Life Chances Strategy
Baroness Stroud Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Stroud (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for securing this debate. His credibility and commitment to this agenda, and in particular to issues concerning the family, is beyond doubt. I refer to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests.
Through my work, I have spent time exploring and outlining the causes of poverty in Britain. The Breakthrough Britain report referred to by my noble friend Lord Farmer showed that there are five essential root causes to poverty—unemployment, family breakdown, educational failure leading to lack of skills, addiction, and serious personal debt. The Government have recently set out that they intend to pursue a life chances strategy incorporating these drivers of poverty into their traditional income-based approach to tackling poverty. I strongly support the direction of these reforms. I am particularly pleased that the five pathways have all been recognised and that two of them—employment and education—have been placed in statute and are being measured.
However, we now wait to see what strategy the Government will adopt to deliver the life chances agenda and what further measures will be included in that. The strategy will be strong if it matches the scale of the social challenge with the ambition of solutions and appropriate accountability to drive forward the life change that is so desperately needed by families. To do this, I ask the Minister and those drawing up the strategy to consider two things: first, to extend and deepen the measures to reflect current and future life chance risk; and, secondly, to align the Government’s main social programmes to focus on the delivery of the life chances agenda.
On extending and deepening the measures to reflect current and future life chance risk, the two measures that have been placed in statute reflect two different aspects of life chances. The first is the risk to current life chances—a child growing up in a family where there is no work. The second is the risk to future life chances—the educational attainment of that child. Metrics need to be included in the strategy that drive government action to support these families.
On current life chances, we need to measure where only one parent is able to work, for example—maybe because he or she is a lone parent or due to sickness—so that we can offer support. We need to measure addiction or mental health levels to ensure that the scale of the support matches the scale of the challenge. We need to measure where educational failure is leading to a lack of skills so that we can ensure a coherent and strong skills agenda. We need to understand the nature of unmanageable personal debt. This could be classified as being behind on one’s rent or needing an APA in universal credit, which are indicators of unmanageable personal debt.
For future life chances, we need a measurement of GCSE attainment at 16, as already planned. We could also include reporting on early years school readiness, tests for seven year-olds and 11 year-olds, and A-levels. We should also measure the educational outcomes of children in need and children in care. It is important that we track their educational attainment to ensure that they are not left behind.
I am also pleased that the Government are continuing to monitor the HBAI data as a proxy for income. While I would be the first to say that this measure is far from perfect, until we have something better to replace it with it captures those we are concerned about and ensures the maintenance of an important longitudinal study. We could use this income metric as a gateway to the other life chances measures, ensuring that government policy is directed towards not only everyone who is unemployed or sitting exams and has fears for their educational outcome, but those with an income risk, whom we are concerned about.
The new life chances agenda has enormous potential to bring coherence to deliver the Prime Minister’s all-out assault on poverty by aligning all the Government’s social programmes so that they focus on the delivery of life chances. The Government have four primary social programmes which could be aligned as part of a life chances strategy. Of these, the main initiatives are universal credit accompanied by universal support, the Work Programme, the troubled families programme and the pupil premium. At present, each of these programmes follows slightly different criteria and all are trying to achieve slightly different things. As the Government firm up their life chances and poverty agenda, it would make sense to use the life chances measures as the criteria for the underlying rationale of each of these programmes. The troubled families programme, universal credit, the Work Programme and the pupil premium could all be redirected to deliver life chances outcomes, including family stability, narrowing the educational achievement gap, recovery from addiction, financial literacy for those carrying unmanageable personal debt, and employment and progression in work.
The launch of a life chances strategy provides the Government with an opportunity to assess existing programmes and refocus them to improve life chances measures. We have a moment when we can seriously communicate the strength and effectiveness of our commitment to vulnerable people and genuinely deliver an all-out assault on poverty.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Baroness Stroud Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 25 in the name of my noble friend Lord Listowel, to which my name is also added. It is vital to measure and report on the number of children living in poverty. The reason I support the amendment is that child poverty is multifaceted. The principle of the existing Child Poverty Act, which had cross-party support at its implementation in 2010, was that no child in the UK should live in poverty but that all should have financial security, a good home and the educational opportunity that they need to give them the best chance in life.
