“I want this message to go out loud and clear….”

Today marks the end of the government consultation on ‘better measures’ of child poverty. The consultation has generated lots of debate and a number of interesting respones have been published recently, including a letter in The Guardian today from established academics in the field, along with an acommpanying article which accused ‘ministers of moving the goalposts’

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published their response today, as did the IFS and CPAG published theirs earlier this week. An interesting article in the New Statesman asks why we are not more outraged by child poverty.

We will publish a summary of our response early next week and if anyone would like a copy of our full response please get in touch.*

But, to mark the end of the consultation period, I though it was worth revisiting a speech that David Cameron gave as Leader of the Opposition in November 2006. The speech was delivered as the Scarman Lecture and was entitled ‘Tackling poverty is a social responsibility’. In the speech, there are a number of interesting sentences which will be of interest to people who have responded to the consultation:

“In the past, we used to think of poverty only in absolute terms – meaning straightforward material deprivation. That’s not enough. We need to think of poverty in relative terms – the fact that some people lack those things which others in society take for granted. So I want this message to go out loud and clear: the Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty.”

“Because as well as absolute poverty, there is relative poverty. We exist as part of a community, as members of society. Even if we are not destitute, we still experience poverty if we cannot afford things that society regards as essential.”

“So poverty is relative – and those who pretend otherwise are wrong. This has consequences for Conservative thinking. Tackling poverty is not just about a safety net below which people must not fall. We must think in terms of an escalator, always moving upwards, lifting people out of poverty.”

For me, however, the most interesting quote is this one – “I believe that poverty is an economic waste and a moral disgrace”.

Kind regards,

Steve

*The reason we haven’t/won’t ‘publish’ the full response is because we used the consultation form to answer the questions and it’s not particularly eas to translate this into a blog…….

 

Measuring child poverty: A response to the consultation

In a slightly longer post than usual, Professor John Veit-Wilson has kindly given us permission to publish the first part of his response to the government consultation on child poverty measures.

Guest post by Professor John Veit-Wilson, Newcastle University

Introduction: What is the nature of the consultation?

This consultation is not about how to measure child poverty but about how to describe it better. Mr Duncan Smith has stated clearly in the House of Commons that the decision on ‘measurement’ has already been taken — “Income will be part of it, but not the dominant part” [Hansard 21.1.13 col 130]. Similarly, an informed report stated that —

the key aim of the new measure was to give a richer picture of the experience of poverty. This will enable the Government to look at different combinations of problems experienced by low income children aiding understanding of problems and facilitating better responses.

The status quo will not be an option: even if there is disagreement on whether a new measure is a good thing, our understanding is that it is going to happen and Commission will want to advice [sic] the Government on how best to do it as well as consideration of wider issues. [SMCPC staff members quoted in minutes of meeting with academics 18.1.13.]

This consultation is therefore simply about how best to present that fact to the British public. It is an exercise in market-testing the public acceptability of the predetermined message and not an enquiry into different types of measurement.

The consultation document does nevertheless present it as being about measuring child poverty. In their Forewords, the Secretary of State and the Minister of State make it clear —

• that they simply seek public agreement that child poverty can best be measured in terms of descriptions of the characteristics of families in poverty;

• that they do not believe that low incomes are a sufficient description of what it means to be poor;

• that they want to count the number of children in poverty in terms of characteristics which reflect some of the outcomes, the consequences for children of the lack of resources at the household and community levels;

• that they believe that the personal characteristics of the poor children’s parent or parents are among the criteria which distinguish poor children from children who are not poor.

So either the DWP and DfE are genuinely confused between measurement and description, or they are being deliberately misleading. This is a serious matter.

Two examples to illustrate the confusion.

Personal characteristics distributed across the wider population cannot be used to distinguish children in poverty from those who are not. This is obvious if we consider a couple of common examples, drunk driving and flu. Identifying and counting all the bad drivers is not the same as measuring and counting drivers with excess blood alcohol. Similarly, flu victims suffer many forms of malaise, but counting all the people with headaches, pains and temperatures will not identify those infected with flu virus. If a government cares about excess alcohol consumption or preventing flu, it needs to identify the causal agent not the consequent condition and behaviour.

A simple way of testing whether or not the symptom is a criterion for measurement of the phenomenon in question or even a description of it is to ask, if you abolished the symptom would you have abolished the phenomenon? Even if no one appeared to be driving badly, it would not prove that they did not have excess alcohol in their bloodstream and be liable to accidents. Similarly, taking analgesics against headaches will not cure flu but simply mask the symptoms.

The Policy Exchange, which published the original proposals for descriptors of child poverty on which this consultation document is based [in 2002 and 2011], has recently suggested adding such descriptors as children who have been in the care system or whose parents have a criminal conviction [2013]. It really is remarkable that intelligent people can confuse the phenomenon of poverty with so many stereotypes of social problems which are found right across the social spectrum, some of which may be exacerbated by poverty but have no necessary connection with it. They may not even be the outcomes of poverty or deprivation which the Policy Exchange authors assert. This is muddle or mendacity.

Muddle or mendacity?

Are the DWP and DfE (and Policy Exchange before them) confused between measurement and description, or are they are being deliberately misleading? Either explanation suggests that the capacity for serious enquiry for policy making has broken down under this government. It looks instead as if the government is starting from a position of deliberate and insouciant ignorance about a well investigated and documented subject. There is a large existing body of both UK, European and international material on measuring poverty, built up over many decades, which has been disregarded by those who drafted this document, if they were even aware of it in the first place.

