Examination of Witnesses (Questions 127
- 139)
TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2007
PROFESSOR ADRIAN
SINFIELD AND
PROFESSOR JOHN
VEIT-WILSON
Q127 Chairman:
Good afternoon gentlemen. I welcome you to today's meeting of
the Scottish Affairs Committee which is taking evidence on our
inquiry into poverty in Scotland. Perhaps you could introduce
yourself for the record.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I am John
Veit-Wilson,
Professor Sinfield: Adrian Sinfield.
Q128 Chairman:
Before we start on the detailed questions, do you have any opening
remarks you would like to make?
Professor Veit-Wilson: Yes, please.
I want to thank you for inviting me to expand on my written evidence.
What I sent the Committee was a memorandum to try to clarify some
of the very large variety of meanings of the idea of poverty and
all that goes with it and that includes the question of how much
money is enough for a decent participatory life in our society.
Forty years of studying this subject has taught me that there
continues to be an enormous amount of disagreement and even confusion
about what people mean when they talk about poverty. We see examples
of that daily and there clearly is disagreement in much of the
written evidence which the Committee has received. I should like
to add three comments on some recent examples. I tried to save
time by writing a memorandum on these and I believe that has now
been distributed to the Committee, so I shall only just mention
what those three points are. First of all is the confusion between
the causes, conditions and consequences of poverty. As several
witnesses noted, the consequence of one condition may be the cause
of another in a chain and if we want to intervene to break that
chain, we have to be clear what the causal connections are. That
is why my memorandum refers to a variety of conditions which for
decades, if not centuries, have been described as causes of poverty.
This is an unwise usage because most of those I have noted are
shared right across the income spectrum. These personal and social
conditions clearly do not cause the condition of poverty, which
is not having enough money. What causes poverty is anything which
leads to people not having enough money. It is not lone parenthood
or unemployment as such, it is the fact that they do not have
enough money when they are in those situations. The second problem
I should like to draw attention to is that people talk about policies
against poverty as if it were a matter of altering the characteristics
of the people who are poor, when a more effective and also respectful
way may be altering the characteristics of the social economic
or geographical environment in which they experience that poverty.
I have given the example of altering the social environment in
which some people are identified as poor, for example by means
tests, which is disrespectful, by using instead income maintenance
methods which apply to everyone. I come back to the centrality
of adequate incomes in our largely marketised society and that
is my third point. How much is enough? The dismissive Treasury
quotation in my memorandum, the short note I have just sent, repeats
a formula which has been repeated for public consumption for very
many years. Whatever ministers think, I really do want to assure
the Committee that officials have known since the 1960s that you
can use a combination of reliable methods to produce robust estimates
of the incomes which households of different sizes and compositions
need on average to achieve a decent, socially inclusive lifestyle,
one which respects human dignity as the general public see it.
The phrases I have just used there come incidentally from the
international and EU conventions to which the UK is a signatory
and which make these human rights for everyone and that is why
I quote them. Other countries manage to do this as the EU recommends
and even the USA had an official inquiry a decade ago into what
they call their poverty line and I have cited the reference to
its report at the end of my written evidence. My point is that
it can be done and I hope that we shall find the political will
to do it. Thank you.
Professor Sinfield: I hope that
you are going to build on your 2000 report which many of us found
extremely helpful, particularly its crisp conclusion that you
needed benefits that were generous and wholehearted in support
and that you also needed quality work, which is now even more
a central issue.[1]
The continuing causes of poverty and the poor quality of work
are simply linked issues which I hope we can pick up on. I hope,
besides picking up on some points in my paper, we can pick up
on the issue about poverty proofing or what the Irish and people
in Europe are now calling "poverty impact statements"
and I hope there will be a bit of time to raise the issue of false
economies. If I were writing this again, having had a look through
the evidence you have, the general issue of false economies comes
through and links very well with the excellent report that Lisa
Harker did for the Department for Work and Pensions where she
talks about work first plus, which is a very helpful point. The
final point I would want to make is that, coming down on the train,
I was able to read the proofs of a book that will be sent to you
as soon as it is published, which is on poverty in Scotland 2007,
put together by the Scottish Poverty Information Unit, which has
done a number of editions of this, the Child Poverty Action Group
in Scotland, the Poverty Alliance and the Open University, many
of whose own students are on extremely low incomes. I think this
will be a very valuable resource.
Q129 Chairman:
When we announced our inquiry, we stated that we would be addressing
issues such as "what is poverty?". Does a fundamental
definition of "poverty" actually exist?
Professor Veit-Wilson: We can
say there is no one single agreed definition of poverty and that
is partly because the word is an abstract concept and the concrete
form it takes varies enormously by time, by place and by observer.
There are definitions which have quite a wide degree of assent
and these generally are saying something to the effect that, as
I have quoted in my written evidence, people can be said to be
in poverty when they lack the resources to take part in society
according to the standards which society considers desirable.
