide a large amount of numbers.
Q<66> <Lynda Waltho:> What work is the Treasury doing with
the DCSF to improve both the quality of the child care work force and the
conditions of that work force?
<Beverley
Hughes:> On quality, I think that we have got a
pleasing, improving story to tell.
Ofsted rated 96% of child care as good or outstanding in 2007, and 98%
of early education provision as at least satisfactory. Both of those figures are going up. But you are quite right that the quality is
crucial. To get the benefits,
particularly for disadvantaged children, what happens day to day between the
staff in the settings and the children is the critical factor. So, the training or up-skilling of the work
force is crucial, as is the early years foundation stage, because that will
give parents the assurance that in every single setting, there is a common
framework that staff have to work to.
The Children's Workforce Development Council is working with us to take
forward progressive training for staff both in terms of the extent to which we
can put graduates in settings-there has been a marked improvement there-and in
moving people from level 2 to a minimum standard of level 3 over a period of
time.
Q<67> <Chairman:> But do you
agree, Yvette, that child care settings should be run by people who are
well-paid and well-qualified?
<Yvette
Cooper:> Obviously, the quality of staff is
critical. Our role is to provide the
DCSF with a significant and substantial CSR settlement, as we did last year,
and it has to ensure that the money is well spent and delivers the quality that
our children need.
<Ed
Balls:> I think it was the next CSR round that was
referred to, and we will be preparing the evidence well.
Q<68> <Paul Holmes:> On the issue
that we discussed a few moments ago, it is a little alarming if one of the main
planks is children's centres and after-school clubs. It seems, anecdotally at least, that they are struggling
financially, because they are set up in the poorest areas where parents cannot
afford to pay. About a year and a half
ago, I visited a brilliant after-school club at a junior school on a very poor
estate in Chesterfield, but it closed a year later because the charity that was
running it could not keep it going any longer.
I understand, anecdotally, that all the children's centres in
Chesterfield, where we have many poor areas, are struggling wherever parents
are needed to pay into them. The county
council will not talk to me about that; are you telling me that I cannot get an
answer from you either?
<Beverley
Hughes:> The situation varies, but I do not accept the
general premise that children's centres are struggling financially. There has been a massive injection of
funding, which we have committed to sustaining because we care about it. We feel that the priority on early
years-children under five-is absolutely paramount for the agenda that the
Committee is discussing today. That is
why we started it and why we will continue it.
We
are giving local authorities significant amounts of money that increasingly are
not ring-fenced. Generally speaking-I
have spoken to one or two MPs about this-there might be specific areas in which
the level of disadvantage in communities, and the number of such communities,
is such that they are experiencing some of those issues, but that is not
general. We need both local authorities
and, as I said earlier to Annette, schools themselves to be much better at
using those pots of money. They need to
bring them together and make sure that they can address the need across their
areas, not in a one-size-fits-all way but by using their money flexibly. They want that flexibility and the Government
are giving it to them; it is up to them to be creative in how they use it. It is up to them to address and target their
resources, as far as they think appropriate, at the areas of greatest need.
Q<69> <Paul Holmes:> I will send your answer to Derbyshire county
council.
<Beverley
Hughes:> Okay.
<Chairman:> David has been
very patient. He has been in the debate
on climate change, but he is one of the most regular attendees of this
Committee, and he will have a brisk opportunity now.
Q<70> <Mr. Chaytor:> I am sorry that I was not here at the
start. May I go back to the issue of
training, and ask Ed and James whether the Government are going to abolish the
16-hour rule?
<James
Purnell:> We are, as we announced previously, looking
at the 16-hour rule and how it can be implemented flexibly. For example, we are looking at young people
of 16 and 17, but we want to consider the issue more widely as well. We would not want to abolish it completely
because we want jobseeker's allowance to be a regime that gets people back into
work. We do not want a system in which
people can perpetually be in training and continue to get JSA. Indeed, the evidence shows that one reason
why there has been a good focus on work in the past 10 years is that it is
often better to get people into work and then get them trained. However, that is not the whole story, which
is exactly why we are bringing together the work that we do with the work of
John Denham's Department to create a system in which when you sign up for
welfare you sign up for skills at the same time. As you know, the Departments have made a number of announcements
about how we are integrating those two services. We are going to give people a skills health check to make sure
that we identify skills weaknesses and then, if that is a barrier to work,
provide them with training.
We
are also saying-I know that you want to move on-that there is far more
flexibility in terms of training and how people can take it up within JSA than
they often realise. We need to explain
that well.