If this weren’t simply a marketing exercise, the government would have consulted on how to apply what is already known to improving the current statutory poverty measure. For instance, the DWP carried out a similar consultation on measuring child poverty in 2002 and the government could have studied the evidence submitted then. Many of the responses to the current consultation will probably repeat what has been publicly said many times before, though perhaps this time it is to readers to whom it is largely unfamiliar and new.

Since the government is already using public opinion to defend and justify its confusion between measurement and description (as in the DWP polling mentioned below), and since it is already promoting its decision as a better way to measure poverty and not merely to describe some of its characteristics, no response would be complete without an explanation of the basic facts and methods to those who have to read the responses and who may have to summarise their contents for politicians, officials and press officers.

I’m therefore responding in simple terms (as far as possible in a complicated subject) and without the usual scholarly paraphernalia. All that evidence already exists somewhere in the DWP or is readily available elsewhere to anyone who genuinely seeks it. Other experts will certainly refer to it, so the government can’t claim any lack of information or expert advice about what is known on the topic of measuring poverty in the UK.

Confusion between describing symptoms and diagnosing causes.

Of course many respondents will agree with Mr Duncan Smith and Policy Exchange that the conditions and characteristics which exercise them and which the document mentions may be found among people in poverty. The DWP report of the telephone polling on Public Views on Child Poverty [January 2013] shows respondents agreed that they associate certain conditions with ‘growing up in poverty’, just as they would agree that bad driving is associated with excess alcohol and headaches with flu.

But however strongly the public agrees that it associates certain deprived conditions with poverty, that does not make the conditions those things which identify poor people and distinguish them from people who are not poor. A moment’s thought shows that addiction and family breakdown are sadly shared experiences right across society from the poorest to the very richest people. It has been said that superfluous wealth may be a cause of both addiction and family breakdown, as so many rich people seem to suffer from both of these conditions.

Conditions such as addiction or family breakdown are known to be caused by a variety of factors, but while too little or too much income may exacerbate them, they cannot be used as indicators of poverty — or if they could, then equally as indicators of superfluous wealth. Nor can the strength of public agreement be taken as a defence or support of the government’s confused or misleading position, just as the world is not flat even if 90% of the public agree that this is how it looks. Child poverty is far too serious a problem to be treated so ignorantly.

It really is very important that the government does not pretend that public support for what it calls ‘dimensions’ is taken as any kind of scientific endorsement of their use as part of a poverty measurement tool.

The telephone poll, like the consultation, shows that the DWP approach only makes sense if understood as a market testing exercise. If people respond to market research surveys that they believe green food is more nutritious than brown food (whether or not it actually is), the manufacturer will dye the food green in order to sell more of it. Endorsing the government’s dubious political marketing practices is not what social scientists’ and research methodologists’ roles are about. But since the consultation document claims to want to improve measurement, the next section outlines what the government would have to do if it actually wanted to be serious about it.

Measuring poverty — defining or describing?

To measure the quantity of something you need to be able to identify and count it. Identification means ‘what this is’ which is ‘not that’. Take a simple example. You can’t count men in a crowd unless you can distinguish them from women. You can describe the clothes which men might wear, but women might wear them, too. You will then have counted all those wearing trousers for example, but not have distinguished the men from the women. If you use skirts as your criterion, you have the problem of counting kilts. Or you could use height or any other characteristics which may be shared by men and others. But in each case you run up against the same problem — you are not using the single criterion which separates men from women so that you can count men.

The problem with counting children in poverty is just the same. You can describe all the characteristics which children in poverty have, such as are listed in the document with an invitation to supply more, but unless you find one which children not in poverty do not have, you will not have found anything which helps you to count children in poverty. Thus when the document asks for better ways of counting children in poverty, what it is in fact doing is asking for better descriptions of the lives of children who already experience poverty. That is what the public opinion poll supported. It is not what the consultation ostensibly claims to be about.

If you want to use descriptions like those in the document as the means for distinguishing poverty from non-poverty (as is implied by the document), the result will be that millions more children in the UK will be counted as being poor (as even the latest Policy Exchange document emphasised). That may or may not be true in other senses, but it is hardly what the government wants to show. For example, if you want to describe men as being those who wear trousers and you count all the trouser-wearers, you will have vastly more ‘men’ in the population (but miss the kilt-wearers) and fewer women than is the case when more reliable methods of distinguishing men from women are used.

So if you count children in poverty by such matters as broken families or parents who do not have paid work or suffer addictions (and many other similar aspects mentioned by the document) you will count children right across the whole population, even those in the Royal Family. This will not tell you what you want to know.

I hope this elementary point is clear, because it affects the entire document and possibly also responses to it. There is a solution, and it is this — the one thing that has always been known and tested, which distinguishes children in poverty from children with similar problems and characteristics but who are not in poverty, is that their parents lack sufficient household resources, chiefly income, to enable the family to cope with the problems and achieve a normal socially-included life according to society’s usual standards.

Lacking power over resources to achieve a minimally adequate level of living and that factor alone is what separates poor people from people who are not poor.

That is why members of the Royal Family are not poor even though they suffer many common human problems like those mentioned in the document as identifying poor children. That is why Mrs Rausing, the multi-millionaire whose addiction killed her, was not poor.

The challenge for any government who wanted a better measure of child poverty is to find a better way of identifying who are the families with inadequate incomes than the present method of counting families whose incomes fall seriously below the median household income, whether or not the incomes are adequate or inadequate. If the consultation were to focus on that issue instead of misrepresenting other factors, it would be a remarkable achievement, since no UK government has ever faced up to that challenge.

What really is meant by ‘child poverty’?