While the Government have said that they will continue to produce, although not report on, the households below average income report from which the headline child poverty rates are derived, without the statutory reporting requirement there would be nothing to prevent a future Government from ceasing to produce HBAI statistics. I do not believe that this should be allowed to happen without a change in primary legislation and proper scrutiny from both Houses of Parliament.
There is no perfect measure to understand child poverty, but it is clear to me that income needs to be at the core. There might be other factors such as parental addiction, neglect and depression, and they may increase the risk of income poverty—and they have effects on their own—but the most fundamental problem is that children growing up in households with low relative incomes will find it harder to thrive.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has already mentioned the report from Kitty Stewart and Nick Roberts for the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. The Royal Statistical Society has described the existing relative measure as,
“the product of valid social science procedure”,
arguing that,
“any replacement would need to be subject to the same degree of rigour, including a robust process of consultation”.
Why is the Minister ignoring his own Government’s consultation, which the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has raised? Out of the 203 responses that referred to income, only nine felt that income should not be a headline measure, and just one, from a private individual, felt that income should not be included at all. I urge the Minister to look at this amendment again.
Baroness Stroud (Con)
My Lords, until now, we have focused on measuring income by the HBAI statistics. But if we also measure life chances, we will also invest in supporting people by reversing the dynamics that cause people to be poor. There are a number of flaws in the way in which the current child poverty measures are collected. They show poverty falling when the economy is in recession. If you raise the national living wage, you can statistically increase child poverty. If you invest in pensioners, this, too, can plunge children into poverty statistically. We do not want a measure that is so easy to move in the wrong direction when Governments do the right thing and that moves in the right direction when the economy is in recession. We want measures that actually identify those whom we are concerned about, and that incentivise government support and intervention to do the right thing to improve the life chances of those who are in poverty.
The life chances measures are designed to ask what drives poverty. They ask the question, “Who are these families and how can they best be supported?”. It is not the same families who are in poverty year on year. Half of all children who are poor in one year are not poor one year later. The fact that half these families get themselves up and out and can improve their own life chances leads us to ask the question, “Which families get stuck, and why?”. The vast majority of children in poverty belong either to families who are workless or who are working only part-time. Some 74% of poor workless households who have found work escape poverty. This is why the Government have put employment at the heart of their life chances measures. There is no single more effective anti-poverty strategy than moving a family from unemployment to full-time work.
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Baroness Stroud Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, I hate to intervene, but I point out that the evidence to which my noble friend referred was the Department for Work and Pensions’ own evidence. However, at this point I will go back to the amendments, which I support, as we will have another chance to talk about the principle of these nasty clauses later. I just want to ask a couple of questions.
In the impact assessment and elsewhere the phrase is used:
“The Government will develop protections for women who have a third child as the result of rape, or other exceptional circumstances”.
We have not yet had any clue as to what those “other exceptional circumstances” might be. My noble friend Lady Sherlock has suggested that domestic violence should perhaps be one of them because of the coercion that can be involved in domestic violence and abuse, which are not just about physical abuse but emotional and financial abuse—a kind of controlling which is very relevant in this situation.
Points have already been made about the potential intrusiveness of the questioning that might be required to decide whether a woman has had a child as the result of rape. Can the Minister assure us that there will be no requirement either for a conviction or evidence of a police report for the claim to be accepted? As I understand it, according to Rape Crisis only 15% of victims of sexual violence make a police report, and we have already heard about the potential intrusiveness of any questioning there might be. I hope that the Minister might be able to tell us a bit more about what will happen.
Can he assure us that Jobcentre Plus staff will be trained to handle any such conversations sensitively and to provide women who report that they have been raped or assaulted with information about available support services? Will lessons be learned from the experience of women who were subject to very intrusive and deeply personal questioning about the paternity of their children when the requirement to co-operate was enforced under the Child Support Act 1991? As I understand it, extensive guidance was developed at the time but this rule was subsequently abandoned as unworkable. I suspect that the same will apply now.
Baroness Stroud (Con)
My Lords, I thought the House might just like an issue to be clarified. I have the document with me which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, referred to. While nobody in the Committee would want any child to be brought up in poverty, the evidence clearly displays that the two key main drivers for poverty in the UK are, first, long-term worklessness and low earning and, secondly, low parental qualifications. Therefore the first key driver is current poverty and the second is a clear indicator of future poverty.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I hesitate to challenge the noble Baroness, but if she looks on pages 19 and following she will see that that is not the case.
