Q224Ms
Buck: To what extent is it helpful to consider the
characteristics of groups most liable to fall into poverty when
developing a policy response for them? Does that help you to target and
focus your resources, or does it run the risk of pathologising the poor
and missing as many people as you want to
reach? Neil
O'Brien: It seems that that depends on what you mean
by a group. If you are thinking about children in care who are not
adopted as a group, that would be an extremely good place to start,
because we know that the outcomes for those kids are absolutely
terriblethey are in the deepest kind of
poverty.
Ms
Buck: I mean lone parents, black and minority ethnic
groups and large families, for examplethe major groups,
really. Neil
O'Brien: I am less clear about what exactly you mean
about targeting them.
Q225Ms
Buck: Quite a few of the discussions in the last few hours
in the Committee have been about people at risk of being in poverty,
aspects of family breakdown and all the things that are
potentiallydepending on which perspective you are coming
fromdrivers of poverty. Policy has frequently chosen to target
resources and policy prescriptions on particular characteristics,
family structures and risks of falling into poverty. There might well
be an argument for that, but it would be interesting to know your
perspective on whether, when one is trying to reduce that number of 2.9
million children currently living in poverty, the right way to do it is
to say that we need to worry in particular about lone parents, couples
or large families, or whether it is actually simply better to stick
with the income indicator targets that are on the face of the
Bill? Dr.
Ridge: I think there is a problem with thinking about
groups, in the sense that people belong to multiple groups; they do not
just belong to one group. There is a really important need to
understand the challenges facing families in particular circumstances.
In certain circumstancesif you are a lone parent and you belong
to a BME group with disability in the familyyou have a multiple
set of challenges to face in order to try and manage on your income and
with your life challenges. The danger of grouping people, particularly
a simplistic grouping of people, is that it very easily leads
toas you would saypathologising people, with those
people being conceptualised as having a certain set of characteristics,
however they might be determined. What
is really importantand this is probably one of the strengths of
the Bill and one of the strengths, increasingly, of thinking things
through in terms of policyis the need to engage with people in
different circumstances to understand the type of challenges they face
in relation to some of their characteristics that might define them.
However, actually targeting groups can be problematic, because
peoples lives are very diverse.
Donald
Hirsch: I think that most of the policies that you
talk about are targeted to some extent. Another issue is whether you do
wide or narrow targeting? The risk in narrow targeting is that you
focus on people who are already in situations of multiple
deprivationwhen a lot of problems in the family are
compoundedand you then say that those are the problems and that
if we can just solve them for those groups, we can forget about the
rest. The problem with that is that a much wider group of people are
leading lives that have very little slack in them. They are very
vulnerable to things that go wrong. If you wait until all those things
have gone wrong, you are not really adopting a preventative strategy.
The new deal for lone parents was targeted on lone parents, but they
represent 40 per cent. of families who are in poverty. We are doing
wider targeting all the time. We have to be intelligent about looking
at people whose lives have risk in them, not just at the ones where
there has been a complete
breakdown.
Q226Mr.
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con): Is there is
a consensus on the balance of the long-term measures that are required,
because that would appear to be the unstated assumption in the Bill? I
particularly ask that because the Government have done a lot with what
they regarded as long-term measures to try and tackle
deprivationSure Start, various credits, new deal programmes,
doubled school spending, skewing funding to areas of
deprivationyet children on free school meals have moved further
behind. The number of children leaving primary school unable to read
and write has not really moved, and the number not in education,
employment or trainingeven before the credit
crunchincreased, reaching a million. In the Bill, there is an
assumption that if only we got some money and got going, we could sort
that out. The Government did have money, and they did get going, but
that did not sort it
out. Neil
O'Brien: In a broader sense, one of the findings of a
lot of social science research is that the relative pound for pound
efficacy of earlier intervention and so on is generally greater than
that of dealing with problems that have happened. You, quite rightly,
raise a question about whether the specific policies are the right ones
and whether they are effective, which I think is a different thing. As
elected politicians you are constantlynaturallyunder
pressure to do things that will deliver results now, rather than
spending a lot of money to invest in something that will produce
results in 20 years time when you might no longer be an MP, or
your Government may be long gone. You therefore do not want to
introduce anything, such as the Bill, that pushes you further along the
direction of bias between the short-term and the long-term solution.