Professor Sinfield: I just want
to emphasise that and I would want to put emphasis on the last
point that John made "to take part in society". It is
not simply having a living standard of so many items in your house,
it is the ability to have the resources to take part in society
without this being stopped by lack of income and other resources.
Q130 Chairman:
We are examining matters such as the extent of poverty, contributing
factors and the impact of government policy on poverty. Do you
consider that these are the most relevant areas to be addressed
or should we be concentrating on some other areas?
Professor Sinfield: Those are
central ones. What I would want to add is the importance of the
context within which we are tackling these. One of the issues
about which I have become increasingly concerned is the extent
to which inequality has widened in our society and in many ways
is being taken for granted. This has come out in a number of studies
and it does change the context for looking at poverty studies.
This is a very important point and I hope you will be prepared
to look at that.
Professor Veit-Wilson: May I add
to that point because I am not sure that it has been raised very
greatly by any of the written evidence that I have read. There
is increasing evidence, from the field of medicine particularly,
about the part which increasing inequality plays in causing many
of the social conditions which we then see as poverties in one
form or another. It is very important to look at the wider society
within which these deprivations and so on are in effect enhanced
and perceived and they may, it is argued by people like Sir Michael
Marmot, actually be caused by the degree of inequality in a society.
Q131 Mr MacNeil:
You mentioned inequality widening in society. Would you say there
is a link with inequality widening in society? Does it lead for
example automatically to poverty or is it more likely to lead
to poverty in that society? Is there an exclusion of a certain
group when inequality widens?
Professor Sinfield: There has
not been enough research to answer all those questions but if
you look across the European Community as a whole, there is a
very constant pattern. Countries with low levels of poverty have
low levels of inequality as well and by and large, you can have
height of inequality and height of poverty and, with few exceptions,
this is very consistent.
Q132 Mr MacNeil:
There is a correlation between the two.
Professor Sinfield: Yes.
Q133 Mr MacNeil:
Is that happening throughout Western Europe or is it a function
of globalisation, of different states doing different things to
ameliorate the situation that may not be happening in the UK?
Professor Sinfield: I am not sure
there has been enough research to answer that. My own hunch is
that policy is a crucial issue and is a bigger one than globalisation
and this is a factor. In those countries where inequality has
widened, as it has done in our country over a period, it becomes
more difficult to tackle issues such as poverty and deprivation,
partly because of the social distance. People just do not believe
others are so poorly off. Some rather anecdotal research was done
with bankers and businessmen and, by and large, they all suggested
the average weekly earnings were twice the actual level they were.
They had very little idea of how far others were behind.
Q134 Mr MacNeil:
So you are saying they are socially isolated, to an extent or
in a way, from the rest of society due to an inequality within
that society?
Professor Sinfield: Yes.
Q135 Danny Alexander:
You were just making the point about research from the health
sector, suggesting that inequality could sometimes be a cause
of conditions that might be either characterised as poverty itself
or as consequences of poverty. You mentioned the work of Michael
Marmot. Could you say a bit more about that in terms of practical
examples of what that might actually mean? You put it as an interesting
thought, but in the abstract it is quite hard to grasp how much
impact that point actually has.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I would
hesitate to try to explain this very solid scientific research;
it is not my field. He has written a popular book on it, Status
Syndrome,[2]
which brings together a large amount of work which he and his
colleagues and other people, like Professor Wilkinson, have done
and which illustrate and document, which is the point that you
are partly asking about, the causal relationships. There are two
aspects of the motor there as I understand it. One is that high
degrees of inequality create anxieties and a sense of a failure
to belong to the same society that we then see in many of the
symptoms of social breakdown and discontent and that those countries
like the Nordic ones, which have had a positive policy of restricting
the amount of inequality, partly because they have a high degree
of a sense of social integration and solidarity, have lower levels
both of poverty and of the other kinds of social evils that we
may be concerned with. So that is one aspect of the motor. It
is the effect of inequalities on people's perceptions of where
they are and what they can do in society. The other bit of the
motor is more directly consumerism quite frankly; the degrees
of inequality which we see drive the motor of competition and
aspiration which cannot then be achieved. So people sit and not
only perceive themselves as unable to take part in the society
in which everybody else, as they see it, is achieving these things
and they may resent or get depressed about that, they can then
become disrespected because they are failing to achieve those
levels, which is one of the aspects of poverty, and they may react
in what we see as dysfunctional ways to express their position.
Two ways have been suggested why a high degree of inequality may
create some of these problems of poverty that we are talking about.
Q136 Danny Alexander:
Yet in both of your opening statements and also in your written
evidence, you make the point quite fairly that, in terms of defining
poverty, what is really important is the financial definition
effectively. May I just follow up on that point? Can you explain
how those two thoughts relate in your mind but also, if one accepts
a purely financial definition of poverty, which is probably something
that we have discussed with you before, that does not necessarily
mean that the best measures to alleviate poverty are themselves
purely about alleviating the lack of financial resources. There
can be, for example, inter-generational factors which may lead
to poverty being handed down from one generation to the next which
are not necessarily susceptible to purely financial measures to
tackle them. Then if you want to deal with those inter-generational
issues, just raising someone's income is not necessarily enough.