Poverty cannot be defined in any way one likes. Its technical definition in research should not stray too far from the everyday meaning of the word.

Children normally live in families with both or either of their natural or adoptive parents. To speak about ‘child poverty’ is therefore to address family poverty, since conservatives and liberals agree it is no business of government to interfere in internal family matters unless children are damaged by abuse or neglect. If children live in poverty, especially with consequences which damage them, government is responsible for removing the cause of the poverty to protect the children. That is an elementary political principle in all non-totalitarian states, conservative as well as social-democrat, except those where government has abandoned any pretence of protecting all citizens against dangers (as is the case in some individualistic liberal states).

It is a fundamental principle of our free society, one to which the Secretary of State has often alluded, that people should be free to make their own choices and to act responsibly, a principle which depends crucially on their having power over the necessary resources with which to do so. To lack the resources demonstrably needed with which to make such choices is to vitiate the implementation of the principle itself. For example, everyone supports the idea of freedom of choice in the market, but if one lacks enough cash with which to enter the market and exercise one’s choices, one is not free. Nor is one free if the market offers no choices at the price one can afford on the income one has. Children whose parents do not have the freedom of choice which adequate resources gives them to provide what children need, are not free. Governments which believe market methods are best are therefore logically responsible for ensuring that all families have sufficient resources to enter the market.

Similarly, parents without paid employment cannot exercise their responsibility to escape poverty through paid work if they lack willing employers to offer it to them. Employers will not take on staff if they cannot make a profit from their labour or if they are not themselves paid to do so. Parental willpower does not bring willing employers into being. As William Beveridge (a lifelong expert on unemployment questions) wrote in his celebrated Report,

… the only satisfactory test of unemployment is an offer of work.

Thus to emphasise and exemplify the point about personal characteristics which exercises Mr Duncan Smith, the responsibility to ensure that all parents seeking paid work can find it lies on their potential employers and behind them the government’s control over the economic system. No amount of enquiry into the personal characteristics of the parents in ‘workless’ households (Mr Duncan Smith’s first example of dimensions of child poverty) will help the government to understand why children are poor or reduce their poverty.

This example also shows that the crucial element is the payment for the work, not the fact of work itself. If the wage or salary is too low, the family remains in poverty, as shown by the fact that most children currently counted in poverty in the UK live in working households.

If the government wants to use parental worklessness as a criterion of poverty, it must focus on the availability of paid work and the adequacy of incomes in or out of work, not on the willpower of those seeking adequately paid work which is not currently available to the parents however great their willpower. This point is such an elementary one, but one which is frequently denied by political rhetoric like Mr Duncan Smith’s. We must therefore disentangle the many issues similarly raised by the consultation document.

Mr Duncan Smith’s tenuous grasp of the difference between rhetorical assertion and economic and social reality is demonstrated by his frequent repetition of the myth about ‘three generations of families and even communities where no one has ever worked’. He of course means employment, but the most strenuous efforts to find any such people or communities have been completely fruitless because the most intensive research effort has totally failed to find any of them. It is fair to assume that, like zombies, they almost certainly do not exist, since even two workless generations were ‘a very rare phenomenon’.

While the DWP may think political rhetoric is an acceptable basis for market research, it bears no relationship to real social science research such as is needed to address the urgent problems of child poverty.

What is the common understanding of poverty itself?

Sadly, the consultation document contains confusions between poverty’s causes, conditions, correlates and consequences as if they were all relevant to measuring the poverty of children. To document the consequences of poverty in a reliable manner may be commendable, but to suggest that they offer a better measure of the extent of child poverty in the UK suggests extremely muddled thinking about what poverty is, as understood not only in the UK but generally throughout the civilised world, and how best to measure it.

The government is of course free to adopt whatever concepts, definitions and measures of poverty it chooses. But its idiosyncratic approach undermines the public credibility of its claims. The more it diverges from what people understand as the essence of poverty, the less the public will believe the government understands the real problems or wants to do anything real about them.

This would matter if the government wants to be taken seriously about its claim to develop a more methodologically robust measure. Of course, if the aim of the marketing consultation is merely to sell the already determined policy instead of devising a better measure, then the credibility of the measure is not an issue for the government even if it is for everyone else.

The following paragraphs try to disentangle and demystify some of the confusions displayed.

Few people would disagree with the World Bank’s definition of poverty —

‘Poverty’ can be said to exist in a given society when one or more persons do not attain a level of material well-being deemed to constitute a reasonable minimum by the standards of that society.

This is however a static definition: poverty as the condition in which people do not attain the minimum socially approved level of living. A more dynamic definition raising the issue of causes is that given by the leading figure in 20^th century poverty research, the late Professor Peter Townsend —

People are relatively deprived if they cannot obtain, at all or sufficiently, the conditions of life – that is, the diets, amenities, standards and services – which allow them to play the roles, participate in the relationships and follow the customary behaviour which is expected of them by virtue of their membership of society. If they lack or are denied resources to obtain access to these conditions of life and so fulfil membership of society they may be said to be in poverty.

Politicians and others often misunderstand or misrepresent the meaning of ‘relative poverty’ or ‘relative deprivation’. ‘Relative’ does not only mean one mere statistical position relative to another. Its ordinary everyday meaning is being deprived relative to the common standards of the society at the time at which the deprivation is suffered. The relativity is to minimum social standards, and not just to numbers as in the mistaken assumption.

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights affirmed in 2001 that poverty is —

… a human condition characterized by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.

A succinct formulation of these definitions of poverty is —

… an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities.

