Cross-departmental Strategy on Social Justice

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Dorries—my constituency neighbour—and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for securing the debate. I, too, will talk mainly about family policy, but I think it important to look at all of the five pathways to poverty so ably identified by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), whom it is an enormous pleasure to see with us today.

We still have an issue with worklessness, despite the British jobs miracle, when this country created more jobs than the rest of Europe put together. We need to remember that there are 843,000 young people who are not in education, employment or training, which is why we have to keep on creating jobs, as we have over the last few years—the job is not fully done yet. Speaking on the steps of Downing Street, the Prime Minister specifically identified those in work, but often work that is insecure, does not pay well and leaves them worried about their mortgage. That is where we need what I would call an “ABC” approach, by which I mean a job, a better job and a career. We need to think more about training for people in entry-level jobs to increase their skills and give them the opportunities to progress up the work ladder, perhaps by re-engaging them with local further education colleges and so on, if we are going to deal with that cohort of people whom our new Prime Minister quite rightly identified.

It is also really important that we roll out the universal support offer alongside universal credit. Universal support delivered locally has been rolled out, but as I understand it universal support across the country as a whole would give responsibility to work coaches for things such as addiction and debt. Rather than just passing over a leaflet on addiction, that work coach would take responsibility and perhaps try to get an unemployed person into a drug rehabilitation programme or link them up with someone who could deal with their debt issues.

Educational failure is absolutely key to social justice. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), among others, has pointed out that there is a 19-month gap between the brightest children and those who are the furthest behind when they start school—a gap from which many children fail to recover throughout their time at school. One thing we could do is to get outstanding primary schools in the poorest areas to set up early years provision to try to narrow that gap.

Drug taking is a huge issue across our country, not least in the criminal justice system. It is concerning that a third of recovering addicts are still unable to become fully abstinent. I, for one, do not think it right that we just maintain people for years on methadone and other substitutes. We need a higher ambition for our fellow citizens. We need to raise our gaze around the world to countries we can learn from, such as Germany and Sweden. I have already mentioned serious debt, but it is a huge issue for those it affects. I think universal support will be a part of the solution when it is fully rolled out, but I pay tribute to organisations such as Christians Against Poverty, The Salvation Army, which does great work in my constituency, and the citizens advice bureau, which also does great work locally. They come alongside people to manage their debts so they do not get overburdened by them.

As the prisons and probation Minister, I had the good fortune to come across a small charity in Blackpool called Jobs, Friends & Houses. I say to the Minister that that small local charity is an example of cross-departmental working in the voluntary sector at the local level that the national Government could do very well to learn from. It is funded by Blackpool police and Blackpool Council, with some support from Public Health England, and it took recovering drug addicts who were coming out of prison, trained them in construction skills and had them doing up run-down houses in Blackpool. It also enabled them to live in good quality housing, which the ex-offenders themselves had often done up, and provided a support network for them at weekends. It ticked every box. Although the charity did not receive any support from the probation service, it set a really good example. The Minister will probably know that 22% of benefit recipients are ex-offenders, and this is precisely the type of project we need to see working cross-departmentally at the local level. Indeed, I would like to see it spread across the UK as a whole.

When I was at the Ministry of Justice, I was delighted that the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), when talking about families and prisoners, said:

“Critically, education should also help prisoners to acquire the social skills and virtues which will make them better fathers, better husbands and better brothers. Ensuring that prisoners can re-integrate into family life and maintain positive relationships is crucial to effective rehabilitation. Families are one of our most effective crime-fighting institutions. And we should strengthen them at every turn.”

Those are wise words, not least because if someone’s family relationship breaks down while they are in prison, they will probably not have anywhere to live or a family to go back to, and families are helpful in helping prisoners to find work.

I have a quotation from the other side of the Atlantic. It is from President Obama’s speech on father’s day on 21 June 2010. He said:

“So we can talk all we want here in Washington about issues like education and health care and crime; we can build good schools; we can put money into creating good jobs; we can do everything we can to keep our streets safe—but government can’t keep our kids from looking for trouble on those streets. Government can’t force a kid to pick up a book or make sure that the homework gets done. Government can’t be there day in, day out, to provide discipline and guidance and the love that it takes to raise a child. That’s our job as fathers, as mothers, as guardians for our children.”