Baroness Stroud
I can clarify that again but it is here, quite clearly. Perhaps we can discuss this later.
The Earl of Listowel
Can the noble Baroness say which page she is referring to?
Welfare Reform and Work Bill
Baroness Stroud Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Baroness Stroud (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to stand before you today for the first time as a Member of this House. I have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of Members on both sides of this House as they have supported me in taking my seat here. I would also like to thank the doorkeepers who, on various occasions, have found me on red-carpeted corridors going in the wrong direction and have simply turned me around and pointed me back in the right direction. I thank too my noble friends Lord Freud and Lord Farmer, who introduced me to the House as my supporters. I have worked with the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for five years in the Department for Work and Pensions, and have known the support of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for eight years at the Centre for Social Justice. I cannot think of two better men to be my supporters and I thank them.
There is a line in the Queen’s Letters Patent to each of us which says:
“I give you a seat, a place and a voice”.
To have a place and be able to sit in this House is nothing short of a privilege, but to have a voice here is nothing short of a responsibility. It is my desire to use my voice in this House to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.
I first became convinced that it was possible to see those in poverty completely turn their lives around when I left university—a few more years ago than I care to admit to. I went to live in Hong Kong. I lived in a place called the Walled City, a slum area rife with drug trading and prostitution. I worked with drug addicts to take them off drugs and see them completely rehabilitated. It was not the drug withdrawal process that really astounded me, however: it was the life change that followed—the rebuilding of learning to work again, of family relationships, of learning how to manage one’s finances and deal with one’s mental health problems. This is where the true courage of those who I worked among really lay. This is when I became convinced that true personal change was absolutely possible.
I came back to the UK to see if the same transformation was possible here too. Working with those struggling with drug and alcohol addictions and those with mental health problems, I started a night shelter, then a hostel, then a rehabilitation house and a halfway house back into the community. We saw lives transformed here too and it taught me not to sell anybody short with a maintenance culture, but to support the innate human desire of individuals to fight their way out of poverty and to take every opportunity available to them.
After 17 years of front-line poverty fighting I had built organisations that cared for 50 people for one night and another 50 for another night. But I found that down the road there were another 50—and in the next town another 50, and in the one after that. So I started asking: how do you translate up on to a national level the lessons that we had been learning on a local level?
It was at this point that I met Iain Duncan Smith and founded the Centre for Social Justice, which was all about translating solutions to poverty from local levels up on to a national level. It was about tackling the root causes of poverty and not just the symptoms. If we were to get ahead of the curve and start addressing the real problems, we needed to turn off the tap and not just pick up the pieces. We identified family breakdown, the failure of our education system for the poorest, addiction, debt and worklessness as the key drivers of social breakdown. It started with the understanding that if you are born into a family who love you and care for you, if you go to a good school, do not get involved in drugs or get into debt and have a job, your chances of being poor are really remote. But if one of those drivers turns—you lose your job, say—or a second turns so that you lose your job and get into debt, your life begins to destabilise. If you lose your job, get into debt and experience family breakdown, things become really tough for you. If all five of those pathways reverse, you become entrenched in poverty and without some other external intervention, you are unlikely to see the life transformation which you as an individual long for.
These five pathways, developed at the Centre for Social Justice and informed by front-line poverty-fighting organisations from all over the UK, have become the building block of the Government’s life chances strategy. This is a life chances measure, which is about saying, “Let’s actually tackle the reasons why someone is poor. Let’s support people by removing the obstacles that confront families so that they can take responsibility for their own lives”. It is about saying: let us challenge the risk of future poverty, by narrowing the educational attainment gap, and challenge current poverty by ensuring that children grow up in working households—preferably full-time working households. But let us ensure that the entrenching factors of family breakdown, mental health, serious personal debt and addiction are challenged, too.
Since I arrived in this House I have been deeply moved, in listening to the debates from all sides of the House, by the genuine care, compassion and commitment that exists in this place for disadvantaged people. It is my wish to add my voice and experience to support those who are the most vulnerable, and to ensure that every life chance is given and every obstacle torn down.