Most considered definitions of poverty focus on it as the lack of resources and not on the consequences such as poor conditions or coping behaviours, and some emphasise the dynamic of the enforced lack or deprivation, to make it clear that this is indeed a matter of lack of power and not of choice.

The consultation document takes it for granted that the consequences of children’s relative deprivation is the essence of the child poverty to be measured, but that confuses the exclusion from customary lifestyles and perceived necessities with the condition and its cause, the sustained, chronic and enforced lack of resources with which to buy inclusion.

This raises the questions what are the resources and why are they lacking. They may be an individual family’s flows of disposable cash income or stocks of assets such as wealth, housing and so on. Or they may be collective resources such as Mr Duncan Smith implies when he refers to poor housing, troubled areas or failing schools. But individual purchasing power cannot bring a supply of well-maintained and spacious housing into existence, cannot see that the environmental and socially needed facilities of an area are supplied, or improve the quality of schools. These are matters demanding collective action, and usually also demanding levels of collective resources which can only be mobilised by governments at local or national levels if they themselves have not only the statutory powers and resources to do so but the political willpower.

It is essential that politicians such as Mr Duncan Smith who believe that markets are the right and proper response in such situations must try to understand that questioning that view is not simply ideological, but it is logical and functional. Private (profit-seeking) markets are peculiarly bad at responding to individual need for the simple reason that they can only respond to effective demand (in the economic sense). But the demand which people in poverty put forward to relieve their needs is not ‘effective’ in the economic sense because it is not backed by enough money to enable the markets to be profitable. As a moralist, Mr Duncan Smith should be troubled by the failure of his preferred market panacea to cure the problems which trouble him.

The more the government focuses on such collective aspects of deprivation in its proposed measure, the more that the findings will reflect on the government’s failure to make provision to overcome the deprivations itself, and the more it emphasises that the experience of poverty is not a reflection of parents’ capacities alone. If the government does not wish to offer its critics a rod to beat it with, this would seem politically foolish, quite apart from being inappropriate to a poverty measure. (Of course, as I said before, if the aim of the consultation is merely to sell the already determined policy instead of devising a better measure, then the illogicality of the measure is not an issue for the government even if it is for everyone else.)

Whose minimum standards should be applied?

But the prior question which frames the issue is, what are the socially-approved minimum standards and to whom are they applied and by whom? Are they the personal standards of the politicians in power at some point, or are they those of the population in whose society this poverty exists? This is no mere rhetorical question but goes to the heart of what it means to live in a free society. When governments decide ‘what is best’ for the population we call them totalitarian, but free democratic societies let the people themselves discuss and decide what are the reasonable minimum standards for everyone in society.

Of course the process of arriving at such decisions may be a complicated one in large and complex societies such as that of the UK, but it remains a fundamental principle that in a free society it is the people and not the government which decides on such important matters as this one. Only totalitarian governments insist that the government standards shall take precedence over the standards which the population would apply to itself. Both of the parties in the UK’s current government assert their deep-seated commitments to freedom and democracy, allied to a rejection of totalitarian dictation and a distaste for interference in people’s private lives. These essential basic principles must therefore be reflected in the measures which the government uses for such an important question as the poverty which damages children and their futures in the UK.

To measure child poverty therefore also demands clarity about the minimum standards which this UK society (not any current government politicians) applies to define and identify poverty and the individual and collective resources which can overcome it. Given the importance which this government places on markets rather than public service methods of dealing with problems, and given that this society is a largely marketised and consumer-oriented one, Mr Laws the Minister of State is right to say in his Foreword that —

… the lack of a decent income is and always will be at the heart of what it means to be poor.

But the other factors which he and Mr Duncan Smith mention are either consequences of a lack of income or are widely experienced. A moment’s thought will show that every one of the bullet point factors which Mr Duncan Smith mentions in his Foreword can be managed, made tolerable or even overcome if one has enough money.

This is a crucially important point for the credible measurement of poverty. Conditions and characteristics such as worklessness, problem debt, poor housing or troubled areas, unstable family environments, failing schools, occupational and social skills, and even poor health, are not characteristics which distinguish poor people from the non-poor population. In this context it can’t be repeated too often that even members of the Royal Family have over time displayed characteristics such as worklessness and lack of skills (in the sense of employability), problem debt, unstable family relationships such as divorce and single parenthood, and poor health. But in each and every case, and also including housing and schooling, having enough money has enabled that particular family and most others like them right across society’s income spectrum to escape from or deal with the problems.

This absolutely key point is not just a matter of personal opinion but has been tested in robust and reputable international research. An extensive European study of the characteristics of people suffering poverty and social exclusions found —

… the defining characteristic of the poor is that they have a material standard of living that is socially regarded as unacceptable; the poor do not share any other characteristic or combination of characteristics that distinguishes them from the non-poor. The poor are not necessarily excluded in the sense of having low status or being restricted in their social contacts. They cannot be identified on the basis of behaviour, or any other observable characteristic only.

What does distinguish those people who are poor from those who are not poor is that poor people do not have enough ‘decent income’, as Mr Laws describes it, to buy their way out of the problems we may all experience. If we were to use the characteristics Mr Duncan Smith describes in order to count people in poverty, the obvious question would be why have you chosen the consequences when you could far more simply and justly have chosen their cause?

My response to the consultation’s numbered questions is therefore coloured by this core understanding — it is not the consequences of not having a decent income which is the key to identifying and measuring poverty, it is the lack of household disposable cash resources at a level which allows parents and children —

… to play the roles, participate in the relationships and follow the customary behaviour which is expected of them by virtue of their membership of society.