That was powerfully put and brings me on to the final area of family.

I will not reiterate the excellent points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton, but I want to encourage the Minister to go back to her Department and ask her officials to look around the world at what works well. I note that the Americans set up the National Fatherhood Initiative in 1994. Since then they have had the fatherhood, marriage and families innovation fund, which looks at job training, parenting, domestic violence prevention—a key priority of the Prime Minister—and relationship support. They have also had the fatherhood and mentoring initiative, which looks at raising awareness of responsible fatherhood and works to re-engage absent fathers with their families.

In Australia there is a network of family relationship centres, which the Minister’s officials might want to look at. In my experience of Whitehall, officials and Ministers are sometimes not quite good enough at looking at best practice around the world that the United Kingdom could localise, fit to our own conditions and usefully learn from.

I want to be quick to allow colleagues to speak, but I have four proposals that I want the Minister to raise across Whitehall for what we could do to strengthen family life in this country. First, improving access to psychological therapies is a really good thing that the NHS does for our constituents. Therapy for couples, which has proved to be really useful and helpful, has been virtually squeezed out. This was an issue before I became a Minister two years ago. I am concerned to find that no progress has been made in the intervening time.

Secondly, during the antenatal stage—the one time when dads turn up with mothers to go to programmes in big numbers—we are missing a trick if we do not try to strengthen the relationship between mum and dad before the child is born. The fathers are there. It is an open goal. Some hospitals are doing it under the wire at the moment. Why do we not do it everywhere?

Thirdly, the family hub is an idea whose time has come. Perhaps the Minister will look at what they do on a bipartisan basis in America and at the family relationship centres in Australia and learn from them. We can localise such initiatives and make them appropriate to the UK. Fourthly, my final request is that the Cabinet Office should make sure that its What Works centre looks at this area of strengthening family policy. It is not acceptable that the Cabinet Office does not extend its work to this area. There have been studies by the Department for Education showing that relationship support is extremely effective. The last one was in 2014. The Cabinet Office needs to keep that work going.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Thank you, Ms Dorries. I will try to do the maths on the timing.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing this debate and on her thoughtful speech. Let me say at the outset that Scottish National party Members share the desire to support families, to promote social justice and to improve the prospects of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We recognise that that will require cross-departmental action that cuts across a range of policy areas and Government functions, including areas of devolved responsibility—a point that may be reflected this afternoon in the fact that only Back-Bench Members from Scotland and Northern Ireland are in the Chamber today.

Where we part company with the UK Government is in our analysis of the underlying drivers of poverty and deprivation and in the prescriptions we offer to address it.

[Andrew Selous]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dr Whiteford]

I will not give way because I am very short of time.

The hon. Member for Congleton put great emphasis on family policy, and clearly families are at the heart of a stable society. We have heard from other speakers today and from the Government in recent months about life chances. That is an innocuous enough term. Who could take issue with improving life chances? The problem is that the shift in the Government’s rhetoric has masked a sharp move away in policy terms from consideration of the economic drivers of disadvantage, particularly low income, towards social phenomena such as family breakdown and addiction, which we have heard a lot about today but which actually affect children in families across the income spectrum.

Don't get me wrong—children are often very badly affected by parental separation or a parent’s problematic use of alcohol or drugs, but that will not necessarily push them into poverty. Likewise, problematic levels of debt are by no means the preserve of low-income households. I agree with the hon. Member for Congleton that support for all families who are coping with these issues is important regardless of their income level, but if we want to achieve greater social justice and to close the gaps in educational attainment, job prospects, and long-term health and life expectancy between the wealthiest and the poorest, it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that low income is anything other than the core driver of poverty. It is a distraction to think we can tackle child poverty without recognising that material deprivation, lack of money in a household and chronic financial insecurity—symptoms of a labour market that is increasingly characterised by low-paid, temporary jobs with fluctuating hours of work—and excessive housing costs lie at the heart of the gulf in prospects. We cannot tackle these glaring inequalities if we are not prepared to bite the bullet of these gross disparities in income.

