Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2007
PROFESSOR ADRIAN
SINFIELD AND
PROFESSOR JOHN
VEIT-WILSON
Q140 Mr McGovern:
It was not intended as one.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I know.
I can well understand that different groups will have their own
interests. Again, if we look at it from a national point of view,
and, admittedly as somebody living in England my concerns are
with the whole of the United Kingdom rather than Scotland alone,
it is important that what we arrive at in the end should not allow
one group rather than another to say that it is being privileged
in this respect. There are other principles of the equality of
treatment of people according to how we collectively perceive
their needs and if I were to promote a particular policy, it would
be that the poverty of different groups should all be addressed.
If you want more economistic kinds of arguments, then you have
to be very careful because of course there is no particular cost
benefit of keeping old people, pensioners like myself, alive,
but there may well be in investing in children, particularly in
children's health, for example in the form of the proposal for
free school meals in Scotland. So there are issues around that
and it can get quite sticky, which is why I joked at the beginning.
Professor Sinfield: It can depend
on the priorities you are given. If you are very concerned about
the future of the society, then the Government's commitment to
child poverty as a specific goal is clearly an important one in
the terms of that. Actually when you are in the field and you
are interviewing people when there is a high level of employment,
then the conditions of older members of the family, even when
they are not living in the same home, is better off because their
sons and daughters in work are able to take them out in their
cars, share things, pass their equipment down to them so that
there is this. When on the other hand, I have been interviewing
in unemployed communities, the children were kept going at school
because the grandparents were paying from their pensions to keep
the children going on school trips or paying for their pocket
money. It is extraordinary the extent to which families do share.
This only strengthens an argument for getting rid of poverty and
preventing it from happening in the first place because it is
shared across these communities.
Q141 Mr MacNeil:
I hear what you are saying about participation in society, which
is basically the definition you have offered us of poverty, and
of course it is dependent on time and place. Back in Adam Smith's
time and The Wealth of Nations, if you could not afford
a shirt you were considered poor. Thankfully things have moved
on. You were talking about inequality and poverty and you mentioned
people in the Scandinavian countries. Would you say that this
is something to do with the levels of taxation in the Scandinavian
countries that are resulting in less inequality in their society,
something right wing politicians here would probably rail against,
or is it something else?
Professor Veit-Wilson: Having
worked in Sweden my own impression is that, at any rate until
the last couple of decades, it was quite widely accepted across
the political spectrum that a high level of personal taxation
allowed the Government to offer a high level of services to everyone
and that was part of the quality of their solidaristic approach
that they all liked. There was not very much of the sort of individualistic,
neo-conservative, neo-liberal thinking in the Nordic countries
in those days. Perhaps there is more now. They did complain bitterly,
some of them, the very rich ones, about high levels of taxation,
of confiscatory levels of over 100%. They did not always understand
the difference between marginal rates and average rates, which
led to the tabloids having a lot of fun with that. We have to
be quite careful as to what it really means, who it is affecting
and what the public perception of this is, particularly when there
are such good public services which help to prevent poverty and
to prevent inequalities in purchasing power from having the same
obvious effects on people's perception of where they are in society.
That is a very important aspect of what we are talking about with
poverty.
Q142 Mr MacNeil:
Having been to Olso, Stockholm and Bergen in the last year, it
seems to me that there is no bad side of town, as it were. Just
returning to Jim's point, is there something the Scandinavians
are doing once they are taxed, when they redistribute the wealth,
going into particular points that Jim was raising, or is it a
general across-the-board approach?
Professor Veit-Wilson: The impression
I have is that they have, in the past at any rate, stressed very
strongly the importance of good quality services for everybody
and not having divided systems where there is means testing and
one set of quality of services for some people and other people
buy this in the market.
Professor Sinfield: I would want
to add to that. These countries by and large raise a greater proportion
of their resources from income tax and less from indirect taxes
and that is part of the reason why their distribution of taxation
is not as evenly spread as in this country and in fact a greater
proportion of the higher income goes in taxation. In Britain on
the other hand it is all about 35 or 36% and in fact in the last
few years, the rich fifth have been paying slightly less than
the poorest fifth. The Nordic countries are going with this as
a very strong commitment to universal services. Looking at the
anti-poverty programme in Finland or in Denmark or in Sweden,
there is a very specific emphasis on the fact that everybody should
get the same level and quality of services and they see this as
a very important first preventive measure against poverty.
