The
Chairman: Thank you. Sally, if you will forgive us, we
need to move on. Judy Mallaber, you have been extremely
patient.
Q
132Judy
Mallaber (Amber Valley) (Lab): Thank you. I am not sure
that we are still in any sensible order on
questioning. Going
back to the very first comments in this evidence session, you talked,
Catherine, about the value of the Bill probably being in its seeking to
bring consistency across the country. Taking on board Richard’s
and some others’ earlier comments about how to ensure that we
have co-operation, we know that duties are placed on both responsible
local authorities and partner authorities within the legislation, and
that there are powers within the Bill for the Secretary of State to add
people to partner authorities or take them off, and powers for local
authorities to consult organisations. Within all that, what would be
the appropriate response if a local authority, or indeed a partner
authority, failed to deliver on its duties? That would be moving
against what you are seeking to do in terms of providing
consistency. Catherine
Fitt: In the extraordinary circumstance of a local
authority and its partners not wishing to tackle child poverty, I would
suggest that the penalties—if you like—were no different
to any of the others in place for the rest of local government and
local partner arrangements, and were covered within the corporate
assessment. Richard
Kemp: You are making an assumption that a duty is
necessarily a good thing but I am not convinced that it is. You can
give me a duty and I can perform it well because I want to—but I
would probably have done it anyway—or I can perform it to meet
the minimum requirements so that you do not take me to court or
wherever, but that does not actually move anything forward. Of course,
as a democrat, I believe that there is only one way to deal with a bad
council, and that is to vote it out of
office. Paul
Carter: Again, it is not simple. Being on the
periphery of London, Kent gets a lot of problem families that have been
shunted out of London boroughs, particularly into east Kent, into
housing that is already creaking. If you looked at consistency across
the country on housing condition and housing need, you would see that
in private sector houses in multiple occupation in east Kent there are
1,000 unaccompanied asylum seekers, and problem families that tend to
hover around the coastal counties and repeatedly move from one set of
bad debts to a new authority and a new roof over their heads. One
cannot simply look at child poverty at any one moment without knowing
what else is coming in and being imposed upon you elsewhere. So, you
could suddenly have more vulnerable families placed into Kent and more
children living in poverty as a result of the housing policies of other
boroughs, which you have no control over at all. Likewise, we have
1,000 looked-after children placed into Kent by London
authorities—I know that it is into foster care, but it
destabilises the housing market in a number of ways as a
result.
Q
133Judy
Mallaber: So, are you suggesting that it would not be
possible to assess whether a local authority had failed in its duties
under the
Bill? Paul
Carter: How do you measure that? You are dealing with
a moving
target. Richard
Kemp: You can assess whether it is doing well or
badly, but that is different from whether it is dealing with a duty
properly. Paul
Carter:
Exactly.
Q
134Judy
Mallaber: Is the local authority the appropriate body to
bear a duty locally for reducing child poverty, and, if not, what
alternatives might there
be? Kevan
Collins: I declare myself as the chief executive of
Tower Hamlets council. I do not know what other body locally would be
the appropriate one. The local authority has a special, important place
in convening, and a leadership role in all these matters, so it is
absolutely right that the responsibility is distributed in that way.
What I find exciting is the idea that we are looking towards a
collective effort on the issue. The minute we start trying to work out
where the lines will be drawn around blame or punishment if we fail,
the whole endeavour will have failed. It must be a collective effort.
It must be about how well people are doing to create the conditions
that will reduce levels of child poverty, rather than about trying, as
I said earlier—I know no one is suggesting this, but it is what
we have to watch for—to locate and point the finger at a
particular level of government that has failed. It is not about passing
the buck to local government; it is about collective effort. That is
the game. The minute we get into a culture of trying to allocate
responsibility at one level or another, all of that shared endeavour
would be lost. People would start hiding behind all sorts of reasons
why it was not their
responsibility.
Q
135Mr.
Stuart: The ADCS thinks that child poverty is an unhelpful
expression. Could you expand on that, Colin, and could other members of
the panel comment on whether they think the whole focus on child
poverty in particular is
misconceived? Colin
Green: I think our view is that children do not live
on their own; they live in families and they live in communities. Many
children are doubly disadvantaged because they are both in a family
that is living in poverty and in a community that is living in poverty.