Q<71> <Mr. Chaytor:> A constituent came to my advice surgery last
Friday. He is a parent who has just
been made redundant and who is prepared to invest £4,000 of his savings into
retraining into a higher-level skill, but because that would be slightly over
16 hours a week, the job centre will not enable him to do it on JSA. He therefore cannot claim his mortgage
protection payment, which makes it financially not viable. May I write to you
about that anomaly? I do not think that it was what the Government intended.
<James
Purnell:> No, exactly. That is why we are reviewing it.
If there are clear outcomes such as improved job entry and retention that
justify flexibility in the 16-hour rule, then that will be attractive. If, on
the other hand, it becomes a way of avoiding JSA conditionality, it will not.
Q<72> <Mr. Chaytor:> May I ask Ed about post-16 participation?
Nearly all education indicators have improved significantly over the past 11
years, but the one that is pretty stubbornly static is participation post-16.
Why do you think that is?
<Ed
Balls:> Post-16 participation has increased but, as
you say, modestly. By international comparisons, we are still a long way down
the league table for post-16 participation, at 17 and at 18. That is what our
new legislation, which I think is going to the Lords tomorrow following the
passage of its Commons stages, is intended to address-the Bill would raise the
education leaving age to 18.
It
is partly about the focused nature of provision post-16. As you know, the
expansion of the apprenticeship programme-it has been expanding in the past 10
years, but we want to accelerate its expansion further-is important, as are
diplomas, in ensuring that there are powerful ways in which young people can
combine learning and on-the-job training. There are too many young people who
have left school at 16 and gone into full-time work without any training at all
because that was more financially attractive in the short term. It is partly
about what has been offered post-16, but I would say that it is also about
aspiration. We have done, I think, a really good job in the past 10 years of
raising the aspirations of young people who might have wondered whether, at 18,
they would stay in the education system and go to university or go into work.
As you know, there has been a very significant rise in higher education
participation after 18, but there is more to do to raise levels of aspiration
to stay in education after 16 among today's 10 to 14-year-olds.
I
always feel-this is why our Department has an important role to play-that we
engage too late. We talk to 15 and 16-year-olds and their parents about why it
would be good to stay in education, but to really affect aspiration we need to
be talking to parents and young people in primary school and the early years of
secondary education. Too often, we talk to young people and their parents who
have already decided that they are going to do it, or are on the cusp. Too many
young people and their parents have decided that education will not be for them
at a much, much earlier stage. Much earlier intervention is what we need to do.
Q<73> <Mr. Chaytor:> Regardless of the level of aspiration or the
opening up of opportunities post-16, something must go wrong between the ages
of 11 and 14. It is not a sudden decision to leave school at 16, it is a
gradual process throughout secondary school.
<Ed
Balls:> We know that there is a very clear link-this
takes us back to the subject of the Committee's work-between poverty and educational
outcomes. The evidence shows that those links often strengthen through a
child's life rather than diminish. Children from families on low income are
less likely to make progress from key stage 2 to key stage 4 than the average.
The disadvantage that means that they will already be doing less well at key
stage 2 accelerates in their early secondary years. That is why the focus on
promoting excellence for all and trying to address the quality of teaching and
aspiration is so important.
To
give you one fact, we will set out tomorrow the details of our national
challenge programme to get the number of schools with below 30% getting GCSEs
including English and maths, down from 638 today to zero by 2011. Of those 638
schools, 540 have above average free school meal uptake in the intake to the
school. Half of all the schools with more than 50% of kids on free school meals
are in national challenge areas. Those statistics cut both ways because they
tell you not only that there is a concentration of lower income or poverty in
schools which do less well but that half of schools with more than 50% of kids
on free school meals exceed that basic minimum. Many schools with a lot of
poverty and deprivation achieve high results as well. That takes us back to the
point I was making about aspiration. We need to address poverty, low income and
the barriers to learning outside school, but that should never be an excuse for
poor performance and expectations. I still feel that is too often the case.
Q<74> <Mr. Chaytor:> Will you be publishing the names and local
authorities of all the 638 schools?
<Ed
Balls:> All 638 schools are in the public domain;
that information has all been published clearly. Tomorrow, we will publish the
number and percentage of schools in every local authority area. Of the 150
local authority areas, 134 have at least one national challenge school.
Q<75> <Mr. Chaytor:> Earlier, you commented on the continuing
widening of the divide between key stages 2 and 4 in terms of children from
different social backgrounds. Is there any evidence in any area that that
divide is beginning to narrow? Are there any positive signs that certain
policies have reduced the gap?
