Poverty

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and to contribute to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, made a very robust and passionate speech, and his enthusiasm and fresh thinking is welcome in this House. I have been studying this area of policy for longer than I care to remember, and I think it is important that from time to time we step back and look at what we have achieved and what challenges lie ahead. I will certainly come to the noble Lord’s conference: as long as the conference fee is not too high I will happily come and look at prevention, emergency-coping and cure. I am slightly worried about the use of the word “cure”, but be that as it may, I will stand shoulder to shoulder with him in raising the issue. I congratulate him on using the word “poverty”, because we in this House sometimes pussyfoot around with all sorts of euphemisms for poverty. Politicians do not like talking about it, but 15% to 20% of our population experience poverty and we should face up to that more directly.

I ask the noble Lord to bear in mind, in the course of his developing thinking, that we need a proper network of social protection across the United Kingdom. I think he accepted that when he said that, when people are in need, have no options and are inescapably caught in household circumstances over which they have no control, the state has to step in and provide protection and support to allow them to trade out of their circumstances in the best way they can. It is not an easy thing to do, because individual circumstances are so diverse and the state cannot discriminate but has to have common systems that are available equally to all citizens. I ask him to bear in mind that the social protection system that we have in this country should deal with the redistribution of income throughout individuals’ lifetimes as well as taking snapshots and looking at individual circumstances.

The noble Lord is, I think, in danger of falling foul of one of the myths to which Professor John Hills referred in his excellent book Good Times, Bad Times—namely, that those in dependency are all the same people all the time, and it is a question of “them over there” who are in dependency and “us over here” who are paying the taxes. That is completely contrary to the facts. You need only to recognise that in every three-month period a million people go into work and a million come out of it to see that there is an evolving pattern of falling in and out of poverty and in and out of benefits. Therefore, it is a complete myth to think that people on benefits never change and that they are always there and always costing money. However, that myth is sometimes fostered in the newspapers. The kind of prejudice visited on those in dependency is like the prejudice which we talked about, very usefully, when we discussed the fourth Oral Question earlier today.

We have to deal with that prejudice and we have to deal with the ignorance about the scale of the money that is spent on social security and the social protection network. If you include education, health, pensions and all the other bits and pieces of state support that are available—and have been available, certainly to me and my generation, with defined benefit pensions and all the rest—the amount of money spent actually looking after those in dependency is very small. In his book, John Hills calculates that if you take social protection over that broad gamut of policy areas, for every £12.50 that is spent on social protection, £1 is spent on supporting people who are in dependency, on jobseeker’s allowance and the like. So we need to get the balance right here and understand that, although these figures sound like enormous sums of money when they are dealt with in pounds sterling at today’s prices, if they are taken in the totality of the public spend of £735,000 million, or whatever it is, it is money well spent on providing social protection available to all of us, given that not many families in this country will not need to access healthcare, pension provision, education and the like at one time or another. Therefore, I appeal to the noble Lord to make sure that he does not fall foul of the myths that exist in this area.

In the minute that is left to me, I want to say that this is a very important moment. That is another reason why I am pleased that we are having this debate this morning. A new Government are being formed. I hope fervently that we keep the present ministerial team on this subject area. In my view, any changes would be disastrous. As people know, I am a fervent advocate of delivering universal credit, which I think, if it was a bit better funded, would deliver a lot of the things to which the noble Lord, Lord Bird, aspires. I welcome what the new Prime Minister said on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street about trimming back austerity, because I think that austerity has been part of the problem and one of the causes of poverty. I argue that we should focus on two things for the rest of this Parliament, the first being that we should deliver universal credit in the best and most efficient way we can. The other important Conservative manifesto promise was to halve the disability employment rate. That, too, is an important part of the programme. These two things should be priorities for us in the months and years ahead.

I repeat that I am very willing to contribute to anything the noble Lord, Lord Bird, is doing in this area, and share his enthusiasm. I wish him luck in achieving some of the ends that he set out this morning.