Child Poverty Bill


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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 terrible—they are in the deepest kind of poverty.
Ms Buck: I mean lone parents, black and minority ethnic groups and large families, for example—the 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 potentially—depending on which perspective you are coming from—drivers 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 circumstances—if you are a lone parent and you belong to a BME group with disability in the family—you 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 to—as you would say—pathologising people, with those people being conceptualised as having a certain set of characteristics, however they might be determined. What is really important—and this is probably one of the strengths of the Bill and one of the strengths, increasingly, of thinking things through in terms of policy—is 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 people’s 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 deprivation—when a lot of problems in the family are compounded—and 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 deprivation—Sure Start, various credits, new deal programmes, doubled school spending, skewing funding to areas of deprivation—yet 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 training—even before the credit crunch—increased, 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 constantly—naturally—under 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 need—the 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 shown—and some may take issue with this—that 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 children’s 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 experiences—I could be wrong about that.
Andrew Selous: I have.
Dr. Ridge: Thank you.
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 standards—numbers—and 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 families—members of the general public—rationalise 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 family’s 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 asked—for 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 O’Brien 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 doing—you 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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