Poverty

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adebowale]

I start by apologising to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for my tardiness in being a few minutes late and missing his opening remarks. I was delayed by my need to do my day job. This is a most timely debate, and a most welcome one. My interests in this subject go back many years. I am currently chief executive of an organisation called Turning Point that provides services to many of the poorest in our community, covering employment, mental health, learning disabilities and substance misuse. I want to address the challenges of helping those with complex needs and make a few asks of the current Conservative-Lib Dem Government.

Many of the people that Turning Point sees and many of those at the sharp end of the inverse care law—which states that those who need care most tend to get it least—suffer from complex needs. It is hard to separate those with complex needs from those in poverty. Poverty can contribute to those needs and challenges and hold someone in a life of poverty if those needs are not addressed. Not far from this building, we can see the effects on individuals; they can be seen on our streets and in our communities. The differences in life expectancy and health inequalities are stark. A woman in Liverpool can expect to live 78.3 years, whereas a contemporary in Kensington and Chelsea can expect to live for 87.2 years. Those are the stark realities of poverty in Britain. It is the 60,000 households who were newly homeless in 2009 and the 253,000 people in April still claiming jobseeker’s allowance who are at the forefront of my mind.

In explaining poverty, there is a temptation to see personal character as the main cause. I hope that we do not head in that direction. People living in poverty should just try harder—that becomes the subtext of much of the debate. We know that that approach is simplistic; it focuses on the faults of the individual, rather than considering the systemic weaknesses in society that contribute to social injustice. Social standing, as many of us in this House know only too well, is a result of complex interactions of a number of factors. It is the result of privilege of birth and educational attainment—which can also be related to the privileges of birth—social contacts and personal relationships. Strength of character is only one factor. Social justice can only hope to be achieved if this factor is acknowledged.

Of course, we cannot shield ourselves from the realities of the current economic climate. We have a budget deficit of staggering proportions and we have been told that we can expect to pay £70 billion on interest payments on that debt alone, a figure greater than the amount we spend on schools, climate change and transport combined. These facts, and the statements of the Prime Minister and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, have caused a great deal of fear from those whose livelihood is at risk—fear of the legacy of debt we are leaving our children and fear of what our public services are going to look like five years from now. The low-hanging fruit have already been picked, with the announcement of £6 billion of cuts. However, I am greatly concerned that attempts to rein in the deficit will create further pain for the most disadvantaged in society.

At the moment, our limited knowledge of future plans for the welfare system shows that reform will be based on promoting the value of work by ensuring that it pays to be in employment rather than living off benefit. People will have to work their way out of poverty. The benefits of engaging in meaningful work are clear: it helps to promote resilience, in terms of mental health and well-being, while increasing social networks. However, I am concerned that if we have a one-size-fits-all approach we assume that people are not in employment because of the generosity of the welfare system, and that by tapering the loss of benefits when employment is found, there is a greater incentive to return to work.

Underlying that, though, is the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn. Once work has been incentivised, those who do not or cannot work are deemed to be irresponsible. If you want to know how to create an underclass, the recipe is very clear: create unemployment and remove the support necessary for those who want to work to move towards work. We know that much.

Unemployment is currently high. We cannot expect people to walk into jobs. This approach is alarming, and cuts to public spending are set to increase redundancies. The TUC has recently reported that 45.9 per cent of women in the north-east work in the public sector. There is no point blaming the public sector for that; it is a fact. Unemployment is set to increase in the area, affecting the whole community. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development suggests that cuts to jobs in the public sector will increase unemployment to 2.95 million, accounting for one out of every eight jobs in the public sector. Personal responsibility does not come into this equation. Unemployment is out of the control of the individual, and we know that every month that someone stays unemployed, their mental health deteriorates—the two are interconnected.

Those in poverty are trapped in a cycle of deprivation, often incurring greater levels of debt. The exclusion from financial services and the difficulty of getting credit, with the high interest rates that can be obtained, mean that those in poverty pay over £1,000 more a year on life’s essentials than they need to.

There is no guarantee that those who work are protected from poverty. Statistics from Barnardo’s suggest that a couple with two children and one parent working for the minimum wage would have to work 60 hours a week to earn the 60 per cent of median income that takes them out of poverty.

I have to be honest—rather than “we’re all in this together”, I am concerned that those communities most disadvantaged are being left on the sidelines. We have seen this before; in the 1980s and early 1990s, long-term unemployment scarred communities and it still does. The effects of unemployment go far deeper than just the individual. It also affects families and community cohesion, often resulting in higher levels of crime, further deprivation and further increased expenditure. We have had a failure to invest in preventive actions to act against the social problems connected to long-term unemployment, adverse effects on mental health and drug misuse. Permitting this degradation of society to occur again is both morally questionable and economically illogical.

We must make sure that the long-term unemployed are given access to support that addresses the obstructions preventing them from entering employment. Communities with high levels of unskilled workers have been disproportionally affected by the high levels of unemployment. We cannot perceive long-term unemployment as being a product of laziness; rather, it is an indication of unmet need in the community.

Those most in need of support are the least likely to receive it. This is for a number of reasons. Staff not recognising the full extent of the problem or believing it is the responsibility of other services—a lack of joining up on the ground, a lack of connectedness in service provision, which is both bespoke and personalised—a lack of confidence and knowledge about the availability of support and a distrust of services can all combine to ensure that those with complex needs do not get the help that they deserve.

Efficiencies can be made by increasing the effectiveness of services. Effective services are designed according to the needs of the communities they serve. We cannot assume that all communities are the same. Rather, people should be given a voice to say what they need from the services, and they should be given the opportunity to design and indeed deliver those services where possible. We must ensure that performance measures are based on the outcomes they achieve for individuals and the wider community.

My own organisation has been working on models that engage communities in designing and delivering services, and auditing the effectiveness of those services in their communities. We have shown that such an approach can give far better access to hard-to-reach groups, and we have found that integrated services offer the best opportunity to improve access to services.

Integration can be through joint commissioning across health and social care as well as whole-system redesign. My view is that the whole system needs redesigning. Slash-and-burn not only will not deliver the savings that we are looking for, but will simply drive more cost into the system for future dates. We can avoid duplication of delivery, which means savings; and many of these services can be made sustainable through a strong partnership with the community.

We have seen the effects of not taking action in the aftermath of a recession—inaction born from the belief that people should be able to resolve their own problems. Instead, we need to recognise that the way that services are currently designed prevents people helping themselves, leading to costly inefficiencies along the way. We need to resolve these obstacles if we are to reduce poverty and achieve social justice.

I end by asking my first two questions of this Government. First, are the Government prepared to report regularly on the impact of the impending spending cuts in public services on our poorest people and communities? Too little is said of the impacts of the economy on our poorest. While I appreciate that Frank Field will be working on measures of poverty, I think that we are in danger of letting the excellent get in the way of the good enough. If you cannot afford to feed your kids, a debate about how to measure poverty will be meaningless to you. I want a “good enough” measure; I am not interested in the perfection of the science. Will the Government report regularly to both Houses, and to the country, on the impact of the budget cuts on the poorest areas and people? Secondly, we have set up an Office for Budget Responsibility. Can we also have an office of social responsibility?