Ultimately, those kinds of earlier interventions are better pound for
pound and you need to create a framework that enables the multiple
parties that could be in government over time to keep concentrating on
them, rather than being distracted towards thinking that the short-term
solutions are right.
Q227Mr.
Stuart: Do we have a consensus, because we heard evidence
this morning from a witness who said that the Sure Start programme
simply had not touched the families in greatest needthe sort of
families that that witness deals with on a daily basis? Is there
consensus about what needs to be done for the long term? There is
political pressure not to do the long term; as I say, this Government,
to their credit, tried to do things for the long term. Is there a real
understanding among the academic community that there are measures that
will really make a
difference? Donald
Hirsch: There is a consensus that some of the areas
that you are talking about are the right things to be working on. There
might be differences over whether the particularities of the strategy
are right, whether the long term has actually arrived and so on. The
areas in which that is the case are certainly child care and early
intervention. You mentioned achievement by children on free school
meals. Recent figures have shownand some may take issue with
thisthat there is some improvement there. Who knows if that is
the beginning of a trend. Again, there is agreement that you need to
work on that and do whatever we can.
There is one
area where, in theory, there is some agreement that something needs to
be done, but there is not much agreement over what should be done. I am
referring here to the question of how you ensure that people who are
going into work get better jobs. It is very hard to imagine that in
2020, if we have the present distribution of work among the lower-paid
group of parents in terms of the hours that they work and the earnings
they receive, we will be able to meet the child poverty targets. We
would need to have a massive amount of tax credits to get such people
out of poverty. People generally agree that we need to improve the
quality of jobs and make them more family- centred. We must ensure that
parents have the ability to progress and to do well in the labour
market. However, by comparison with those other areas, I do not think
that anybody has a clue how the Government should do that. That is
probably the biggest challenge of the
strategy. Dr.
Ridge: There is general consensus, as Donald just
said, across several particular areas. I should like to point to a
couple where ever such a lot more could be done. One of them is school.
You particularly mentioned the experience of free-school-meal children
at school. One of the things that we have been very slow to approach
and to try and address are childrens actual experiences within
school as a social experience. There has been a lot of focus on
literacy, numeracy, truancy and school exclusions, but the research on
children that I have done and have reviewed for the child poverty unit,
and that others have done as well, shows that the biggest problem for
low-income and disadvantaged children in school is exclusion within
school. By that I mean those social experiences of being unable to take
part in the same way as other children. I believe that you have seen a
video of children talking about their experiencesI could be
wrong about
that.
Dr.
Ridge: Thank
you. For
example, children whom I spoke to found the delivery of free school
meals in their schools so problematic that they did not want to take
them up, yet they would be an enormous advantage to them. A small boy
once said to me that his favourite thing in life was his free
school meal ticket, yet other children refuse to take that up because
the delivery is so heavily stigmatised. So, the delivery of services to
families and children should be done in a way that they feel is
appropriate and does not stigmatise and single them out. The social
experiences of school and the ways of incorporating children and giving
them a social inclusion within school is really important, and we have
not begun to tackle that at
all. I
do not think child care has been approached, although it is an
incredibly important thing. Sadly, it is missing as a building block
here. Child care should be in here, even though there is other
legislation about child care, because it is such an important factor
for children. A lot of children I have spoken to recently in employed
families and in low-income families trying to get into employment are
very resistant to the type of child care that is on offer to them. We
have a problem in the sense that we have not started to think about
child care from the perspective of children first. What we have thought
about is the labour market first and, sadly, I think we are still doing
that. There are definitely areas where there might be consensus that it
is the right area on which to target policies, but where we may not be
getting it right or have the right focus
still.