But if the government’s implicit political aim is to draw attention away from adequate incomes to mere behavioural consequences, it is surprising to choose to do so in ways which are likely to suggest that the numbers in poverty are even greater than they are by ‘decent income’ measures, and take in large sections of the non-poor population who may resent being labelled in a way which the government itself uses to stigmatise people.

What’s wrong with using the existing HBAI measure to count people in poverty?

The internationally-used HBAI income inequality currently used by the UK to measure and count households at risk of poverty has been criticised because it measures income inequality and not income adequacy. Income inequalities demand to be measured in their own right, but they are not a substitute for measures of income adequacy.

Household incomes above the median may be insufficient to achieve the socially-defined minimum decency level of living, as was reported to be the case by research in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet system (even majorities of the population may be in poverty by their own standards). But the only credible alternatives to the HBAI measure which make any logical or socially-recognisable sense are those based on robust and reliable social science evidence of UK society’s minimum standards and the incomes needed on average to achieve them. So whatever the reasons for the government wanting a better measure of child poverty, the place to start is with the household disposable income measure, not with consequences.

The next section describes the principles of any good, serviceable poverty measure, as set out by the US Government’s intensive study in 1995. Any good measure must obviously distinguish between those who do and those who do not experience the condition at issue, avoiding all confusions between causes and consequences like those discussed above. The point is not that the detailed US proposals should be adopted by the UK — they are inappropriate in many respects — but that the UK government should pay careful attention to the principles which have been thoroughly investigated and clearly enunciated. They deserve attention in the UK.

Principles of any good serviceable poverty measure.

The US Congress’s Joint Economic Committee commissioned the US National Research Council to carry out a study —

to address concepts, measurement methods, and information needs for a poverty measure, but not necessarily to specify a new poverty ‘line’.

It recommended the retention of “the basic notion of poverty as material deprivation’”. That was the US approach to poverty, worth noting in a country at least as preoccupied with the behaviour of people in poverty as is the UK government!

What’s also crucially important is its emphasis that it was not concerned with the different question of the level of means-tested income maintenance benefits such as social assistance. A lot of people muddle these two distinct aspects. Public opinion about the minimum standards of decent living which should apply to the whole population may not coincide or be comparable with views about the adequacy or inadequacy of the social security or social assistance systems. They must not be confused with each other.

The US study concluded —

Our recommended changes are based on the best scientific evidence available, our best judgement, and three additional criteria.

First, a poverty measure should be acceptable and understandable to the public.

Second, a poverty measure should be statistically defensible. In this regard, the concepts underlying the thresholds and the definition of resources should be consistent.

Third, a poverty measure should be feasible to implement with data that are available or that can fairly readily be obtained.

Conclusion

If the UK government really were concerned with counting children in poverty, it would not want to adopt any methods or criteria which are less rigorous than those recommended by the US government’s official expert panel — the best scientific evidence, minimum standards which are acceptable to and understood by the population as a whole, a statistically defensible, robust and reliable measuring tool based on consistent concepts and definitions, and one that is administratively feasible based on available data.

This is the first part of a response to the government consultation on ‘better’ measures for child poverty from Professor John Veit-Wilson, Newcastle University.

Perfect Storms

Guest post by Jeremy Cripps, Chief Executive, Children North East

In the weeks after storm Sandy flooded Manhattan it’s sobering to be reminded of the chaos that turbulent conditions can cause. The same goes for economic weather as meteorology. Children England, the national membership organisation for voluntary organisations working with children, young people and families, have published a report called ‘Perfect Storms’. The report models and provides case studies showing the cumulative impact of the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures on children’s charities and their statutory partners. It describes two worrying and interrelated ‘perfect storms’ affecting the voluntary and public sectors, and those they support.

First the ‘Business Storm’ threatens the financial survival of charities – individual giving has remained static, the financial crisis reduced investment income, social enterprise income (e.g. running paid training for professionals) has fallen and the deep public sector funding cuts have increased competition for the grants made by trusts, foundations and the national lottery. Costs have risen too due to inflation, higher fuel bills and the costs involved in public fundraising.

Most importantly at the same time demand for services, both in the number of people seeking support and the severity of their problems, has increased dramatically. As a result, staff and volunteer numbers have fallen, reducing service capacity, while those remaining in post are increasingly suffering from burnout.

Second the ‘Locality Storm’ demonstrates these pressures are not isolated, they mirror and interact with pressures on local authority children’s services – both sectors are experiencing higher costs, reduced funding and increased demand.

The consequences are that local support arrangements are starting to break down, threatening the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children, young people and families. With many services rationing the support that they provide, principally through waiting lists and raised access thresholds, and others closing altogether, people in need are being pushed towards whatever support they can find. Public sector services and contracts with charities increasingly focus on crisis support at the expense of early intervention, potentially storing up further trouble for the future.

This analysis is based on discussions with Children England member organisations all over the country. It is also a true representation of the circumstances for my organisation, Children North East. Our total income for the year 2011-2012 was 25% less than the previous year, but during the year our services reached 1,033 children, and 5,751 young people, that is 65% more than the previous year. We also worked with adults in 944 families. All this is achieved by 41 part-time, 19 full-time and 6 sessional staff and 111 volunteers.

The children, young people and families coming to or referred to us have more serious difficulties than before, for example we have noticed a marked increase in the number of young people who are self-harming, talking about or attempting suicide. Increasingly it is the norm for our staff to take responsibility to coordinate other services and professionals involved with the child, young person or family. Whilst it might be expected that trained staff take on these roles as part of ‘new ways of working’, there is a serious question to be answered about what it is reasonable to expect of volunteers in these situations.