<Ed
Balls:> Yes. If you look at GCSE results in the last
four or five years, the results of children on free school meals have risen
faster at GCSE level than the average, so the targeted intervention for boys
and girls from low-income families in terms of catch-up has been working. Those
children have been doing better than average, but it still does not take away
from the fact that a child from that kind of family is at the moment much less
likely to get five good GCSEs at 16 than the average child from the average
family.
Q<76> <Mr. Chaytor:> Would you accept that there is any truth or validity
in the argument that although a highly standards-obsessed and assessment-driven
system is good for children with supportive families, it might be part of the
reason that children from less supportive families fall behind?
<Chairman:> Can we have a
brief answer to that one?
<Ed
Balls:> I obviously read your report in detail and I
welcome your support for continuing to publish national test results. That was
very positive. We obviously want to make the process as stress free as possible
and, as I said, make sure that we tackle all the barriers to learning from
outside the school. Earlier, we talked about it becoming harder as you make
progress to address special educational needs and the barriers to learning
outside the home. Tackling that is what our Department is about, and is the key
to the next stage in terms of raising the level of test results.
I
come back to the simple point that it is much harder to have a culture of
excuses about low performance linked to poverty or the area where the school is
if you are publishing those results and holding governing bodies and local
authorities to account for performance. I personally think that for too many
decades we, as a society, assumed that people who live in a certain place and
are from a certain kind of family just did not do well. We can now demonstrate
clearly that although some schools are still underperforming, some schools with
the same kind of catchment in the same kind of area have achieved dramatic
improvements in results. They are posting results way above the average. It is
the publication of that information that allows us to demonstrate that there is
not necessarily a link between poverty and performance. It is the tracking of
individual progress that gives teachers the power to make sure that every child
can stay on track and to see early when a child is falling behind and give them
extra support.
<Chairman:> I am sure we
can carry on with that next month when you are here on your own.
Q<77> <Fiona Mactaggart:> Is the gap between the achievement of
children on the lowest incomes and the achievement of children on medium
incomes growing or shrinking?
<Ed
Balls:> The answer to that is that the gap has
stabilised during the past 10 years, having grown for decades. There is
tentative evidence that we are starting to close that gap. The fact that GCSE results have risen faster
than average for free-school-meal pupils suggests that we are starting to close
the gap, but to me it is still a more powerful reality than the closing of the
gap, which is why we must continue to do more.
The national challenge programme is powerful because it puts a large
amount of money on the table to empower governing bodies and local authorities
to address disadvantage and poor performance, but it also makes it clear to
local authorities, areas or governing bodies that come up with excuses that we
will not tolerate them any longer.
Q<78> <Fiona Mactaggart:> How will you stop them meeting the
national targets by coaching children across boundaries, which too many of them
do?
<Ed
Balls:> As in?
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
One of the points that we raised in our assessment report is that there is a
bit of a culture of coaching children who are close to a boundary across that
boundary so that they can-
<Ed
Balls:> I thought that you meant bussing them from
one area to another.
<Fiona Mactaggart:>
No. I am talking about teaching to the
test.
<Ed
Balls:> The way to do that and one of our big success
stories is our progress not simply in terms of average results at key stage 2
and key stage 4, but the floor target.
One of the advantages of testing is that it allows you to track the
progress of every child, not simply the average. We must demand that schools focus on the progress of every child
and measure that progress rather than simply looking at the average. We do not think that schools would be
delivering if they were simply coaching to the average and just around the
borderline.
Q<79> <Fiona Mactaggart:> I have one more gap issue, which is
about the social and emotional aspects of learning. We now have information about that, which we did not have before,
which is great, but it is another area where the gap seems to be pretty
sustained and not necessarily moving.
What does that tell you?
<Ed
Balls:> I am not sure that I understand what you mean
by the gap.
Q<80> <Fiona Mactaggart:> In the "Opportunity for all" report,
which I referred to earlier and you helpfully said that you would consider
whether it would be possible to give that sort of comprehensive information for
2007, there are figures for the most deprived children, for children in other
areas and for development attainment, including social and emotional aspects of
learning. It seems from those figures,
although they are provisional for 2006, that the gap is not narrowing and may
be widening. It is difficult to work
out.
