Social Justice Strategy

Baroness Uddin Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, for raising the matter in this House and commend her consistent service to the lives of those who are disadvantaged. It is a real pleasure to take part in a social justice debate. The concept of social justice is not new. I kept thinking, what have I missed? I remembered the Commission on Social Justice, which was supported by the right honourable John Smith and even the right honourable Tony Blair. I remember doing quite a lot of work on the front line in enabling so-called engagement at the time in social justice and some of the contributions that the organisations were making in Tower Hamlets and Newham.

When the social justice strategy was published in 2012, it devoted a long chapter to how work could transform the prospect of the 120,000 so-called “troubled families” it identified—I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and am deeply troubled by the concept of so-called “troubled families”. I hope that we will move away from that term as we continue to pursue their well-being. The strategy spoke of the “complex and interlinking disadvantages” facing one person named Barry, whose parents were drug addicts and who came to be a child in care and then a man on drugs, on benefits and then, of course, in prison—an all too familiar picture of the cycle of deprivation of parental care, education, liberty and work. That cycle demands the early and repeated intervention of the state in order to disrupt it.

Barry’s is a tale of thousands in our country who are unfortunately caught up in the social welfare system. I know and have met many such individuals throughout my 30 years at the coalface of the community work and the social work profession, and through my work with an organisation called Addaction leading the “Breaking the Cycle” project. I commend its work to your Lordships’ House and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, that we need to ensure that we work with some of the amazing, long-standing and dedicated community organisations to have a response to some of the issues that we have all raised today.

State-sponsored intervention to reduce the problems of people with multiple related disadvantages in order to break the cycle of deprivation is a worthy ambition, yet I would argue that precisely the opposite has been happening in this country. The erosion of safety nets, designed to catch people before they fall into such cycles of deprivation, followed the publication of this strategy. In particular, the outlook for the disabled has not improved one iota as a result of this strategy.

The incidence of disability is, in the Government’s own terms, higher among these 120,000 so-called “troubled families” than in the less troubled strata of society. Research suggests that children with special educational needs and disabilities are more likely to encounter family breakdown, poverty and the criminal justice and residential care systems, as well as having NEET status. Yet the state’s protection for those with a learning disability, or indeed any sort of disability, was virtually absent from the strategy—except perhaps for references to disability. It is as if they are self-created and not framed in a context of deprivation and poverty, a context that has in many cases been worsened by the initiatives of this Government. Disability should not correlate to “troubled” or “deprived” in and of itself; it exists in all communities and classes—it occurs in rich families, poor ones and black, white and Asian ones. Yet an absence of early intervention to protect people with multiple protected characteristics belies this fact.

Without taking into account the interlinking disadvantages that some disabled people face, we cannot break the connection between disability and deprivation. Take the still misunderstood but widespread condition of autism, a spectrum disorder thought to affect one in 100 people. Autism can present significant communication, social and behavioural challenges. It occurs across classes and socioeconomic groups, although in more men than women. Yet the Government have conceded that autism in black, Asian and minority ethnic families is underdiagnosed in this country. A similar trend has been identified with respect to mental health, as has been mentioned.

Research has also shown that the prospects of autistic children with educated, white mothers are significantly better than those whose mothers are not white and educated—and I can easily testify to this, over a period spanning 30 years, as a mother whose autistic son faced huge prejudice and barriers to opportunities and access to mainstream services because he and I were not. I take no comfort in saying that, more recently, I have spoken to British born-and-bred mothers from minority backgrounds and the organisations that work with them, who have described facing horrifically similar experiences to those of my son and me all those years ago.

I fail to understand how independent evidence collected by independent organisations such as the Runnymede Trust and the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign, exposing correlating, overlapping disadvantage, would not point policymakers inexorably towards targeted intervention. In the incidence of autism, it is needed to correct underdiagnosis and the consequential lack of specialist support for families from particular BME backgrounds.

The social justice strategy acknowledges:

“We know that individuals and families facing multiple disadvantages do not always get the support they need, when they need it”.

Yet, with conditions such as autism, no research has been commissioned to so much as understand the extent of social injustice on the grounds of race and ethnicity—injustice that means that an autistic child born black will probably be less successful than another born white and will be left alone to tackle this inequality as we allow the marginalised or vulnerable to disappear from view and fend for themselves. The self-confessed failure of the social justice strategy to address disadvantages that are exacerbated by factors such as ethnicity, gender or disability has diminished this impact. My question is: how does the Minister intend to promote social justice for disabled people from BME backgrounds, and others who are not, who suffer multiple disadvantages as a result of their disabilities?

I turn to the subject of employment. Although the strategy outlined initiatives to support disabled people into work, it was silent on the measures that the Government would take to protect people who are unable to work and their families. The years since the strategy was published have not been kind to such families, with the proliferation of “scrounger” labels and associated stigma as the Government have sought to justify their chaotic implementation of the work capability assessment by ATOS. Last year I was involved in the work undertaken by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Disability, which undertook a commission and highlighted serious concerns about these assessments. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how these have been addressed since.

The strategy states its commitment to,

“offering unconditional support to those who are severely disabled and cannot work”,

but the Government’s own welfare policies have rendered that support far from unconditional. The welfare system should not only offer financial support to ensure a minimum standard of living but offer universal and specialist social care, health and education services to tackle those barriers to attainment. It is a matter of social justice and economic literacy that there have been too many morbid cases recently of people who are unable to work languishing in penury.

If social justice is truly a priority for the Government, why have they been withdrawing the disabled living allowance from disabled and vulnerable people to so egregious an extent that at one stage around half of all appeals were successful? When unconditional support was promised to the severely disabled in the social justice strategy, how can the Government justify their decision to scrap the Independent Living Fund that supported them? If the strategy had any weight in the coalition today, how could the Chancellor of the Exchequer pledge to withdraw housing benefit for young people under 25 who were unfortunate enough to be born poor and, in some cases, were seeking to escape their troubled families and the cycle of deprivation outlined in the strategy? If the Conservative Party wins the general election, what will it do differently?

There is no social justice without protection for the poor and vulnerable. Taking people out of poverty cannot simply mean pushing fragile people into unpaid and low-paid unsustainable jobs. Social justice also requires ending the stigma, heartlessness and bureaucratic incompetences that have led to the penalising of disadvantaged families, and ending the withdrawal of benefits from ill men and women such as Mark Wood and Linda Wootton weeks before their deaths. In the years before and since the social justice strategy was published, the Government’s deficit reduction programme and the euphemistic mantra of ensuring,

“a fair deal for the taxpayer”,

have caused disproportionate suffering to the vulnerable, particularly disruption to the provision of disabled benefits, ignoring the needs of those very people with complex and interlinking disadvantages that the strategy sought to protect.