Our challenge
Yesterday, Luke issued a challenge to Labour bloggers:
I’ve set out below my instinct that Labour currently lacks a policy big idea to deliver in this term in government, let alone the big idea(s) for the next manifesto that will win us the 4th term.
So here’s a challenge. Post your ideas here. Conditions - whatever its merits, changing the leader does not constitute a “big idea” (we’re assuming that will happen anyway and we’re talking policy not personnel here); the big ideas have to be ones that would unite the Labour Party not divide it; and they have to be ones either Blair or Brown might reasonably be expected to implement (so leaving NATO and joining a defence pact with Iran and North Korea is also a no-no). And in net terms they need to be designed to increase the Labour vote not reduce it. Also, none of these ideas can have already featured in the 1983 Manifesto as that would prove they failed the test just mentioned.
Scale - “big” - e.g. minimum wage, NHS, not cones hotline or citizens’ charter.
So, here’s my pitch. Let’s do it. Let’s end child poverty once and for all.
Why is it the big idea?
It’s distinctively Labour - neither of the other parties have signed up to our pledge to abolish child poverty. The end unites our party, even if all the means may not. Ending child poverty is the unifying theme that brings together policies across education, health, housing, local environment, social services, local government and devolution, work, industry, crime and youth offending.
How do we do it?
By increasing family incomes:
- Raise child benefit and pay an equal rate to all children
- Extend child benefit to pregnant women
- Link the combined value of child tax credit and child benefit to average incomes or prices, whichever is rising more quickly
- Sort out tax credits and benefits – ensure they get the right amount to the right people at the right time
- Reduce the disproportionate burden of taxation on poorer families
- Ensure the national minimum wage provides a living wage
- Get more people into jobs and more people into good jobs
Improve public services for children
- Give greater weighting to poor children in education funding
- Introduce school uniform grants and school activity funds to make sure all children can take a full part in school life
- ‘Poverty proof’ all policies across all government departments
- Introduce free, good quality, universal childcare
Extra help for the poorest children
- Reform the social fund to give grants not loans for essential items and benefits at times of key transition
- Ensure that all children, regardless of immigration status, qualify for benefits and inclusion in mainstream services
- Put in extra support for poorer families, organised through children’s centres
(Shamelessly stolen from CPAG and End Child Poverty’s 2005 general election manifestos)
How much will it cost?
It won’t come cheap. The JRF reckons:
The Government could meet its target of halving child poverty between 1998 and 2010 by spending an estimated £4 billion a year (0.3 per cent of GDP) more than currently planned on benefits and tax credits.
Getting the second half of children out of poverty between 2010 and 2020 will be far harder. If the Government relied primarily on tax credits and benefits to achieve this, it would have to add about a further £28 billion (1.6 per cent of GDP) to planned annual spending, an unlikely scenario.
To make further inroads into child poverty, the Government will need to extend its policy of increasing redistribution to low-income families, but that this will not be enough on its own to meet the targets. In addition, this will require parents to fare better in the workplace, with improved pay and opportunities. Long-term policies working in this direction include better education and training for disadvantaged groups, improved childcare and the promotion of equal pay for women.
Whaddaya think? Better than “choice”? Worthy of a fourth term?
Ending Child poverty?
Also stop the parent/s spending money on fags and booze.
From a study on what low income families spend extra money on, by Bristol University academics, published in December 2005:
Ian, that comment was so intelligent you coukd be on the Manchester Evening News letters page.
Fine by me. If I may make a predictable quibble.
“Extend child benefit to pregnant women”
I was at a meeting about these issues, and this proposal was rejected rather forcefully by the abortion lobby. Lack of focus on the big picture, if you ask me.
There is nothing here I disagree with, but I do think the cost is a problem. It means you are presenting the party leader with a direct choice: do you end ‘child poverty’, a position which the UK government still hasn’t defined, or do you replace Trident.
Life is tricky.
Adele
And what is intelligent about cigarette smoking?
Complete waste of money.
Convenient research conclusions!How much duty and tax revenue from tobacco and alcohol did the Treasury receive last year?
The link with poverty-it wasn’t called mother’s ruin for nothing.
I expect the treasury got a lot of revenue from cigarette smoking and alcohol. And rightly so because we don’t want people to do too much of either.
However, the issues often run deeper than that. Sure smoking e.t.c can be just stupid. But it can also be due to lack of an education, family issues e.t.c.
I don’t know about the cigarette and alcohol thing, but I do know that a startling number of Rose Hill estate houses have satellite dishes and much nicer cars than ours in the driveways (we don’t even have TV connected, since the bill is so high.) Without wanting to demonise all families struggling on the poverty line, I think that there is a very real problem with ensuring that the money is spent in a way which benefits children (not just on fancy toys and mobile phones, for starters.) I’d suggest vouchers for school uniforms, sports equipment and school activities rather than cash payments.