<Ed
Balls:> It is certainly the case that there are some
real issues in terms of children and young people with mental health issues
that need to be addressed, and we are reviewing that at the moment in the child
and adolescent mental health services
review. We have just moved,
since last September, to encourage all secondary schools, with funding for the
provision of social and emotional aspects of learning and teaching. It is similar to the issue of extended
schooling. I do not think we know at
the moment how many primary and secondary schools are providing such teaching,
but we are embarking on measuring, area by area and school by school, not just
standards, but children's well-being, and that will become part of the Ofsted
assessment and accountability regime, so that we will be able to see, first,
the schools that are playing their part in addressing those wider well-being
issues, and secondly the areas in which other children's services are not doing
enough to support schools or where we do not have the sort of school parental
links that we would like. The shift
into measuring and holding the system to account for progress in child
well-being is exciting. We are at an early
stage, but that is one of the consequences of the children's plan that we are
taking forward.
Q<81> <Chairman:> This has been a very good session, but I have
one final question. We have been to Merton. We were investigating looked-after children
and our most vulnerable children, and we went to a local authority whose prime
aim is to keep children out of care. It
is one of the most successful in the country, and has an amazingly interesting
intervention system. As soon as a
family seems to be breaking up and becoming dysfunctional, they move in in a
very powerful way. It is a very interesting model. As soon as a child goes into
care, on all the criteria of life chance, they dramatically drop.
All
the evidence that I was reading for this particular session suggests that as
soon as you envisage a one-parent family for a child, you have to consider the
likelihood of them being under-achieving and in poverty. I know that this is a
challenging area, but do we do enough to support families to keep together?
<Ed
Balls:> That is a very interesting question and, to
be honest, we will probably answer that in our different ways. Beverley is
leading a piece of work on the ways in which our new Department is considering
supporting families. We know that the family, and parental support, have by far
the biggest impact on a child's life chances and that the quality of
relationship within families matters a great deal to children's outcomes. That
is the relationship between the mother and father, single parent and partner,
and grandparents as well. The adult relationship impacts on children.
We
have thought a lot about the way in which we use the work-life balance. For
example, we have considered the right to parental time off for mothers and
fathers, flexible working and the right to ask about such working. We have
thought a lot about giving flexibility and support to parents. Getting those
things right, and the impact that that can have on the relationship between the
parents, can have an important knock-on impact on outcomes for children. We are
considering what more we can do to support parents and their relationships
because of the benefits that can then accrue to children and their well-being.
Q<82>
<Chairman:> Is it almost
politically incorrect to consider that issue?
<Ed
Balls:> The opposite. We are considering it at the
moment for precisely that reason.
<James
Purnell:> That is right. Clearly, we have to focus on
how we can keep families together. As Ed has just outlined, there is a huge
amount of work under way on that issue. You will also always want a safety net
to help all families whatever their circumstances. The point that you make is
the very reason why we have had a focus on helping lone parents as well as
other types of families. That is why we are proud of the fact that there has
been a 12.5% increase in the proportion of lone parents in work. You have to
have early intervention and support-what the state can do-to help families stay
together, and then a safety net that helps everybody, in particular those in
the greatest needs. That underlines my final point on the inter-relation
between welfare reform and child poverty. You could take an approach in which
you say that the way to get parents into work is to say that they are poor if
they are on benefits-picking up on Paul's point, the way in which to deal with
better-off-in-work issues is to say, "Children will be poor if their parents
are not working." Indeed, that is what
some countries do. We reject that. We say explicitly that we want to take all
families out of poverty, and eradicate child poverty in that way.
Once
we have such a generous welfare system, the opposite mistake is to say that
there is no conditionality in the system.
We would have people who end up not being in work, when being in work
would be the best thing for them. There
is a direct relationship between a relatively generous welfare state and one
that has significant conditionality. That
is how to make sure that people get into work and have the advantages of work,
which is why the lone parent changes will lift 70,000 children out of poverty.
It
is worth saying that, when people get into work, they progress and make further
strides in respect of their income. As
for the employment retention and advancement pilot to which I referred, when we
consider the incomes of lone parents who have gone into work a year later or
perhaps a bit more, their incomes make them something like a quarter or fifth
better off. Being in work is good for
people's incomes. It is good for child
poverty. It is good for all the points
that Stephen made about self-esteem, too.
If we want to tackle child poverty, we have to put welfare reform
alongside it to make a relatively generous welfare state possible.
<Chairman:> We have had a
good innings. Thank you very much for
your attention. I do not know what a
clutch of Ministers is called, but it has been good on our side. Thank you for your patience. It has been a long sitting.