We are seeing widening gaps in the safety net of public sector provision. For example neither local authority children’s services nor NHS child psychiatry departments have provided an effective service to families of children with behaviour problems, but as both services raise referral thresholds to limit the provision and increase waiting lists to manage demand there is nowhere for those parents to go. Some of them end up with voluntary organisations like Children North East who are not commissioned to provide that type of service but do what they can anyway driven by their charitable objectives such as relief of distress or support for the vulnerable.

In effect our services are taking the place of some of what used to be done by the public sector, but at the same time funding for our services from the public sector is declining. I do not want us to mimic public services and raise our thresholds or create waiting lists because in my opinion the role of the voluntary sector is to stop people falling through the gaps in public sector services. However it is not clear what the solution is.

Children England found their members thought the scenarios described by Perfect Storms are inevitable but unintentional, they also feel that they are deep-rooted and predate the economic downturn that started in 2008, though have been exacerbated by the recession and austerity measures. They are problems of complex systems and therefore do not have straightforward solutions. Perfect Storms concludes that solutions may be found by questioning what vulnerable children and young people actually need; the role of charities in service provision; priorities for public spending; public accountability and the ownership of risk; the future role of public services as statutory powers are devolved to local levels; and training for the voluntary sector workforce.

Jeremy Cripps

Chief Executive

Children North East

Losing control, losing services: Impact of the Cuts in the North East

Guest post by John Clayton, Catherine Donovan, Jacqui Merchant, University of Sunderland

Over the last two years we have been involved in a study looking at the impact of the comprehensive spending review (2010) and the subsequent funding cuts on our partners in the region. This year we were particularly interested to explore whether and how localism – the Coalition idea about empowering communities to take locally based decisions to address local issues – was being experienced by practitioners and service users in small third sector organisations (identified in the first year as being most vulnerable). Fifteen interviews with practitioners and six focus groups with service users were conducted. This included organisations working across education, childcare, social work, young people, disability support, with older people, health promotion, community development, self-help groups for survivors of domestic violence and a refugee and asylum seeker support group. The sample was drawn from across the region.

Our findings indicate that contrary to the rhetoric of ‘Localism’, most participants believe that local decision-making has been removed further away from local control. In particular it is becoming increasingly difficult for small community groups to get funding because of increased changes in funding criteria and consequent competition from bigger organisations including those not based in the local area (e.g. national organisations).

The lack of control over decision-making is resulting in three main impacts:

(i) The further marginalisation of already marginalised groups including older people, young people (particularly those from Black and ethnic minority groups) women, those out of employment and welfare claimants, asylum seekers and refugees, those escaping from abuse/violence and/or who are homeless. The position of these groups is worsening as projects close, ration their services, impose longer waiting lists, claimants face harsher welfare eligibility tests, as unemployment increases and as political rhetoric demonises and blames them for their own circumstances.

(ii) The emotional toll on practitioners and service users. We found increased insecurity among practitioners and service users about what the future will hold along with an emotional toll on practitioners attempting to accommodate spending cuts without any detriment to their service users. Most participants felt funders and politicians no longer care about social need, and/or the services provided. Many practitioners spoke about feeling personally and professionally overwhelmed with the increased work resulting from covering for posts deleted, services cut and hours curtailed. Expressions of despair, bewilderment, low morale, ill-health and fears about their personal and/or their professional future and/or the future of their service and the future for their service users were articulated. Service users also talked about feeling invisible, unheard and/or not understood.

Conversely, participants also spoke of their commitment to fight for and champion their work and their dedication was evidenced in the willingness of staff to do more hours and more work with less resources. All participants were engaged in processes to develop survival strategies for their agency/group.

(iii) A level of emerging resourcefulness of participants. Whilst all participants were engaged in strategies to respond to the funding context, this did not always have positive outcomes. The following strategies were identified that may be useful at some times in some circumstances for some agencies/ user groups but which may also sometimes present counterproductive challenges:

Volunteerism, now being re-branded as ‘The Big Society’ has always existed but is now under threat. The use of volunteers is positive when it is mutually beneficial and when a realistic assessment of training, support and the nature of voluntary work is conducted. This can be negative when such an assessment is not done and volunteers are treated as free labour. There is also the risk of exploitation and of jeopardising the quality of the service provided to service users and/or their safety.

Charging for services can supplement project funds. However, there can be negative outcomes when charges result in a self-help group no longer being able to meet; or when numbers attending courses drop because of cost. Income generating can also change the focus and priorities of agencies and this can be counterproductive for partnership working as erstwhile partners are perceived as competitors.

Diversifying funding streams so that agencies are not reliant on one big funder can be a useful way of developing a survival strategy. However, following the funders’ agenda can move the work away from its original aims. This strategy also demands dedicated fund-raising time and smaller agencies and community groups are often not able to invest this kind of resource.

Developing consortium bids, co-operation and partnership building can be a useful way of building local strategies about need and the provision of services. However, there is evidence that current interpretations of procurement and commissioning procedures of local authorities result in big, national agencies being preferred over local community-embedded consortia. This also has a negative impact on a multi-agency working ethos.

Campaigning and lobbyingcan be useful ways of raising the profile of the work of the agency/group. Again, this takes time and smaller agencies/community groups may not be able to compete with larger agencies to undertake this work which exacerbates the ‘competition’ between groups for funding; and leaves it open for larger local and/or national agencies to move in.