Q143 Mr MacNeil:
So what you are saying is that there is a lack of means testing,
it is across the board, it is not targeted at anybody in particular
and it is a wider and more comprehensive safety net.
Professor Sinfield: It is not
necessarily targeted in the income way, which can be stigmatising
when you have measures that are especially for the under-fives
or for large families or for the over-80s. These are the various
ways of targeting without any stigma whatsoever.
Q144 Mr Walker:
Can you give us some examples of major economies that have followed
the Scandinavian model? What is the Scandinavian population in
the four countries? Twenty to 25 million, perhaps four or five
million each? Important though they are, they are not what I would
class as major global or even European economies. Can you give
us some examples perhaps of European economies where they have
had success in limiting the gap between the poorest parts of society
and the least well-off parts of society?
Professor Sinfield: It is interesting
when you are talking about Scotland, a country of just around
five million which is very comparable to some of the other Scandinavian
countries.
Mr MacNeil: It seems an optimal size
for an independent nation.
Q145 Mr Walker:
I suppose what I am asking is whether the Scandinavian countries
are an optimal level for this type of social model to work? Has
the social model worked in larger economies as well, perhaps less
homogeneous in their cultural make-up?
Professor Sinfield: The big difference
between the United States and Canada is explained in part by this
factor; it is less easy citing other European countries. Perhaps
Australia would not be a good example at the moment and New Zealand
has a larger level of child poverty.
Q146 Mr MacNeil:
No European nation over 10 million has seriously tackled poverty.
Professor Veit-Wilson: If you
are asking about France, Germany, Spain or Italy, which it seems
to me you are asking about, then I would say that the histories
of those countries—and perhaps this is a matter of scale
but it is certainly other things as well—have been so much
of a very stratified society with feudal or post-feudal tendencies,
whereas the Nordic countries all were different in that respect.
So what we are talking about it seems to me is less a matter of
size in the first place, but of a sense of solidarity: this is
our society. If I may illustrate that, in studies of the welfare
state, which academics have lots of fun with, some of the Nordics
find it difficult to see the state as being other than their own
government. They do not have this sense, which is absolutely taken
for granted south of the Baltic, so to speak, that the state is
something against us, the people. They have a totally different
way of looking at things and it helps to illustrate that kind
of solidarity. I am not sure whether scale is the cause of it,
but it may help it.
Professor Sinfield: One can add
that Professor Atkinson at Nuffield College is just about to bring
out a book studying the top end of inequality across Europe and
North America and his conclusion is that over the last century,
the pattern across these countries was very similar until the
last 20 years or so of the century when the United States and
Britain left the others, with the inequality gap widening very
considerably, and it is in those two countries you have had the
sharpest increase in poverty of all those countries.
Q147 Mr Davidson:
May I follow up on the point you were making about the stratification
of these societies? The Swedes in the past had one of the biggest
empires in Europe in a sense; they were stretching down to the
Ukraine eventually and it was clearly a feudalistic, aristocratically
based society at that stage and then it broke up and dissolved.
This is an interesting point about the question of whether or
not it is an issue of size or whether or not it is an issue of
there having been almost a process of conscious political decision
making over a period which has changed a collective culture and
led to these sorts of conclusions. I am just trying to struggle
with the idea of whether or not it is possible to replicate their
example by a collective will here about emphasising the need for
equality and social solidarity, as distinct from the new conservativism
and let the market rule and so on, as distinct from anything at
all to do with size. It does not seem to me that there is anything
in here about the size of the UK or Canada or Australia and New
Zealand or almost anywhere else inevitably meaning that they are
going to be more or less accepting of wider or lower levels of
inequality. I can see the very minute level where you would maybe
want to have everybody in the same boat, in the Caymans, Bermuda,
Gibraltar, very small communities; in fact in some of those the
social divisions are actually wider than elsewhere. I am not sure
that the evidence can actually support any suggestion that solidarity
is a function of size. Does that seem fair?
Professor Veit-Wilson: I think
so, but we are going a bit outside my field. I do not really want
to comment here on that.