I’m also not sure what ‘ensure the minimum wage pays a living wage’ means. The minimum wage keeps rising in an attempt to keep pace with inflation, and prices keep rising right along with it as companies attempt to keep their profits while having to pay their workers more. A significant reduction of taxation for minimum wage workers with families seems a better way to go, and would hopefully provide some kind of incentive to work…
Lastly, is there any suggestion to reform the unwieldy bureaucracy surrounding child support payments? I imagine that non-custodial parents not paying up is also a significant factor in child poverty.
Ever tried living on the minimum wage? It is at a really low level; but at least it is there.
Perhaps extending it to all workers would be a really good way to end child poverty.
One reason why the Bristol research is so interesting is that it challenges the prejudice that people living in poverty can’t be trusted to spend money in a way that helps their kids.
More than half the people living on Rose Hill estate aren’t living in poverty, so it is no great surprise that some homes have satellite and nice cars. Measures like vouchers to help with particular costs would certainly be welcome (free transport for schoolchildren in London is extremely popular, for example), but I do think that as a general principle it is a better idea to try to make sure that people living in poverty have more money, and let them choose how best to spend it, rather than setting up lots of bureaucracy to get the government to decide how they spend their money.
For more info on the benefits of paying a living wage, there’s a report by London Citizens - http://www.londoncitizens.org.uk/files/urbanworkers.pdf
The only problem with a living wage is that it can cause small businesses to go under.
But if a business can only keep going by paying its workers less than they need to live on, then I don’t think it should be viable, any more than if it would be viable only if it didn’t have to pay business rates or allow workers to have parental leave.
Since a quarter of all low paid jobs are in the public sector, one way we could start with a living wage for all public sector jobs.
Agreed!
Adele, Dan:
I don’t think that’s usually the choice. The kinds of small businesses that you’re talking about are things like small shops hiring teenagers at minimum wage to stand behind a till so that the owner can do something else. If the owner is required by law to pay a “living wage” in such a circumstance, he will probably decide that he’d rather just fire the shop assistant and work longer hours himself.
Whilst I’m sure that there are some businesses that wouldn’t be viable if they had to pay a “living wage”, I suspect that in the majority of cases it’s individual jobs within a business that won’t be viable.
To put things simply, if you work for me, your presence in my company had better earn me enough to pay your wages, overhead plus a premium to cover the risk of employing you. If you don’t bring that much benefit to me, you won’t have a job. The higher you make a minimum wage, the more use you have to be before it’s worth employing you.
One of the benefits of a citizen’s basic income is that it eliminates the market distortions introduced by a minimum wage, whilst having the same effect of ensuring that the lowest paid worker has enough to subsist on.
OK. Let’s discuss a couple of things. First of all the remark about “choice” - what is it that the left has against choice. If state monopoly provision was so good the rich would be using it all the time. They don’t, draw your own conclusions.
Then on child poverty. Just so long as we are clear what this means - ie if child poverty is the priority then pensioner poverty isn’t. I’m not saying we should cut pensions to make poor children better off, but we could do(!) More seriously we could stop the relative growth in pensioners’ incomes - because either child poverty is the overwhelming priority or it is not.
More generally there are other things the left might need to look at if we are serious. Sweden is quite a low wage economy. The difference is that benefit levels/redistribution is very high. It is difficult to imagine, say Unison, arguing for a low pay settlement in local government or health to ensure that single men and women see their share of national income fall (but that *is* what we are talking about).
The 1974 Labour government closed the gap much more rapidly than this one mainly because the economy was in such poor shape. It’s extremely politcially difficult to do this when the economy is strong (Sweden’s social democrats came to power in a country where famines were regular occurances…)
I agree that child poverty is the biggest (but not the only) priority.
“Extend child benefit to pregnant women”
“this proposal was rejected rather forcefully by the abortion lobby. Lack of focus on the big picture, if you ask me.”
Maybe extend it to pregnant women in the third trimester?
I think the minimum wage does need to keep increasing, but we can’t just assume either that employers will be able to pay it easily or that any jobs lost as a result will be ones that should never have been viable anyway.
Maybe it would be worth thinking about raising the threshold for employer national insurance payments, to balance this out a bit for them - and you could do the same for employee contributions. This would cost money, of course, but you could get some back by raising the NI upper earnings limit.
Boozer’s Kids Peril
Children of alcoholics are more likely to be addicts themselves when they grow up a report claims.
About 3.6 million people in Britain bear emotional and behavioural scars from being raised by drinkers.
They are up to four times more likely to become alcoholics or marry heavy boozers,says the study by the Priory group,which treats addicts including many celebrities.
And 70 per cent show compulsive behaviour problems with drugs food,gambling and spending.
The Priory’s Dr Michael Bristow said:Alcoholism affects the entire family, particularly the children.
Daily Mirror
4th September 2006