Professor Veit-Wilson: Yes, it
is a fair point but I would like to make what is quite an important
distinction there. There is a dynamic which relates inequality
in a country to the sense of poverty, but when we are talking
about how much money is enough to buy oneself out of the problems
of poverty which are in that marketised economy in which we largely
live, then the measure is not simply an economic statistic of
income inequality, the measure has to be an empirical one of how
much money we discover is enough. It is that sense that I would
criticise: the use of what may be a perfectly valid measure of
the dispersion of low income as a guide to what should be the
income level at which people should not be perceived as being
poor. The two are quite distinct concepts and measures.
Q137 Mr Davidson:
May I just pick up a point related to the context of poverty?
You are speaking in terms of society as though it were a single
thing and I used to be a councillor in Strathclyde Region. We
had the areas of priority treatment and so on and so forth and
visits to the rural areas reinforced my view that, to some extent,
am I right in thinking, there is the poverty of individuals, of
income, where somebody can be without means but in a grouping,
a locality which is not overwhelmingly a poor one? Therefore the
norms and values are different in a rural area as distinct from
part of my own constituency where you have large numbers of people
who have accommodated themselves to their lack of financial resources,
who have established a different set of values and paradoxically
are actually quite often happier and more content with their lot,
which in absolute terms can mean worse off than some of those
who are poor in a rural area, because everyone else round about
them is poor also. The solutions that are required to break that
poverty of ambition, which is in a sense almost a culture of contentment,
do require us to make sure that we are coming back with solutions
which address not only the individual but the collective manifestations.
Professor Veit-Wilson: Yes, it
is a very important point. It should not be called a culture of
contentment but of acceptance.
Q138 Mr Davidson:
Of resignation then.
Professor Veit-Wilson: Yes, resignation
would be even better. The distinction is this. What you have described
is how one would perceive being poor in a particular social context.
So often what we are talking about, and we are here sitting in
a parliamentary context, is what the national policies should
be. If we were talking about national income maintenance policies,
then we would not be talking about high degrees of variation from
one social context to another. We would be talking about what
should be the national level of income support, of Jobseeker's
Allowance and of the various allowances for people with particular
conditions and of the minimum pension. We would not be saying
there should be variation according to the social context in which
the claimant finds him or herself. There are two different things.
You were referring to a much more sociological approach to looking
at the question, whereas the policy approach does not accept all
those fine gradations and variations. This is a very old question.
My own research, which has included policy making on this subject
back into the 1930s when the first national income maintenance
system, the unemployment assistance, was brought in, the politicians
and officials concerned with that were very concerned with the
different costs in rural areas by comparison with urban ones and
whether they should have different levels of benefit for people.
In those days they thought you could manage on much less in rural
areas because, of course, all the likely applicants for this benefit
would be growing their own food and so on and therefore they did
not need so much money. Much of the evidence you have and you
will all know personally is that if you live in a rural area in
Scotland, it costs you a good deal more than living in urban areas.
You can play that one both ways and that is why, if we are looking
at the policy issues, then we have to see whether there are national
factors which we can take into account to arrive at some measure.
Professor Sinfield: May I just
add to that and link it back to the inequalities in health issue.
The evidence is now very clear across countries and within Scotland
that people in better off areas live longer than people in poorer
areas; when inequalities rise in a society, the gaps widen, which
is one of the things that happened in the last 20 years of the
last century. These people can appear content but their expectation
of life is significantly less than grumpy people much better off
and this is one major issue. The other thing is that I would encourage
you to contact the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Dr Harry
Burns, because this is an issue on which he has done some very
interesting work; he has been giving international lectures on
the impact of poverty on people's health for a long time, which
actually helps to explain something which struck many of us interviewing
people living in poverty, which is that we always get their age
wrong. Particularly working class women appear to us much older
than they actually are. He is suggesting that in fact this deprivation
and poverty is draining them physically which helps to explain
why they are dying earlier of diseases that middle class people
die of later. He would be particularly helpful to you.
Q139 Mr McGovern:
The question is to both professors. In the course of this inquiry
we have met various groups and organisations and taken written
evidence from various groups and organisations and it is quite
natural that they feel that the people they represent who are
involved in poverty should be a priority. Do you consider that
we should be tackling one particular type of poverty as a priority
and, if so, what would it be? For example, child poverty or pensioner
poverty, lone parent poverty or what?
Professor Veit-Wilson: I am almost
afraid that is the kind of trick question one does not want to
get into, particularly from an academic point of view.
1 Scottish Affairs Committee First Report, Poverty
in Scotland, Session 1999-2000, HC 59. Back
2
Status Syndrome, Michael Marmot, Bloomsbury, ISBN: 0747570493. Back
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