Q148 Mr Davidson:
I just wanted to demolish the previous point that was being made.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I would
disagree that they ever thought they were feudal. They have had
an elective monarchy since the Middle Ages and admittedly they
elected some rather curious German princelings in the 18th century,
but at the time when they were rampaging around Europe in the
Thirty Years War and building up their empire, as you describe
it, this was very largely a matter of mercenary and other armies
charging around under the king and a couple of generals and pillaging
what they could. It was not quite the same kind of imperialism
that we may think of since then.
Professor Sinfield: You did not
know that before I met him John actually did research on Sweden
in the 1960s.
Q149 Mr Walker:
When we took evidence in Inverness, it was put to us that although
poverty could be linked to issues such as job opportunities, an
age profile effect and access to education, the fundamental cause
of poverty was low wages. Is the issue really as simple as that?
Professor Sinfield: Yes and as
complicated. If you have low wages, and we do have a problem with
low wages, then this encourages poor quality in jobs and this
creates a whole range of problems which I hope we can spend a
little bit of time talking about. Also, in the environment we
have at the moment in Britain with this very strong commitment
to means testing, there is a tremendous belief that with the low
income people you have to have a very wide gap between wages and
any benefits to provide an incentive to go to work. The great
irony is that if you go to other countries where benefits are
much higher, they do not believe in this incentive issue, whereas
in theory, according to some of the British analysts, the problem
should be even greater in these countries because benefits are
so much closer to the level of wages.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I was only
going to add the point about the differential and the credibility
or incredibility of the evidence.
Q150 Mr Walker:
Professor Sinfield mentioned poor quality work in his opening
remarks and that is an interesting topic. People are willing to
accept poor quality work if they know it is their first job and
not their only job and not their last job. We sometimes roundly
criticise McDonald's as a burger-flipping job, but, depending
who is running that particular franchise, there are good examples
of people who go in to flip burgers, who get into management and
go on and learn business skills. When you say that, are you really
referring to what could be classed as dead-end jobs, where people
get a job and once they are in that job there is very little way
for them or opportunity for them to progress out of that job and
take the disciplines they have learned from turning up at work
on time, working with a team, to advance and better themselves?
Would that be near the ballpark of what you were suggesting?
Professor Sinfield: Yes, you have
put your finger on it very well and this is a very serious problem
that we have to engage with because the Government have taken
the line that the way of tackling poverty is work first and in
many ways I agree with them because a lot of my work has been
on unemployment and during the 1980s I was arguing that full employment
was still worth considering. However, work first should not be
work first alone and this is why the Harker Report is so good
in that she talks about work first plus, that you have to get
people into work but work in such a way that it does not actually
pull them back, the point you are making about many students having
vacation jobs and then subsequently moving into a totally different
career and they are not marked by these jobs by and large. Single
parents, may get in, and then, as a result of problems of child
caring or under-reliability of child care, find themselves trapped
in these jobs. They have real problems. I understand the situation
now is that the rate for single parents getting into work is much
the same as it is for the rest of the labour force. The problem
is that they are coming out at twice the rate because of a whole
range of problems around these jobs: the inability of employers
to accept various work times that are friendly to the family,
the problems of child care, a whole of range of issues like this.
It is very important that we should be aiming for better jobs
as a policy and this is why I was so pleased with the conclusion
of the report last time, which put an emphasis on quality jobs.
There is also some very disturbing evidence from Brussels that
Britain may actually be leading Europe in creating poor jobs.
If you look at European statistics on what they call high and
low quality jobs that have been coming out in the Employment
in Europe reports at the beginning of this century, Britain
has a higher percentage of people leaving low quality jobs to
go back into low quality jobs. We are right at the bottom of the
line. Ireland is the opposite: it has the highest proportion of
people going from low quality jobs into high quality jobs. I hope
that there can be some more research into trying to work out what
it is that is happening that is leading to this problem.
Q151 Mr Walker:
You could say that is almost the winner-takes-all society in a
sense, is it not, that the rewards are far greater for those who
have access to academia, training, education? Those who do not
have access to those support networks tend to journey backwards
in their career as opposed to forwards.
