UK Poverty Post

Our nation in a state?

The ‘State of the nation report’ published last week by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a long overdue attempt by the government itself to layout the full dimensions of poverty in the UK. The department says it will use the assessment to inform policy decisions, so it’s vital that the report is up to scratch.

I watch statistics on poverty pretty closely, and this report doesn’t tell us anything new. Every year prestigious bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) monitor poverty and inequality in excruciating detail. We also recently received the latest report by the National Equality Panel, ‘An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK’. There is no shortage of evidence out there in the public arena. I do often wonder how, in one of the richest countries in the world, there is so little public reaction to this regular explosion of shocking facts.

So far so predictable. Both parties in the new coalition government put reducing poverty and inequality at the heart of their electoral platforms. It is only natural that the new government should now examine official statistics in order to establish the extent of the challenge ahead. It’s good that the new government is being completely frank about the scale of the poverty problem this country faces.

Yet what is really significant is that the government appears to be trying to examine the root causes, not just the statistical manifestations, of poverty so it might take action that could help to resolve some of the problems that underpin Britain’s persistent malaise. This approach presents big opportunities to think afresh. It also contains risks if we misdiagnose symptoms of poverty and inequality as causes. Here are three examples:

Welfare dependency

Of course the benefits system doesn’t work. That’s a no-brainer, especially for the millions trying to cope with a stigmatising and hugely complicated system that doesn’t even deliver enough for people to live on. However, welfare remains as vital a buttress against greater poverty and suffering as any other public service. It’s not just a system that helps with money when people can’t get work; it also provides a much wider range of social protection services. We forget at our peril, that for people on low incomes, access to a decent education, to quality health services, to key universal benefits, are absolutely crucial to their ability to cope. When the government looks at the welfare system, it has to look at the whole picture – not just benefits.

The Centre for Social Justice’s (CSJ) policy reports and recommendations, which have clearly influenced the new government’s report, recommend reducing the number of benefits from 54 to two. Reform on such a monumental scale must be made sensitively. An equalities impact assessment could prove enormously valuable. In a time of austerity, reform should be particularly careful not to adversely damage those whose main job is actually caring for others. Changes to everything from child benefit to disability living allowance should be assessed on this basis.

Multiple disadvantage

This is a huge and un-addressed problem and I am glad to see that a chapter of this new report is devoted to it. There is, however, relatively little attention given to the way gender, race, and class intersect to perpetuate disadvantage. An Oxfam report out this week highlights how social protection mechanisms, particularly universal ones, benefit the poorest the most. The majority of people in more vulnerable groups – single parents, pensioners etc – are still women. Poverty for women is huge and persistent but not often immediately evident from many typical statistics.

Family structure

I have real problems with the assumption that family structure is per se a major cause of poverty. Do children in non-nuclear families tend to be poorer? Yes. Yet I have seen no clear evidence to suggest that ‘family breakdown’ is a cause and not an effect of poverty and deprivation. Also, there’s plenty of evidence about to suggest that single parenthood has little absolute impact on social problems. The alleged relationship of cause and effect becomes even more uncertain when social class and age are factored in. It seems that some statistics in this report are accurate, and yet presented as conclusive proof, when the relationship is not necessarily so clear-cut.

Extending inaccurate logic to deploring social choices contains risks. For those of us old enough to remember, there used to be a climate of stigma against single parents during the 80s, that was deeply corrosive and damaging. There is no reason to suppose that this new government will take the same approach, but planning to influence some social choices could bring disadvantages. In his first speech on the steps of Downing Street David Cameron celebrated the fact that ‘this country is more open at home’. He should stick to his guns on social liberalism while trying to tackle the structural causes of poverty experienced by families – a good approach to solve many of Britain’s social puzzles that are often caused by poverty and tawdry rates of wellbeing. For example, let’s make sure that women don’t end up poorer at the end of their lives by fixing a pensions system rigged against those with broken work records, where women still find that being in and out of caring means they will rarely qualify for a decent pension.

There is much to be welcomed in the DWP report. Yet we should be careful not to draw hasty conclusions about social choice by examining statistics through the prism of our particular assumptions. Let’s not shy away from encouraging deep thinking about what the causes of poverty and inequality in Britain really are. We have a chance to go beyond policies that tinker with statistical measures, and really change the fundamental underpinnings of persistent poverty in the UK.