Eliminate Child Poverty: Labour's Mission Impossible?

By Cllr. Andy Gibbons (from a speech to Wandsworth Council)

As 2010 dawns some of us may be reflecting on the last ten years of Labour Government. It is a mixed record, but the biggest task lies ahead: Labour’s commitment to eliminate child poverty by 2020.

The Government’s Child Poverty Bill is designed to eradicate child poverty over the next ten years. A monumental task, but - if achieved - surely the major British social reform of the first century of the new millennium. Just to get some idea of how child poverty affects Wandsworth, 30% of local children live in some degree of poverty with 25% of these living in families dependent on workless benefits. On a wider scale a staggering 55% of the Borough’s children are in families which receive Working Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit. And 74 out of 174 areas in Wandsworth are amongst the 25% most deprived in the country.

This Government has already taken steps to get Local Authorities to produce a Child Poverty Strategy – Wandsworth’s will be published in spring of 2010. At a national level support for the policy to date falls into four areas: improving employment prospects and incomes; providing financial support for those in low-paid jobs and for those who cannot work; creating safe and sustainable communities and improving opportunities through the Every Child Matters agenda.

The principles of the Bill are to provide access to resources such as training and services as well as money. Significantly Labour wants decent services - not just a bare minimum or safety net as the Tories’ social policy dictates - with standards assessed relative to the wealth of our society. The means by which much of this is to be achieved is by bringing together services around the child – “joined up thinking” as we have come to know it.

The implications are far reaching. Poor children live in poor families and if the strategy is to succeed, they have to be lifted out of poverty. So it will require funding – you can’t cure poverty without spending money. Wandsworth Council will need to become an enabling and proactive council within a state which intervenes for the good of its citizens. (The economic shocks of the last couple of years show that the people’s appetite for government to be active is undiminished despite the small-state visions of Conservative ideologues.) It also implies a commitment to something close to full employment, as unemployment and poverty go hand in hand.

Yet all this is at risk: the Bill is not yet law and the next election approaches. Would a Conservative government have the ambition to match Labour’s aspirations for our society? The Tories are busy sharpening their knives to slash public sector spending – a round of cuts which could trigger another recession in the British economy. There are those amongst Wandsworth’s Conservatives who doubt the value of Sure Start, one of Labour’s most successful initiatives for improving the prospects of the young. And the Wandsworth Tory reaction to Labour’s plan to extend free child care to two year olds is to threaten to scrap it.

Wandsworth’s mantra is value for money. Interestingly the Council’s own paper concludes: ‘Expenditure on the alleviation of child poverty should theoretically produce long term savings…breaking the cyclical nature of poverty within family groups, reducing dependency on benefits and decreasing the level of family breakdown…’ The Tories talk the talk but do they have the will to make it happen? Labour’s vision is about long term value. We may feel pessimism of the spirit but we should have optimism of the will over the next year.