As we have already discussed, some of that can be about poverty of
aspiration as much as about lack of income in an absolute sense. That
is why I come back to the issue of inequality being very
important and to the issue of persistence, which is recognised within
the measures. Persistence is very important in whether children spend
the whole of their childhood in poverty. We also feel strongly that the
notion of family poverty is a better lever for engaging the partners,
because, otherwise, it tends to be seen as a children’s issue.
It is not a children’s issue; it is a consequence to children.
We feel that better engages the whole community and the other
partners.
Mr.
Stuart: Does anyone disagree with
Colin? Richard
Kemp: You have to differentiate between two types of
poverty. The first is short-term poverty, when someone is down on their
luck—they have just lost their job, but in six months they will
have a job and will move
back out of poverty. What concerns me most is systemic poverty. In
extended families, I can show you people who are fifth-generation
unemployed, and you have to deal with the whole family because there is
a total lack of esteem and aspiration in that family. They operate in a
way which would not be recognisable to most of the people here. I think
we have to deal with the family. Paul Carter is absolutely right to say
that we have to join the organisations around those families. We can
identify 27 organisations or parts of organisations that are dealing
with some of those families. That is very expensive, and, frankly, the
fact that they are fifth-generation means that it is not working
either.
Catherine
Fitt: I don’t think this is disagreement, but
more about perspective. At one level, I am just glad that, whichever
words are used, people are looking at what effect this is having on
children and their lives. I also think, in the case of young people,
that they would probably see themselves as being a group in and of
their own right and being in poverty in and of their own right. While
they do live in families and are part of families, increasingly, as
they grow up, their separation from the family becomes more
significant. I suppose what I want is for us to look at what is going
on in the lives of children and young people. I have had parents say to
me very powerfully, through Sure Start children’s centre
programmes, “We are not poor, because we have hope,” and
they lived in the most deprived wards of the country. So, I think that
something very important goes on when we translate our intent into
language out there, working with people. We need to do that
sensitively, but the bottom line for me is that, as long as this makes
us do that, it is justified.
Paul
Carter: May I add to that? Again, it is about the
definition of poverty. This 60 per cent. threshold regarding median
income does not hit the spot, in my view, when apparently we have
48,000 children in Kent living in poverty. I agree that it should be
family, rather than child, poverty, but it is about defining what you
mean by those young people living in circumstances that you would badge
as family or child poverty. That is really important. Before you get
the definition of that and start to set benchmarks of what is
acceptable and unacceptable, and whether you are going forward or
backward in this country, sub-divided into the counties, city regions,
metropolitan authorities and anything else, you need to get that
definition
right.
Q
136Ms
Buck: That is a helpful thing to say, because this
discussion is the absolute crux of the evidence that we have heard in
the past hour. I admit that I am feeling a bit anxious about it. What I
have been hearing in the general responses to questions so far is some
important thinking and analysis, but it is all about something
different: the multiple problems of children and families of the kind
that Paul discussed as being within Westminster’s family
recovery project. That is a Government programme, by the way, but be
that as it may, it contains 100 children. Actually, there are 2.9
million children living in poverty in this country. You have just
brought our attention, helpfully, to the figure in Kent, which is
48,000. That is what the Bill is
about. Local
authorities may well have varying numbers, and will therefore consider
how they might want to tackle that as authorities and in partnership,
but surely the Child Poverty Bill and its responsibilities on local
authorities are about addressing the number of children living below the
poverty line. What I want to hear back from all of you is whether that
is what you are talking about too. I am not sure that I have heard that
it is. If that is what you are talking about, how will you develop a
strategy that reduces the number of children living in poverty under
the indicators that the Bill specifically requires us to
achieve? Richard
Kemp: I have been concentrating on the things that I
concentrate on, because I realise the shortcomings of local government.
We can only do so much. The thing that will still take more people out
of poverty in my city is more and better-quality employment. We do not
have enough jobs and have not had enough for some time. Although we
created 4,500 jobs last year, they did not get down to some of those
people who are fifth-generation unemployed. We need to look at the
benefit system and the tax system.