Professor Sinfield: That is again
part of the argument against a widening inequality when that makes
it more likely to happen. We have certainly had periods in the
past when we have not had as big a problem as this and we had
much lower levels of unemployment and much lower levels of poverty.
Professor Veit-Wilson: I should
like to add to the point about low-reward jobs which you made.
You said these things are tolerable for short periods when you
are starting your career. However, one of the things that we are
all looking at is what happens to children who leave school without
qualifications which are going to take them further and whether
they are, in those kinds of jobs, then getting the training opportunities
from their employers. It is a policy issue which needs to be taken
into account before we simply leave it at "Okay it's all
right to have a short, not very nice, not very well paid job".
All jobs should have the appropriate standards and a consideration
of what development is needed, what training is needed in this
job so that people can move on from it.
Q152 Ms Clark:
I expect we may go on to the issue of low quality jobs and low
wages later on in this session. To focus on the issue of unemployment,
which of course has been a massive issue over the last few decades
in Scotland, do you still agree that it is the case that full
employment, but in particular full employment with well-paid highly
skilled jobs, is the best way of spreading prosperity throughout
the whole of the community?
Professor Sinfield: It is necessary
but not sufficient. This is the point I was going to put the emphasis
on. If you are going to have a situation where the adult rate
of Jobseeker's Allowance or income support for those people who
are not in work has not risen above the inflation rate for 20
years now—it is about half what the poverty line is that
the Government uses, which I would argue was not enough anyway—this
is a very real problem. Even if you are going down to lower levels
of unemployment, you still have to support these people because
there has been some very good research led from Oxford and Paris
across Europe showing that poverty itself can become something
that causes continuing unemployment and so I hope this can be
tackled, but also people in jobs have to have decent jobs so that
they can form a career rather than a career remaining a middle
class reserve.
Professor Veit-Wilson: We pick
up that term "unemployment" as though we have some sort
of standard statistic to apply to it without thinking about the
quality, not only of the jobs we were talking about a moment ago
but also people's capacity, in terms of working capacity and hours
of work and quality of work, to continue working. We have not
yet raised the question of the various kinds of disability, but
we should not treat having a high employment statistic as the
sole issue here. Many of us are concerned with the quality of
civil life and the involvement of everybody in civil life and
it is a difficult area when there is a struggle between achieving
some high employment statistic and encouraging people whom the
labour market does not wish to employ because of their various
characteristics, or because of the lack of demand for what people
in the labour market are producing. They are discouraged from
taking part in civil life because then they would be treating
themselves as being out of the labour market and we should not
encourage that, should we? There are sticky areas there too that
need to be looked at rather more carefully than they sometimes
are.
Q153 Mr McGovern:
I am intrigued by what you are saying about low quality jobs and
high quality jobs. How is that defined? Is there a criterion to
help you define what a low quality job is? Is it remuneration
or is it something else? My mother worked in a jute mill. She
was a weaver and she always makes a point of saying she was a
weaver because a spinner was regarded as lower than a weaver;
there was a pecking order there. How do you define low quality
or high quality and when you say that in this country more people
are moving from low quality jobs to other low quality jobs, do
you mean Scotland or the UK?
Professor Sinfield: Sorry, this
is the data on the UK. It would not be possible across a European
sample size. The European Household Panel study has been used
to do this. The Scottish component of this would be really quite
small, so one could not make statements about anything less than
the UK in this respect. It might even be difficult to break it
down into men and women once you start to look at the quality
of the job because then you are dealing in smaller numbers anyway.
Q154 Mr McGovern:
Is the criterion for defining low quality or high quality strictly
wages or is it something else?
Professor Sinfield: No, it is
a combination of factors and I would have to send you the detailed
analysis. It is a surprisingly sophisticated one. I thought originally
it was very crude but it was better than I thought it was, much
better.
Q155 Mr MacNeill:
Are you saying the UK leads the field in a negative manner rather
than a positive one?
Professor Sinfield: Yes, on the
mobility issue. Britain also has a larger number of people leaving
the labour market altogether.
