Q
165Ms
Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab):
Can I pick you up on something? I think everyone on the Committee
agrees that there is deep, multiple deprivation that we have to tackle
through different Government Departments. You just said that increasing
wages, benefit or whatever would not lift people out of poverty. That
is not right, is
it? Charlotte
Pickles: I said that if you give it to, for example,
a family where a child is living with an addicted parent, it is very
unlikely that the money is going to the child because we know it will
probably go towards the addiction. That was my specific
point.
Q
166Ms
Buck: Okay, but I think it is important for the record
that it is clear that the definition of poverty— families being
on 60 per cent. or below of median income; we accept that it is only
part of the whole story—is addressed by tackling income. It
would be extremely unfortunate, and I hope you would agree, if we imply
that dealing with the issue of income would not help us to tackle
poverty, because I think it
would. Charlotte
Pickles: Of course. I started my comments by
endorsing what the Reverend said about needing to address sheer income
levels. Of course we do. Our argument at the CSJ is that you can do
that but it is not necessarily going to help that child’s
outcomes in later life. If our sole purpose is to raise someone above
that 60 per cent. median income threshold, giving them more money will
do that. Do I think it will necessarily make them better at school and
more engaged? Do I think they will be more relationally able? Do I
think they will be emotionally and psychologically more stable? Do I
think they will be able to create a stronger family life themselves? Do
I think they will get into work by doing so? No. I do agree that, of
course, you need to
address income levels but that cannot be the sole thing. Unfortunately,
the Bill is framed in such a way that we feel that the point of looking
at a wider perspective may be
lost.
Ms
Buck: We could agree on the concept of it being necessary
but
insufficient.
Q
167Andrew
Selous (South-West Bedfordshire) (Con): Those statements
slot quite neatly into the area that I wanted to probe as well, which
is to get our witnesses’ views on the extent to which the Bill
gets the balance right or wrong between alleviating symptoms and
dealing with causes—exactly the area that you have been talking
about. I wonder whether you share a concern that the Bill as currently
written may not drive policy in a sensible direction. Edna, you said
earlier that it is too late. It is not. We have next week to try to
amend the Bill, then it goes through the Commons and the Lords,
notwithstanding the electoral arithmetic. So, all these comments can be
taken into account and Members can consider them when they
vote. My
question is, what are your thoughts on how we should change the Bill so
that we actually have to track progress on dealing with the causes of
poverty, some of which you have already mentioned? I do not know
whether you have any specific proposals. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation
produces a report card with 56 different indicators of
poverty, some of which the Government have made good progress on,
others of which are steady, others of which have got worse. The
Department used to produce such a report card up to 2007 and then
slightly bizarrely stopped. Do you think a report card like that would
be helpful in driving policy in a more sensible
direction? Edna
Speed: I am comforted that it is not too late. I have
travelled down from the north-west and I am glad to hear that. As an
organisation, we work not just in the limited field of homelessness. We
work across the very broken and divided communities, deep in the heart.
I visit them three times a week with all kinds of aid, from bedding to
tins to children’s clothes. I believe that there has to be a
deeper look at those causes. If there has been a deeper look, maybe
what has been deduced is not balanced because out of it has come only
money. I absolutely endorse what Charlotte said. There are growing
bands in this country where children will not benefit by more benefits.
I will prove that to you if you
want.
Q
168Andrew
Selous: Can you give us some examples? Charlotte gave us
some about
addiction. Edna
Speed: It is not linked to just drug addiction and
alcoholism—it is deeper than that. It is generational, and it is
a whole culture of thinking. When you have benefit handouts, there is
something about that money that isn’t quite like the earned
money. This is why I am all for getting people into jobs. There is the
idea of live for today, of “I’ve got the benefit, I can
have what I want”, and then the benefit’s gone and the
rest of the fortnight is spent in severe poverty. It is almost an
educative programme that we have to do. I do not like the word
“programme” because programmes have failed. Take Sure
Start. Sure Start never came on the radar for our families. If you said
Sure Start to them they’d say, “Sure what?” They
wouldn’t have a clue. In those Sure Start programmes there was
budgeting and child care, but they didn’t access
them—they didn’t even relate to them.