In conclusion…

The rhetoric about ‘localism’ and ‘The Big Society’ is contradicted by our findings which suggest that among the third sector there is a sense of losing control. We recommend:

• A regional manifesto for the ethical use of volunteers
• Monitoring by funders to assess the impact of the localism agenda on their spending decisions
• Strengthening of the role of umbrella organisations to represent the needs of third sector organisations
• Strategies to promote collaborative working on consortia bids
• Long-term/in-depth research on the impacts on marginalised service users
• Development of skills within providers of public services to produce evidence of their worth and value to use in funding bids.

Department of Social Sciences

University of Sunderland

October 2012

Save our childhoods = save our parks and open spaces

Guest post by Harriet Menter, Scotswood Natural Community Garden

Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child”

Recent cuts in local authority spending on parks will have a detrimental effect on all children in urban areas, especially those from economically deprived backgrounds. Parks provide unique opportunities for children, young people and families to spend time outdoors, in contact with the natural environment. There is an abundance of evidence on the benefits of outdoor play and contact with nature;  and just being outdoors, for people of all ages. Research shows it has a positive impact on physical health, mental health  and self-esteem.

“If you watch a child playing outside they’re just doing so many physical tasks – they run for hours, dig, climb. If you told them to do it they wouldn’t, but they want to because they’re playing. You won’t get that level of physical activity with anything else”. Penny Wilson, head of play at Play Association Tower Hamlets quoted here

The health benefits and positive lifestyle choices developed are also shown to carry through into children’s adult lives.

Parks also provide a fantastic environment for children to learn through play providing huge developmental and educational benefits for children. The opportunities for different types of self-led learning are endless, and the enthusiasm children have for nature, adventure, and outdoor play creates the kind of self- motivated learners teachers and policymakers dream of. A group of children involved in making a den, will be developing their communication skills as they share their ideas and divvy up tasks, doing maths as they measure and estimate the amount of sticks/leaves/mud they may need, science as they experiment with how much weight those roof beams can hold,  storytelling as they invent a narrative of pirates/soldiers/superheroes around their den, art as they decorate their den with mud, flowers etc. They are also developing traits that will make them more effective learners in the school environment: resilience when the first idea fails or the roof beams break and they move on to the second, third or fourth design, problem solving skills, perseverance and confidence in using their own initiative. They are also having huge amounts of fun.

Sadly, children nowadays have much less contact with nature and all its benefits than previous generations. A recent survey by Natural England found that “fewer than a quarter of children regularly use their local “patch of nature”, compared to over half of all adults when they were children, and fewer than one in ten children regularly play in wild spaces; compared to almost half a generation ago.

A recent report by the National Trust entitled Natural Childhood discusses the benefits of outdoor play for children and the disconnection between children and nature and aims to start a national debate on how to re-engage children with nature.

For my money the answer is urban parks, city farms and community gardens. National Trust properties, English Heritage sites and the like tend to be difficult to reach on public transport, too expensive for many families, and definitely, albeit unintentionally, seem to make people from less socio-economically privileged backgrounds feel out of place. Parks on the other hand are free, often on people’s doorsteps or easily accessible by public transport. Importantly, people from all kinds of socio-economic backgrounds feel comfortable accessing these opportunities. If we want to make sure all the benefits of outdoor play that we have mentioned above, don’t become yet another advantage that poorer children miss out on, we have to continue to support our urban parks.

We know that parks and green spaces are hugely important to children from poorer backgrounds. In a recent photography project by Children North East, children identified how important the physical and natural environment is to their lives, and highlighted with their photography the dereliction of these play spaces. After housing, the environemnt and ‘places to go’ were the most important issues for the young people who took part in the project. One young person commented ‘you can’t play in the park cos it’s full of rubbish then you play in the streets and adults get annoyed.’ The report also notes that

‘the majority of photographs (in the places to go theme) were of parks, both play parks and open green spaces. This was clearly where most children and young people spend their free time. They were free to access and most often within walking distance.’ (my emphasis)

During focus group discussions in Gateshead, young people said that the parks were one of the best things about living in Gateshead.  However given the pressures to cut spending on the park’s teams and environmental services, I wonder if the answer would be the same in ten years’ time? Even if the reduced maintainence teams manage to maintain the parks to a decent level, the loss of the whole education teams in some areas means that for those children whose parents do not have the time, resources or confidence to support them in making full use of the parks, these health and developmental opportunities are reduced. Having rangers, education officers and other council officers working in the parks is essential to ensure all children have access to the benefits parks can offer.

The scale of cuts to parks, especially in terms of park rangers who provide a presence in the parks, mean we face a return to the 80′s when parks were unloved, underused, and perceived by many as unsafe places to go. Those with the means can still get their children a  fix of nature by driving out to one of the beautiful National Trust properties in the region. But what about others?

For me, the most important thing about parks is that they are one of the few democratic spaces we have left in our cities. Where else can you find people of all ages and backgrounds sharing space? As the rest of our cities become more segregated, with school choice leading to an increase in class based segregation in schools, parks become even more important as true democratic spaces, where old and young, rich and poor, black and white share space and time. Watching my kids play in Saltwell Park recently, I wondered where else you would find such as mix of people from different ethnic, demographic and socio-economic backgrounds sharing space. For communities to get on well together, to develop trust and understanding, we must have these opportunities to spend time together.

Harriet Menter

Education Manager

Scotswood Natural Community Garden

www.sncg.org.uk

All of the photographs used in the post were taken by young people as part of the Children NE project.

GYA guest post: child poverty is unacceptable

Almost a third of children in the North East are living in poverty.

As a group of young people, we at the Gateshead Youth Assembly think this is unacceptable and believe that all young people should have an equal chance.