Q156 Mr Walker:
Being a member of the middle class, I feel I am allowed to say
this, though I do not want to be pompous. It is very easy for
the middle class to talk in a rather pompous way about low quality
jobs and high quality jobs. I just want to go back and try to
push you on this. I am happy for low quality jobs to exist if
there is sufficient progression and opportunity in the labour
market for people who start out in low quality jobs to progress
into the higher quality jobs, because there will always be a need
for people to flip hamburgers, clean streets and so on and so
forth, but surely there is a critical role here in training and
education, to ensure that actually the whole of society has the
opportunity to better itself through work life. Your first job
really should be seen as a stepping stone to number two, number
three, number four. You should actually have hope ahead of you
that your circumstances will change and you know that there will
be the support in place to help you change your circumstances.
Professor Sinfield: That would
be nice.
Q157 Mr MacNeill:
It would be nice. Is it possible?
Professor Sinfield: One of the
sad things that have been happening is that mobility rates in
Britain have been falling so that the present generation of students
are more likely to finish up in the same classes they are currently
in than their parents and it is particularly true of young women.
Their mothers are much more likely to have experienced some form
of social mobility. There is a separate issue about how poor people
who are lower down society's ladder should be to take part in
a society. This comes back to the degree of inequality and the
extent of poverty at the very bottom that are major issues.
Q158 Mr Davidson:
It is very useful to talk about quality, high quality and low
quality jobs, but I suppose generally it would be a question of
the degree of autonomy that somebody had over their work processes
and self-realisation and so on. It strikes me that a lot of what
you are saying is assuming that the society that you are looking
at is self-contained. One issue that concerns me very much in
my constituency is the whole question of migration. Clearly inward
migration is serving to keep wages low in a whole number of areas
simply because of over-supply of labour, and in particular it
is allowing employers in areas like construction and catering
and so on to avoid training, to avoid giving youngsters the opportunity
to invest in their training and to move on because they can simply
snap somebody up who already has these skills, effectively poaching
from someone else. To what extent is the issue of trying to create
a ladder of progress dependent upon actually having the framework
within which you are looking at that cocooned from external influences
and, therefore, in present circumstances unrealistic?
Professor Sinfield: I do not think
it is. The trouble is that in the whole migration field there
are so many more myths than very well grounded bits of research
and I am trying to recall good clear evidence about the extent
to which research has shown what is happening with certain groups
coming in.
Q159 Mr Davidson:
I know that in my constituency construction wage rates are holding
steady at a time of increasing demand which would never have normally
been the market mechanism; the market mechanism would have driven
the price up. I also know that unemployment in my constituency
is going up at a time when more people are being employed because
the shortfall is being met by an influx. Clearly the impact of
migration is adverse upon those at the bottom. It has been great
for those who are getting cheaper nannies and cheaper construction
and so on, but the balance of advantage is not equal. That is
why this point about progress and about training requires an investment
by employers and in training and if you have an open market it
is rational for any employer to poach rather than to train. To
what extent is your suggestion about the creation of this ladder
unrealistic?
Professor Veit-Wilson: I hope
it is not unrealistic, if we recall that at one time, through
a good part of the 20th century, this country had systems of industrial
training boards in one form or another to which employers paid
levies within their particular industries. These were abolished,
perhaps in the interests of freeing controls and opening the market
in a number of ways. One of the ways of course is, as you say,
if you have a free labour market then this is the effect. It might
be helpful if employers were required once again either to provide
training or to contribute to a scheme whereby, as in the past,
these costs were shared out then to those who were doing it by
those who were not and, of course, ensuring that the minimum level
of wages paid in all these industries and these free labour markets
was a living wage, which it is not at the moment necessarily.
Professor Sinfield: There are
good opportunities that could be taken up by the Government and
it is very frustrating that they have this welfare reform legislation
going through which is going to have major implications for people
suffering some form of disability or incapacity. In the Green
Paper which came out last January, there were several good statements
about involving employers, taking a tougher line with employers
on discrimination and so on, but in terms of what is going through
there is no evidence that this demand side is being picked up
to the extent that the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development,
which is the human resource management team in Britain, has actually
said employers could do much more with the support of Government
to take on people who are suffering from a range of difficulties,
disabilities, problems relating to mental health and so on. Some
employers already have a good record and this good practice could
be encouraged by Government. They have been setting out ways in
which they think employers could help to improve the demand side;
it does not have to be entirely the tough employer side.
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