UK

The way we live has to become fairer in every way. Politicians must begin the heavy lifting of public persuasion

We will never abolish child poverty in a society shaped like this one

However his reign ends, whatever his legacy may be, one moment will always stand out as a monument to Tony Blair. It was that remarkable, utterly unexpected pledge back in 1999 that Labour would abolish child poverty by 2020. That sunny morning he sprung it on an astounded assembly of economists and poverty experts. The hall rippled with people turning to one another to ask if they had perhaps misheard? Did he really mean it? And if so, did he fully understand how radical it was?

The answer was yes, he meant it, even if he is seized with spasmodic regret. It is one of his more admirable traits to nail himself to targets that matter, and work out afterwards how to do things that seem near impossible. (Abolishing hospital waiting lists by next year is another example.) But his poverty promise is by far the toughest social pledge any British politician has ever made, harder even than the founding of the NHS. And yes, he probably well understood the Herculean scale of the task. Certainly the chancellor did and he has pursued it as a highest priority, through thick and thin. It has needed his fierce protection from ministers, and sometimes from his neighbour, clamouring to spend money on more popular vote-winners: the poor don't vote, they show no gratitude and the well-off don't know or don't care. The first quarter-way target was missed as 700,000, and not a million children, were lifted out of poverty. Instead of celebrating success, the headlines called it "failure", so why stick to an impossible target?

Because this is emblematic, the unshakable moral underpinning of this government (which Labour defectors would do well to remember). It stands as a constant rebuke to the Tories that they doubled child poverty during their 18 years, leaving appalling social wreckage. It is such an effective moral back-stop that David Cameron has been obliged to sign up to it too. That is how seismic New Labour's effect has been on the political landscape, marking 1997 as just as decisive a shift in political geography as 1979 or even 1945. Those who say there's no difference should look at how the Tories are being hauled from the blue to the red side, with poverty a prime marker in the ideological tug of war.

But now comes the reality check - for both parties. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has produced the most complete and hardheaded research so far on what it would take to reach that 2020 goal. Donald Hirsch, with a number of other leading economists, has modelled the future to find that even if the government hits all its most optimistic welfare-to-work targets for lone parents and those on incapacity benefit, the task ahead is daunting. And next year will be the toughest spending round yet. The halfway mark can be reached by 2010, at a cost of another £4bn-5bn a year. But, on the present trajectory, there is no chance of reaching the other half.

At the End Child Poverty event, John Hutton, secretary of state for work and pensions, sat tight-lipped through the facts. Only three countries of the EU 25 have more child poverty than Britain. Intergenerational poverty is solidifying, so poor children are more firmly anchored to the floor than for decades, their social mobility frozen. The drop-out rate at 16 is still a national disgrace. Getting poor people into work helps, but not enough. Over half of all poor children have working parents, but the minimum wage is still £2 an hour below subsistence. Pay is topped up with credits and benefits that fail to keep up with earnings, let alone speed recipients out of poverty. The cost of poverty in cash and social dislocation is far higher than the cost of making sure all families thrive. Even so, the price of abolishing it is very, very high. What will it take? Notionally, another £28bn a year if it were to be done entirely through direct redistribution in cash through tax credits. How much is that? It is the cost of buying, perhaps, a new Trident replacement every single year forever. Or look at it another way, it would still only be 2.5% of GDP, not at all unaffordable.

But of course it's all more difficult than that. To pour so much cash into credits and benefits would be politically impossible: it would wreck work incentives to pay out-of-work parents more than they could earn. And anyway, cash alone does not solve everything.

It will take vastly more spending on social programmes, on education and skills in perpetuity. Consider that Sure Start children's centres are multiplying by seven with only double the cash, at risk of spreading their effect too thinly. Countless other good, proven schemes are underfunded, not spreading out or shelved for lack of money. Yesterday John Hutton suggested there wouldn't even be enough money to roll out his own Pathways to Work scheme with equal attention to all who need help, although it scores phenomenally well in getting people off incapacity benefit and back to work. Instead he would prioritise parents, to help more children out of poverty. If even a scheme with such a rapid payback to the exchequer in saved benefits can't get funds, what hope is there for programmes that only pay back when these children become parents?

Poor John Hutton did well in his reply to the devastating Rowntree report, though he left more questions than he could answer: the solution lies in hands above his pay grade. But he said what mattered. He called this report a milestone: "We accept it. We accept that we will not hit the target if we go on as we are. And we are never going to change that target." So there is the conundrum, and it's the same one for the Tories. Both parties will need to lay out their own statistically convincing road map to get where they say they are going.

What's to be done? Dreaming Swedish dreams on near US tax levels leads to this impossibilism. Sooner or later, it has to be spelled out in public. Does Britain really want to be more Scandinavian and if so, will we pay the price? Poverty will never be abolished without more equal incomes and lifestyles. It takes higher taxes to pay for better public services and education from infancy. The way we live has to become fairer in every way, without such sharp social divisions in wealth and opportunity, and with no housing ghettos or school segregation. It took Sweden some 60 years of social democratic determination - unlikely by 2020, but at least the raw target could be hit. No society as grossly unequal as ours has ever cut child poverty significantly: wherever mega wealth is allowed to let rip, there will be severe poverty too.

The Work Foundation points to these hard figures: in 1980 top directors in FTSE companies were paid 10 times the average worker in their companies. By 1990 the gap had multiplied to 31.5 times. And by 2002 the top dogs were paid an enormous 75.7 times more than their average employee. It is a statistical and social impossibility to pretend that we can really abolish child poverty in a society shaped like that. Do we want to change it, or not? It's a political choice, not an economic law.

Politicians alone can't do the heavy lifting of public persuasion, though it's time they stopped running from the debate. It needs all who command trust - the major charities, the professionals in health, education, crime, police, judges and faith groups too, alongside all who rub up against poverty and its pernicious effects. Since both main parties (though not the Lib Dems) are signed up to abolition, it's time for a Royal Commission to draw up the roadmaps towards that shared goal.

Polly Toynbee
7 July 2006

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1814663,00.html

 
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