Further memorandum submitted by Professor
John Veit-Wilson, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Further to my previous written submission to
the Committee on this topic, I should like to add the following
three points which in my experience often need clarification in
discussions on poverty.
1. DISTINGUISHING
THE CAUSES,
CONDITIONS AND
CONSEQUENCES OF
POVERTY
We are often told that social conditions such
as family breakdown, lone parenthood, low educational qualifications
and occupational skills, unemployment and old age are causes of
poverty. But a moment's thought about the fact that these personal
conditions are found throughout society, including among the very
richest people, shows that it is not these conditions that cause
poverty, since one can buy one's way out of their associated consequences
if one has enough money. The same applies if one lives in sparsely
populated areas such as Scotland: rich people live there, too,
without suffering the problems that many submissions again report.
This emphasises that it is lack of sufficient money resources
in our marketised society that is the condition of poverty, and
the causes are pay or benefits too low to enable one to live a
decent participatory life.
The first problem is then not altering people's
behaviour but ensuring that they have incomes sufficient to enable
them to enjoy human dignity, a decent level of living and social
participation. If they then fail to do so, that is the time to
examine the reasons such as family breakdown, but only if it is
essential, keeping in mind that the behaviour of better-off people
is not examined.
2. CHANGING PEOPLE
OR THEIR
ENVIRONMENT
Some people talk about policies against poverty
as if they were a matter of altering the characteristics of the
people who are poor, when a more effective way may be altering
the characteristics of the geographical, social or economic environment
in which they experience poverty. The higher costs of rural life
are examples.
This is also important if governments want to
reduce the disrespect which people in poverty receive, a form
of social exclusion. It is better to avoid measures such as means-tests
which increase the risks of people being individually identified
as "poor", instead of as the citizens they are.
In this context, objectors to income maintenance
policies which appear to benefit all citizens, even those "who
don't need them", should keep in mind that all political
parties accept fiscal welfare expenditure as unproblematic, even
though tax allowances go to people with the highest incomes and
are in fact worth even more to them than to people with lower
ones. If the so-called universal benefits such as tax allowances
or Child Benefit are more effective in targeting, and more efficient
in administration, than are means-tested benefits which people
find demeaning, then they should be preferred.
3. THE CENTRALITY
OF ADEQUATE
INCOMES IN
OUR MARKETISED
SOCIETY
How much is enough? When asked to explain benefit
levels which are demonstrably not enough to live on decently,
Government officials have for decades offered this response:
There is no accepted single research method that
can be used to calculate a minimum income standard for all families.
What people need to live on varies greatly depending on their
needs and a range of factors. The Government therefore believes
that it is not possible to produce a single figure showing an
adequate income for all families. [Treasury letter, Stephen Timms
MP to Sandra Osborne MP, 30.10.06]
While each of these sentences may be literally
correct, the implication that governmental minimum income standards
cannot be discovered by social science research is misleading.
Without going into technicalities, I would remind the Committee
that the [then] Social Security Select Committee examined these
issues in its enquiry into Integrated Child Credit in 2000, to
which I was invited to give both written and oral evidence. That
Committee recommended that the Government "fund a variety
of research by different social scientists into the levels of
income which are sufficient to keep families with children out
of poverty", and that it "convenes an ongoing working
party involving policy makers, academics and other interested
parties to assist it to devise publicly acceptable measures of
the levels of income needed to avoid poverty" [Second Report,
2001, HC72, paras 24-25]. In fact, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation
is currently sponsoring a very large research project on this
topic. The EU recommends that member states set income standards
for inclusion [92/441/EEC, 1992] and my research [1998] showed
that seven European countries were doing so.
It is also relevant to note that, as long ago
as 1965, the National Assistance Board carried out an in-house
study to review the adequacy of its benefits [the Beard and Windsor
Reports on the NAB Scale Rates, unpublished]. Its officials had
no difficulty in using a combination of different methods to find
a defensible basis for adequate benefits.
Setting income adequacy standards and using
them to guide minimum wage and benefit rates is an essential precondition
if poverty is to be eliminated in Scotland and the rest of the
UK. I hope the Scottish Affairs committee will recommend such
action, as the Social Security Committee did six years ago.
Professor John Veit-Wilson
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
15 January 2007
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