Despite government rhetoric about reducing poverty and inequalities – and the slew of policies and laws to achieve this – the poorest people in the UK are being penalised and the rich are getting richer.
The Queen’s Speech last December included the government’s plans ‘to promote equality, fight discrimination and introduce transparency in the workplace to help address the difference in pay between men and women’ and ‘to improve incentives for people to move from benefits into sustained employment’. These duly became the Equality and Welfare Reform Bills.
Along with a Child Poverty Bill (currently under consultation), these measures aim to enshrine in law government commitments to reduce child poverty and tackle entrenched inequalities. But while the Equality and Child Poverty Bills are more needed than ever, the Welfare Reform Bill could hardly come at a worse time.
Back in 1999, a new, hopeful and ambitious Labour government boldly committed itself to halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it altogether by 2020. Economic stability and paid employment were at the heart of the strategy: moving poor people off benefits into a buoyant and expanding labour market would lift their children from poverty. The government, notoriously at ease with the ‘filthy rich’, redirected support to families with children by stealth, but failed to make a virtue of the redistribution of income.
A series of policies and initiatives were launched to reduce health and educational inequalities, empower communities and increase economic and emotional assets. Good early years provision (‘better than any state handouts’) would enhance life chances and school reforms would bring about personalised education and greater choice.
Arguing that the welfare state was failing to ‘provide security for those who cannot work’, ’to encourage work for those who can’ and ‘to ensure support goes to the right people’, the government unleashed an ambitious reform programme based on ‘rights and responsibilities’. Lofty rhetoric about empowerment and individualised support were accompanied by increasingly punitive policies to get people off benefits and into work.
Ten years on, Britain is a more unequal country than at any time since modern records began in the early 1960s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Figures for 2007/08 show that progress on child poverty stalled, and even rose on some measures. Pensioner poverty has also remained static and one in seven working-age adults without dependent children is poor.
Meanwhile, children in the UK are among the unhappiest in the developed world. On a league table produced by the University of York, the UK came twenty-fourth out of 29 European countries in terms of child wellbeing. Only Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta did worse.
But there are other problems with the government’s approach. Although it is now clear to all that a benign, unregulated approach towards the most affluent in society was a mistake, a prescriptive, punitive and judgemental approach is still being applied to the poorest groups. And the reliance on paid employment as the basis of equality has compounded an already eroded welfare state, society’s principal weapon against social exclusion.
The fact that most poor children have a parent in work raises questions about the quality of jobs on offer. For lone parents, moving in and out of sub-prime jobs generates constant changes in income and benefits and tax credit entitlement. For their children, moving in and out of erratic and sometimes sub-prime childcare provision damages wellbeing. Yet choice about whether a job is viable or childcare appropriate is being eroded — but only for low-income parents.
Meanwhile, despite all the legislation to reduce discrimination in the workplace, huge disparities remain — particularly for women, disabled people and some black and ethnic minority groups — not least in Whitehall departments.
The government’s failure to practise what it preaches is stretching its credibility and integrity to breaking point. In 2005, at a Fabian Society seminar on social mobility, former health secretary Alan Milburn announced that ‘decent, hard-working families’ needed to know that there were ‘fair rules in play’. It was, he claimed, ‘failed asylum seekers and benefit cheats’ who were ‘undermining incentives to work hard and play by the rules’. Current headlines would suggest otherwise.
The press furore over some MPs’ flexible interpretation of what ‘playing by the rules’ means on the expenses front follows media outrage at the imposition of a 50% tax on high earners. But while the adult rate of Jobseeker’s Allowance is worth £3,344 a year — one-forty-fifth of the £150,000 tax threshold — policies that might reduce the income of benefit claimants who don’t ‘play by the rules’ are wending their way through Parliament largely unopposed.
If this inequitable situation continues, legislation designed to reduce inequalities will be viewed not so much as an attempt to safeguard the many good things put in place by this government, but a last ditch attempt to divert attention from some of its failures.
Gabrielle Preston is policy and research officer at the Child Poverty Action Group