We
need to be very creative in our thinking, and that is what we have done
in Save the Family. We are off the wall, if you like, at times, but we
find ways forward and we engage with them. Hence, we are probably the
most successful: 86 per cent. of our families are turned round for
ever. They go into jobs and university, and live in community. Please
look at us. We would love somebody to come and research us. Can we be a
pilot project? We have been going for 34 years. We are there.
We’ve other sites to go
to. I
feel this very strongly, and ask you to listen, whether
or not you agree with me. I am coming from the deep dark
pain of the poverty of children, the poverty of not having the shoes or
the uniform and not having enough to eat, but also the poverty of
experience. If you will bear with me today, my drive in the last years
of this work is to be able to relate the realities to people, and I
will go anywhere and everywhere. I am not political on any front. I
thank the Centre for Social Justice for putting us on the radar, but we
are not political. I just want to tell you that this Bill does not
address the deep roots. You can bring in money, I am all for that
level—don’t ever think I’m not—but there is
going to be a widening, and a bigger margin or group than you will ever
know. Those children will not benefit, and I am saying that from
experience. I can give you statistics and examples. I could walk my
families in today. Along with jobs and with getting them into training,
it is a much bigger, more educative programme that is needed, lifting
them up. In this third generation, there is no idea of work and their
own expectations are at such a low
level. One
of the big drives that we’ve got in Save the Family, is
“Every mother, every father, you’re gonna make
it”. In this country today there are two sides to this. There is
the extraordinary weight of families on benefits and the awful social
problems, with the support of the courts and the probation service and
all that we have, but on the other side is the loss of that potential,
which hurts me deeply. There are people in university
today—
The
Chairman: I am sorry to interrupt you, Edna, but we have a
lot of territory to cover this morning, so I ask all our witnesses to
try to be as succinct as
possible. Rev.
Paul Nicolson: I agree with everything that has been
said. I do want it to be understood that I think there is a very
serious problem that cannot be dealt with only through money. But I do
not want the necessity of having enough income to go by default. When
you look at the situation of single adults, of women aged anything from
18, on £50.95 a week unemployment benefit, and when you look at
the Joseph Rowntree Foundation research into what is required to buy an
adequate diet—£45 a week—there isn’t much
left to buy anything else. Food is constantly competing with heating,
lighting and debts—everything but rent and council
tax—and there is a desperate need for social fund
loans. For
10 years, I helped people to fill in their means statements at the
magistrates court. They came into court with no money to pay their
fine. The reason was that the jobcentre had stopped their benefit
because they did not go to one interview—that was usually the
reason; they did not have the money because it was stopped altogether.
When they got the money back, they had the £60 loan they had
been given by the social services to be paid off at £10 a week,
and £5 to pay off
the fine. So from £50, they were down to £35. You cannot
live on that. So what do you do? You complain about the rise in the
level of crime and see all the young people in prison. You have to take
a look at this very much from a point of view of minimum income
standards. The
Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s minimum income standard for a
single adult is £144 a week. That includes a lot of things that
you, as a Government, might not want to select for benefits. But my
goodness, it gives you the necessary information if you are going to
select benefits from the necessary research on the ground. I am very
glad that you will be interviewing Donald Hirsch this afternoon, who
will give you the methodology on that, which is very thorough. We had a
slightly different methodology, but we are doing exactly the
same thing—the £100,000 that I raised in 1998—to get
the job done. We found that the benefit was £40 a week below
what was needed. Now it is much more below that particular level of
minimum income standard. We are keen that minimum income standards will
come on to the
scene.
Q
169Andrew
Selous: Can I stop you there? What you said was very
useful; thank you very much for that. In America, as far as I am aware,
there are poverty standards based along the lines that you are talking
about, on what a nutritious diet costs for a family and multiply that
for different levels of family. I think they worked out that families
spend a third of their income on food, so they multiplied it by three
to get levels of income on which they judged people in poverty. Is that
the type of idea that you are talking
about? Rev.
