Child Poverty

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bird for introducing this important debate.

I grew up in Bradford, delivering milk in the early morning with my father, who was a milkman on the Thorpe Edge housing estate—one of the largest housing estates in the city, with all the high statistics you would expect in one of the most challenging communities in this country. As a young person I got a nose for what poverty was about—I could smell it, often literally. Over the last 30-plus years, I have been working with challenging families in East End housing estates and, now, in towns and cities across the north of England, where we have had some success in addressing the causes of child poverty and creating an entrepreneurial culture within which families embrace the world of work and take more personal ownership of their situation. From within an entrepreneurial culture focused around activity and practical action, not policy discussion and political agitation, wealth creation has begun to take root.

We have taken the long view. Change takes time. These families are not our clients; they are our friends—people with names, addresses and family histories. It has been about growing a can-do culture and building relationships. We have broken open the traditional silos of government, which, from where we stand, seem incapable of ever learning anything from experience. When you stand in a housing estate and look down the telescope at yet another government policy and programme coming down on these children and challenging families, and if you stay around long enough to gain perspective and watch the cumulative effect of all this political and government activity, what you see is a winding snake.

We have lived through Mrs Thatcher’s policies coming down upon us, as well as John Major’s, Tony Blair’s, Gordon Brown’s, Dave’s and Nick’s, Dave’s and, now, Theresa’s. When you watch carefully, you see the latest well-meaning politician with their policy advisers, often with little practical experience, and their latest bright idea coming down from above with all the unintended consequences. No one stays around long enough to watch the cumulative effect over many years, as we have done. People become trapped in a dependency culture created often by the well-meaning state with all its attendant theoretical “liberal” ideas, often based upon ideology rather than practice.

In the last year I have been asked by the CEO of Public Health England to lead Well North—10 pathfinder projects in challenging communities in the north of England, many of them in housing estates with children and families who have been failed by successive Governments. I have been asked to take our many years of experience in east London and to share it and work with the people there. Of course, I must declare an interest as chairman of Well North. Even after just a year’s engagement in 10 communities, I have found families and individuals who get what we are talking about, and who feel trapped and want to do something very different. They are real people with names and addresses, living in real places called Oldham, Bradford, Skelmersdale, Whitehaven, Bootle, Sheffield, Rotherham, Newcastle and Gateshead, Halton and Widnes. The challenge is: will we be given enough time and space by the system to innovate and build the kinds of long-term relationships with these local families and communities that can be sustainable and make a real difference—relationships within which families can be supported to take hold of their own destinies, escape from a tick-box culture and break open the silos that hold them firmly in their grip?

There is not enough time in this debate to really open up the detail for the Minister of what a more entrepreneurial approach to these challenging issues of poverty means in practice, but I thought I would share some initial radical thoughts to encourage us to think outside the box. Here are three practical, if radical, ideas that challenge the liberal consensus.

First, we should make it a requirement for any programme addressing social issues that 70% of the employees, or self-employed contractors, should live in the wards with the highest unemployment in the area where the programme is working. This would give a real advantage to genuinely locally based and embedded organisations, and a boost to the local economy, and might achieve more than anything else.

Secondly, we should take the “personalised budgets” approach to the next level. We should look at all the money being spent across government on a family or child. We should not, as now, just get government agencies to decide how they might spend the money but co-create something with the family, with a particular emphasis on the children. We frequently forget to listen to children, but in my experience they often have real insights into what is needed. We should be radical. For instance, a place at Eton costs £40,000 a year—a lot less than being in care—and I have found some very talented children on some of these estates.

Thirdly, we should focus on the children themselves. We should learn from the Big Issue and set up enterprise programmes so that the children can start to earn real money themselves. We have done this to some effect. We should support them if the parents try to take the money—for example, parents who have addiction issues with alcohol, drugs, gambling and so on. In this way, the children will become more self-confident and self-reliant in their heads but they will also be helped by having a bit of cash in their pockets. It is simple. I have a good friend who is a very successful business entrepreneur in the north of England and who came from one of these communities. He always tells me that the difference between him and his friends at school was that they had one paper round and he had two. Start ‘em young.

It is time to be radical and to create a learning by doing culture locally that sees the children and families caught in poverty as part of the solution, not just the problem. There is great opportunity awaiting us on our housing estates. There are talented people there—I am meeting them and working with them—who want to be radical and do things differently. They want to take hold of their lives and the life of their community and its future generations. The question is: will we, the well-meaning here in Westminster and Whitehall, allow them to do so? I ask the Minister: what space will be created in the Government’s thinking for innovation in this field that moves beyond the usual structures of government and local authority silos and gets behind local leaders and communities? I would suggest that quite a number of successful entrepreneurs who grew up in these communities want to do more now than just give cheques; they want to use their business skills to help with these issues.