The reality is that the Government’s austerity agenda continues to reduce the incomes of families in lower paid jobs and those unable to work because of serious illness or disability. Austerity has hit the incomes of women and disabled people disproportionately. The four-year freeze on working-age benefits, including child tax credits, working tax credits and jobseeker’s allowance, will see families lose an estimated 12% of the value of their support by 2020. Two thirds of children growing up in poverty in the UK live in working families, so cuts to tax credits have an enormously detrimental effect on parents in low-paid jobs. That undoubtedly puts pressure on families and strains relationships.

The cuts to the work allowance will also hit low-paid working parents, including single parents, some of whom could lose as much as £2,600 a year. The cuts to the work allowance also remove from universal credit one of the cornerstone benefits of the system, namely that it was supposed to remove the work disincentives—the so-called benefit trap inherent in the previous system. Universal credit now replicates that flaw so that for many low-paid parents there is now no incentive to take promotion or increase their working hours because their family will be worse off. According to the Resolution Foundation, work will pay on average £1,000 a year less for working families in receipt of universal credit.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) talked about the Concentrix fiasco, which we debated in the main Chamber today. All I can say is that it has caused extreme financial distress and hardship. I know of at least two families who have lost their home because of that. The Government really must take responsibility.

Another key issue in addressing life chances is housing costs. There is a chronic shortage of affordable housing across the UK, a consequence partly of grossly inflated house prices and partly of the failure of successive Governments to build enough affordable homes. I am glad to say that in Scotland we have taken a very different approach and have started to reverse that situation. We are committed to building 50,000 more affordable homes in the next five years, which will go some way to meeting need, but we cannot avoid the fact that children who grow up in a warm, dry, decent and stable home will have better life chances than those who do not. That is a good example of why we need cross-departmental efforts to tackle child poverty. Again, it goes without saying that poor housing puts terrible pressure on families and relationships.

Last week, I attended the launch of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s “Solve UK Poverty” report. One of the most important messages that comes out of that is about the dynamic nature of poverty. In this place, we often trade in lazy stereotypes about entrenched poverty, and there is no doubt that some parts of the country are affected by that because of deindustrialisation and so on. Nevertheless, for most people it is unexpected life events that push them into poverty, whether it be redundancy, relationship breakdown or long-term illness and serious health problems. One of the most important things that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighted is families’ level of resilience. Clearly, when unpredictable events that could happen to any of us strike, poorer families have less of a cushion. They are much less able to cushion themselves against such events that can have long-term, far-reaching consequences.

I will finish by talking about how we measure child poverty and pick up some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East. The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016 removed the statutory child poverty targets that were to be met by 2020. A cynic might assume that that is because the Government know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies is correct in its projection that the rate of child poverty in the UK is set to increase to over 18%—affecting almost one in five—by 2020 as a direct result of austerity reforms.

Life chances indicators may provide some useful insights, but given that two thirds of children living in poverty have working parents, focusing on worklessness will not take us much further forward and misses the big picture of widening inequality eroding young people’s life chances. I am glad to say that in Scotland we are taking an alternative approach to child poverty which focuses on maximising household resources, investing heavily in high-quality early-years education, including 30 hours a week free childcare for all nursery-age children and for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds, and renewing the focus on closing the attainment gap in schools between those from the lowest income groups and their better-off peers.

The Scottish Government are also consulting on legislation to measure child poverty with proposals for ambitious statutory income targets and duties on Ministers to report every year on published delivery plans. We have also protected the education maintenance allowance, which has helped young people from low income families to stay on at school or college so that they get the qualifications they are capable of achieving, and ensured that those who get the grades they need to go to university can study on the basis of their ability to learn, not their ability to pay tuition fees.

We should not dodge the big issue about income, but should recognise that it is at the heart of families and their ability to sustain the normal shocks and events that most people go through at some point in their lives.