Paul Nicolson: Absolutely. Indeed, it is all there. I
spelt it out in our submission to the Committee—it is all there.
What we do not do in this country, which is done in the Nordic
countries, inevitably, but also in France,
Germany, Australia, New Zealand and the United States—various
states in the US have ways of doing it—is to research the
adequacy of statutory minimum incomes.
Q
170Andrew
Selous: Are you saying that once you have found that, the
benefit system will immediately have to kick in and rise to those
challenges?
Rev.
Paul Nicolson: No. As you have in the Bill, you have
to take account of economic circumstances. I am saying that you have a
target of income for healthy living for the unemployed, the employed
and pensioners. It is right across all three. We do not have it in this
country, and I think it is profoundly dangerous to leave unemployed
youngsters on a benefit of £50.95 a week. When I was doing my
stint in court, they literally came in with no money, and you can guess
what they were doing to get the money. You can carry drugs from A to B
for £50 a time. I actually dealt with a case of that. The person
did not have any money, so a friend of his said, “Well, you can
take this parcel from A to B for £50 a time.” If you do
that four times a week, why will you need benefits at all? Why will you
need a job? When I told the police about this, and said to them that
that was what I met with when I was doing this work, they said,
“Yes, you are right. It always escalates, because he then goes
on to actually take the
drugs.” All
economists talk frequently about the moral hazard of having a benefit
too high because people will never take work. What is never looked at
is the moral hazard of having it too low. The consequences of that are
profoundly serious. Having full prisons is a
start.
Q
171The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Helen
Goodman): What Reverend Paul Nicolson says about the
importance of young women eating healthily is extremely important. That
is one of the reasons why we introduced the Sure Start maternity grant
and the health in pregnancy grant this year. I would like to ask
Charlotte a question. You said that money spent on benefits for
families where there is drug and alcohol addiction probably would not
benefit children. Do you suggest that those families should have lower
benefits, or that any increases in benefits for all families should not
go to those families?
Charlotte
Pickles: Absolutely not. That was in no way what I
said just then. I said that by raising benefits, you are not going to
pull that child out of poverty. We have an entire report
that makes numerous recommendations about how you could get people off
an addiction to drugs or alcohol. We are saying that the priority in
that situation has to be first ensuring that that child is living in a
safe family environment, which is unlikely if a parent is addicted to
drugs or alcohol, and secondly that you need to get the parent off
drugs and alcohol. I do not think that in any way the solution is found
by saying, “Let’s take away money”, but rather by
saying, “Let’s have a proper, real, meaningful
intervention, which is going to transform lives, rather than creating
dependency and relying on maintenance.”
Q
172Helen
Goodman: Of course it’s true that people who are
addicted to drugs and alcohol need help to get off their addiction. Of
course they need care from the health services. However, we are talking
about a Bill about child poverty. There are services delivered by the
local authorities and the NHS to deal with those problems, but I do not
quite understand what relevance that has to your comments on the Child
Poverty Bill.
Charlotte
Pickles: If you have a child living in poverty, and
you are focusing the Child Poverty Bill solely on income targets, there
is the danger that by skewing a policy response towards increasing
benefits to pull that child—or, as Edna said, that family, which
is as it should be—over the poverty threshold, you
are not improving that child’s life in any way, shape or form.
They are still living in a household that is likely to be chaotic. I
also refute the fact that at the moment we have sufficient, or even
nearly adequate, services for tackling addiction. Our polling of
addicts who say that they want to come off drugs and not be maintained
in their addiction shows that we need a different approach to
addiction.
I completely
take your point that this is about child poverty. It comes back to
Mr. Selous’ question earlier, which I did not get a
chance to respond to. I will take a moment now to do so. If your
targets are solely focused on income, and not on other issues around
poverty, you are not measuring what is necessarily going to bring that
child out of poverty. If you had a wider range of indicators—I
am sure that the JRF is a great place to start—you could be
tackling child poverty by supporting that family, by taking parents off
drug addiction, by strengthening family units, by giving support to
parents to improve parenting skills, and all those other things, which
are very interrelated to child poverty. It is not just about
income.
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