UK OPINION
Pity the poor children left to Blair’s
care
When people come to look back on the legacy of new
Labour they will feel a deep indignation that, for some reason, is
expressed at the moment only by very few. Labour has always prided
itself on being the caring party, champion of the underprivileged and
the vulnerable. Yet the people who have done worst out of new Labour are
children, particularly the most deprived children. Despite the posturing
and promises, despite the thousands of initiatives and the billions of
taxpayers’ money, Britain’s most vulnerable “kids”, as the prime
minister calls them, are in many ways worse off than in 1997. In others
they are no better off. What a legacy. What a disgrace.
Labour’s education policies have proved a very
expensive failure, particularly for the least privileged children. In
August the government admitted it had failed to reach its own targets
for standards in primary schools. In September it had to acknowledge the
same failure in secondary schools. Meanwhile it emerged that private
school children are on average two years ahead of state school children.
A study also found that private day schools cost less than state schools
if true costings are compared like for like. The government has also
presided over a decline in social mobility.
Equally bad is last week’s startling news of the
failure of the Sure Start scheme for deprived children under five. Of
all Labour’s projects this was one of the dearest and most vaunted. It
was inspired by the American Head Start programme and since its launch
here in 2001 the government has spent £3 billion on a range of
pre-school programmes in targeted areas, such as childcare, parenting
classes, training to help mothers into work, health advice and various
other schemes. The idea was to lift the neediest children out of the
cycle of poverty by helping them and their parents, all too often their
lone mothers.
However, an independent academic research project by
Birkbeck College found that Sure Start isn’t delivering anything.
Researchers found no discernible difference in children’s development,
language and behaviour between those living in Sure Start areas and
those elsewhere. It also showed that some children of teenage mothers —
those often most in need of effective help — did worse in Sure Start
areas than elsewhere.
It simply defies belief. This was a serious
government-sponsored evaluation involving 8,000 children under five and
costing £20m. Both the National Audit Office and the Commons select
committee on education have already been critical of Sure Start too.
The government’s response is simply to say that it is
too early to evaluate the scheme, even though it was ministers who put
pressure on researchers to get some results out quickly. Almost
incredibly, they are pressing on with plan A, to increase the Sure Start
centres from 500 to 2,500 over the next three years, and add 1,000 more
by 2010. This is so preposterous it would be funny, if it weren’t so
serious. American findings about Head Start are highly debatable and
inconclusive too.
Yet Tony has faith, so Sure Start must continue.
There’s even an element of loaves and fishes feeding the 5,000 about his
faith, because although Sure Start centres are to increase more than
fivefold, the government is only planning to double its spending. But
then social engineering was always a matter of blind faith and wishful
thinking.
The real problem for children in inner cities is
family breakdown. Programmes such as Sure Start only tackle the
symptoms, not the malady. They aggravate the disease too. Until recently
politicians were afraid to say that broken families and lone parenthood
are bad for children, particularly for the poor, even though there has
for years been an incontrovertible mass of evidence. It was seen as
judgmental and discriminatory, or at any rate bound to frighten the
voters.
Even now the Conservative leadership contender David
Davis is wary of making this obvious point. As he said last week:
“If a Conservative politician observes that
children have a better chance of living fulfilled and gainful lives
when brought up by two happily married parents, he is likely to be
pilloried as narrow-minded.”
That is still true, although as a lone parented child
he is well placed to speak out. It may be some time before other
Conservative politicians drum up the conviction to talk seriously
family-friendly. Meanwhile there are a few brave voices crying out in
the wilderness — some of the right-of-centre independent think tanks
such as Civitas and the Centre for Policy Studies, which have the luxury
of indifference to popularity. They have been saying for some time that
family breakdown, and the poverty and social breakdown that follows from
it, is encouraged by government intervention. The tax and benefit system
provides incentives for couples to split up. They are better off apart
(or “off the books”, concealing their partners). It makes it just as
desirable for a teenage girl to have a baby on her own as any other
option she might have.
People on the left and even on the right have
passionately resisted the truth for years. But now it is beginning to be
impossible to ignore the evidence. Last week Civitas published a survey
showing the perverse incentives of Labour’s tax and benefits system in
comparison with family friendly provisions in France and Germany.
Needless to say, they have far less family breakdown and lone
parenthood. We have more lone parents and teenage pregnancies than
anywhere else in western Europe.
Here when an unemployed unpartnered person becomes a
lone parent their financial situation improves substantially, unlike in
France or Germany. Here it is financially advantageous for couples with
children, where both parents are on the minimum wage or unemployed, to
part. The tax credit system favours children who live with a lone parent
rather than with both. Fathers who work and stay married (or partnered)
are penalised. They would be better off divorced.
The figures are on the websites. Civitas publishes
them. So does the Centre for Policy Studies, which revealed equally
startling evidence earlier this year. We have a government that is
actively promoting family breakdown and the evils that follow from it,
and then applying expensive sticking plaster to gaping social wounds.
Odd how few people yet feel angry.
Minette Marrin
18 September 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1785363,00.html