Unless we do
all those things, we will not deal with a very large proportion of
those people whom
Councillor—[Interruption.] Sorry, I was
going back to your old job; whom Karen Buck rightly mentions. Councils
can do the things that we are talking about, but if the Department for
Work and Pensions, for example, is not a partner, that loses one big
chunk of Government direction and spending that could be better used
with some local direction. However, DWP is not in at the
moment.
Kevan
Collins: I am sure that we are not alone in how the
strategy is framed locally—that is the value of the local
strategies—in trying to attend to the long-term issues of how to
raise educational standards, build a skills base and get people into
work, because the surest way out of poverty is work, as well as
mitigating the effects of poverty in the here and now. That is where it
is very important to focus on the benefit system and those
issues.
The other
issue for me in terms of mitigating the effects of poverty is how to
ensure that people, regardless of their economic circumstances, have
the right to a full and enriching life, whether that involves leisure,
sport or culture. All those components—as we said at the
beginning, certainly, for me, it is a complex array of
things—have to be corralled into a local strategy, and all the
partners need to be around the table. But absolutely, it is the skills
and access to employment. Into work is the key agenda for us, both for
children in the long term and parents in the here and now, if we are
going to break the cycle of
poverty.
The
Chairman: Helen Goodman wants to leap in at this
point.
Q
137Helen
Goodman: You have all talked, quite reasonably, about the
importance of co-operating also with Jobcentre Plus. I am the Minister
for DWP, so I wanted to check out with you whether you are conscious of
the partnership that we are running in Birmingham—the multi-area
agreement—which includes Jobcentre Plus. Do you know anything
about that? We have positive experience in some places, but I am not
sure whether you are conscious of it.
Richard
Kemp: Yes, but would you like some negative
experience as well? The trouble is that one council can say,
“DWP and Jobcentre Plus are absolutely marvellous partners and
with us all the way,” but I could take you
to the next council and it will not. In my area, someone from Jobcentre
Plus was supposed to be leading the worklessness stream, which is of
vital importance in Liverpool. She pulled out because she said that it
was not part of her day job, although we were trying to create a
partnership to help her do her day job in that
case.
Q
138Helen
Goodman: Of course I understand that sometimes things go
well and sometimes things do not go well—we do realise
that—but the point that I was trying to make was that these
partnerships exist in some places. I was getting the impression from
the way you were talking that you were not conscious of any
partnerships with Jobcentre Plus and local authority agencies
anywhere. Paul
Carter: I find them quite reluctant partners. In
sharing the data and the information, the data protection gets in the
way. You are trying to get a handle on what is going on in a highly
socially deprived ward, but getting that information is—for
perhaps legitimate data protection reasons—a real problem. There
is an enormous reluctance to focus in on some of those vulnerable
families that are significantly benefit-dependent—you need to
look at and share the data on them to find the
solutions.
Q
139Mr.
Gauke: Following on from Karen’s question, I think
that she was absolutely right in that a lot of what we have heard from
you today about addressing deep, severe and persistent poverty, which
we all support, and also about the very long-term aspects of creating
the right environment and so on, will not necessarily have an immediate
impact on getting people above the 60 per cent. target. Do you have any
concerns that the 60 per cent. target might divert resources from what
you are already doing? Richard, you made the point that there are only
so many things that you can do. Is the point more that, as far as the
60 per cent. target is concerned, the effective things that can be done
are to do with tax and benefits and so on, and it is more a central
than a local government
point? Colin
Green: I would say that that is more the case. If I
look at the things that I think that a local authority can do with the
partners, the most important things in this area are those that Richard
pointed to, about creating a dynamic local economy. It is about what
you are doing about getting people into employment, given that the
local authority is often the biggest local employer. What are you doing
in that area? What are the NHS bodies doing in that area? How effective
are you in improving schools? It is very important that the local
authority maintains a role as leader of the local education system. It
needs to have the powers and capability to do that. Similarly, about
tackling health inequalities—is the PCT addressing that? These
are the ways in which, by creating a dynamic and positive local
environment in the city, county or wherever, you give people the
opportunity to get better jobs to change their lives. Those are the
things that we can actually
do.
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