Q228Mr.
Stuart: May I ask you about minimum income standards?
Again, we had evidence this morning about that. If the Bill is not
going to prescribe minimum income standards delivery because of the
costs mentioned, surely we should at least ensure the publication of
minimum income standardsnumbersand monitor that over
time? Donald
Hirsch: As someone who has produced
some, I think I should reply first. The minimum income standards that
we produce do, as I said earlier, serve to strengthen and in some way
justify the idea of these kinds of targets because they show that
looking at relative poverty is not just some kind of abstract thing; it
is about expressing what the standards and expectations of our society
are. It is more credible to do that if you can actually say why that is
the case, rather than just having an arbitrary
statistic. The
other important thing about having the standards mentioned within this
process is that it actually tells you a bit about what sorts of things
people need to spend their money on and why. Our work includes a lot on
how familiesmembers of the general publicrationalise
what is a necessity and why that is. It is a way not just of
challenging what numbers you use, but of strengthening what it is you
are trying to do and helping to show the public and perhaps even MPs
why it is that people need these sorts of things as a
minimum.
Q229Mr.
Stuart: So would you like to see an amendment to the Bill
to ensure that, as you say, something that puts down the price of a can
of baked beans is part of a familys budgeting and what the
budget needs to be to live any reasonable quality of life?
Donald
Hirsch: That would be very
welcome. Dr.
Ridge: I would certainly echo that. I think it is
very
important.
Q230Judy
Mallaber (Amber Valley) (Lab): I must say that I contest
the tone of some of the questions that have been askedfor
example, in relation to there being
no improvement in the standards of reading and writing for primary
school children when they leave school, and in relation to child care,
which has improved enormously in my county of Derbyshire.
If I could
just come back to the text of the Bill, Neil OBrien made the
comment some while ago that there was a mismatch between the strategy
and the targets in the Bill. I do not really understand that comment
because targets have been set out as the first duty of the Secretary of
State. The second duty of the Secretary of State is about drawing up a
strategy that concerns two things: first, looking at meeting the
targets and, secondly, ensuring that children do not experience
socio-economic disadvantage. A number of headings set out what would be
part of the components of that strategy, which in my view would also
encompass child care. As that is my interpretation of the Bill it, in
terms of how effective the way in which we should draw up strategies
is, I wonder if you could comment on how effective you believe those
strategies might be. Do you have any other comments on how you think
they should be developed, as set out in clause
8? Neil
O'Brien: I am sure that the Government will come up
with a broadly based and sensible strategy for child poverty in the
round, and that is a good thing. The point I was making is that you
then selectively privilege some of the aspects of child poverty and
turn them into legally binding targets. But you do not do that in
relation to some of the other things you are going to be
doingyou do not have a legally binding target to make sure that
more children are adopted, although I know that the Government did set
a target and try to raise the rate a few years ago. You are taking some
of the parts of what you do and privileging them hugely by turning them
into legally binding targets, which I worry distorts your overall
efforts, because all these different things are potentially just as
important as the income target that you are turning into a legally
binding target. Does that make
sense?
Q231Judy
Mallaber: Yes. Does that mean that your inclination will
be to have no targets or to have far more targets? How do you take
account of the fact that there are targets in other parts of Government
policy that would feed into this strategy? We are bedevilled. We are
told that we have too many targets and that we should not have any,
then everybody comes along and says that we want a target for this,
that and the other. You cannot win.
Neil
O'Brien: My answer to that question is fairly clear.
I think that you want a broader range of targets and you do not want to
privilege a few of them over others. So you want, in a sense, to be
neutral between the different types of approaches to challenging child
poverty, rather than saying that one thing is much more important than
another by turning it into a target.
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