Life Chances Strategy

Lord Lupton Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lupton (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to spend these few minutes concentrating on the vital need for early intervention in the lives of deeply troubled children, a topic I covered in both my maiden speech and an Oral Question. Before I do so, I shall try to put in context this Government’s attempts to transform the lives of the most disadvantaged people in Britain. In doing so, I want to make a point that probably only a newcomer to this House can make, which is that it seems unproductive to overlay the intractable social problem of poverty, which has been with us for centuries, and its causes and solutions with excessive party politicking.

The causes of poverty are not easily assuaged only by taxpayers’ money. It is a fact, rather than a party political point, that, according to Treasury figures, expenditure on tax credits and equivalents, when expressed as a percentage of GDP, have risen from around 0.6% through the mid- to late 1990s to around 1.5% in the early 2000s, peaking at 2% in the run-up to the 2010 election. In current terms, the difference from top to bottom is over £25 billion per annum, a truly staggering figure. Despite this massive increase in expenditure, there are few if any of us in the House who do not think that there is still a serious poverty issue to solve, however you define poverty, but opening the taps without an adequate plan is proven not to work.

So, in approaching the challenge of how best to tackle one of the biggest issues of our day—ingrained, seemingly permanent, poverty in a section of our society—I am still fresh enough in this House, bearing few battle scars, to express the hope that we could tackle such a complex social Rubik’s cube of a problem with a more collaborative mindset than I have seen to date. I suggest that, had your Lordships addressed some elements of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill in this spirit, there might have been a greater willingness to accept, for example, that definitions of poverty based only on income levels might have been doing as much damage as they were good, not least because they may have unintentionally created targets that could be met by infusions of taxpayers’ cash without addressing the underlying causes. They were like a thin sticking plaster seeking to cover a severed artery.

In January this year, the Prime Minister set out his bold vision on fighting poverty, following from the success of the coalition Government in the creation of 2 million jobs and bringing the dignity of work to so many previously permanently unemployed. In that speech, he was clear that we needed to move beyond just the economics of either what he described as,

“the leftist, statist view—built around increased welfare provision and more government intervention"—

he then reminded us that it was he who started the troubled families programme, so he is not averse to state intervention where appropriate—or the more free market approach, that the rising tide will lift all boats. He argued that we now need a more social approach—what he described as the “human dimension to poverty”. He went on to set out four key planks of a plan to extend life chances: first, the importance of the family as a unit, which I shall talk about; secondly, a good education; thirdly, equal opportunity; and, fourthly, the provision of the right treatment and support for those in crisis. In my last minute or two, I would like to emphasise the first of those planks: how vital I believe early intervention is when young lives are going off-track, often as a result of dysfunctional families.

In recent years, my wife and I have spent many hours talking to deeply troubled children in south London who, as young teenagers, get excluded from their schools in the morning and are pushed out on to the streets and turn to prostitution and drug-dealing. We have read the medical research, which suggests that a sustained increase in adrenalin as a response to repeated abuse may chemically affect the frontal lobe of the brain, which is thought to control temper.

Last autumn, we visited the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire, which carefully, and at huge expense, reassembles the shattered spirits and souls of dreadfully abused children who have had no experience of what might even be termed family life. We have also talked to superheads while visiting their schools in Hackney and other parts of east London about the benefits of and need for early counselling both for troubled young children and their parent or parents. Sixty-five per cent of children aged 12 to 16 in disadvantaged households do not live with both birth parents—a figure which is 26% worse than for better-off households. We must all support the initiatives around strengthening families. Six hundred million pounds in total has now been committed to the troubled families programme, while—this touches on the excellent point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler—160,000 couples have taken up the preventive relationship support programme. As Labour MSP and former Scottish Health Minister Tom McCabe said while summarising six months of expert evidence presented to the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee:

“There is empirical evidence stacked from the floor to the sky that backs up our taking a different approach to preventive spending and investment in the early years”.

We must both listen to the bottom-up needs and be prepared to be granular in our interventions. For example, I suggested last autumn that we impose a higher duty on schools to ensure that school kids are properly looked after when excluded, rather than ending up on the street. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that reducing the number of workless households is not just about the economics of a pay cheque but about giving children a good role model for the benefits and dignity of work that will be crucial to creating their motivation to get on in life?

To finish with my first point, we need to recognise that this whole issue is of national importance. We must not allow party politics and dogma to slow down and hinder the development of solutions. The nation has every right to expect the expertise of so many noble Lords in this House—I certainly exclude myself from that description—to be deployed to maximum advantage.