Young people at the Gateshead Youth Assembly have come together to develop a child poverty strategy: this shows our ideas, what we think will alter the way child poverty is handled and viewed in the North East. The strategy is a group of ideas that the young people of the assembly have developed through personal ideas and group discussions. We are confident that our strategy would make a difference as it not only looks at supporting young people living in poverty, it also looks at educating young people who are more fortunate and do not.

The ideas are as follows:

• Improve housing: restore rundown family houses, neighbourhoods and rebuild where necessary.
• Tackle the cost of school and improve schools: Provide second hand uniform shops/banks which will ensure good quality second hand uniform is available at reasonable prices or free of charge. Provide free bus passes where pupils need to travel on public/ school transport for educational purposes. Ensure that school kit is reasonably priced so families can afford them. Provide more grants for low income young people in schools. Provide breakfast clubs and lunches so people can eat at school. Bring back the Building Schools for the Future program, so that all our schools are better.
• Improve family incomes: Introduce a living wage. Get rid of the youth wage, all people of all ages should earn the same. Increase child benefit; make it for all young people. Ensure child maintenance works by ensuring payments are made and not take it off benefits. Increase heating allowances over winter.
• Ensure no young person goes hungry: Subsidize healthy food so everyone can afford it. Provide food grants for low income families. Make sure breakfast clubs and free schools meals are available to all low income young people and ensuring that families on low incomes have the information/ support they need to claim these benefits, and work to cover provision over the holidays. Look at supporting families to grow their own food with seed banks and allotments etc.
• Make the childhood experience better: Provide free leisure activities to young people from low-income families. Provide programs to raise aspirations. Ban or change alcohol and junk food advertisements; so young people don’t get bombarded with them (as you have done with cigarettes). Change citizen curriculum to include money management, raise aspirations and highlight issues with alcohol, drugs and junk food.
• Make things fairer: Cut higher wages – avoid helping people get super wealthy. Harsher penalties and community service for people convicted of crimes.
• More work opportunities for younger people: Look at moving public sector jobs out of London.
• Tackle stereotypes of young people in the media and wider society.

The assembly recently did a weekend workshop on Child Poverty with a PhD student working on developing a child poverty strategy with young people. Over the weekend we looked at all the pros and cons of growing up in the North East area and came up with projects to help young people over the North East region. These include:

• A scheme to give students Secondhand School uniform
• Promoting Healthy eating in schools
• Giving out free school meals over the Christmas break to children that have free school meals
• The Breadline project: promoting child poverty awareness in the North East
• Holding a conference with other young people to inform others of our ideas and facts/figures.
• Creating a Regeneration Map of the North East to show the parts of the region that the assembly thinks needs regenerating.

We feel that by encouraging the involvement of young people and adults from all areas of the North East, to participate in activities, designed to look at poverty and the impact this has, not only on families in general, but also the impact it has on young people in particular and their long term futures; we can raise awareness, educate young people and aim to reduce childhood poverty and its long term affects in the North East.

All of our ideas are in the early planning stages and may change if they prove to be unnecessary or they duplicate someone elses work, the projects will also be tweaked to best suit and represent young people in Gateshead.

Mirander de la Haye

Gateshead Youth Assembly member

Surviving or Thriving case study: Scotswood Natural Community Garden

Guest post by Amanda Hannen (VONNE)

Q & A

Scotswood Natural Community Garden

August 2012

The Scotswood Natural Community Garden aims to promote learning about nature, the environment and sustainable living in Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne. The Garden itself is a beautiful and wild site of more than 2 acres where a range of activities for children and adults are run. The Garden’s activities include educational workshops for schools, Forest Schools, volunteering opportunities for adults, a weekly youth club and regular community open days.

VONNE talked to Chris Francis at Scotswood Natural Community Garden about the impact of the spending cuts and the recession on their youth work programme:

Can you describe the impact of the spending cuts and the recession on your organisation?

At the moment there’s been very little impact because our youth programme is funded by Children in Need and we are just in our first year of a three year tranche of funding from them, so in terms of the general work we do there has been no reduction there. We have also applied for some small amounts of funding to top up the Children in Need fund to cover some of the activities that the organisation does with children and we’ve been successful with £1,000 here, a £1,000 there – that sort of level of income. If you’ve got three years of funding then in that time you’re quite comfortable and happy to continue, it’s when we reapply that we’ll be in a more competitive market and the situation could become more critical. I guess in two years time we’ll be thinking about resubmitting when the money runs out the end of October 2012. The concern is when we go back to Children in Need in two and a half years time, we’re aware that there is going to be more demand on those funds.

In terms of the [impact on] people we work with, this part of Newcastle is fairly deprived so the fact that there are fewer jobs around, increased pressure on families and less people working for local authorities with their cutbacks, there is less support available to families out of work.

Can you tell us about changes you have seen around you which might have an impact on your organisation or your sector in the future?

We know that in the west of Newcastle there’s been a change in the city councils tender process for delivery of youth work in the area, resulting in the latest contract going to a large organisation who didn’t really have much of a presence in the West End of Newcastle. One or two smaller organisations that are based here have missed out on that funding and it’s certainly caused a bit of uncertainty and anxiety amongst those groups that had the [city councils] funding. There’s meant to be dialogue between those groups to see how all that moves forward. We didn’t have money from that source so we haven’t been directly affected.

It’s a tricky one because I’ve been here for about 11 months now and the whole tendering process is something I’ve not been involved in before this job. I’d been on a few training courses and the advice we were given then was basically follow the money. If you apply and don’t get it, and a larger or national organisation does go and talk to them to offer your help in delivering it and subcontract.

The other change I’m conscious of is the number of local authorities that are moving their services out into new charitable organisations – I’m aware that North Tyneside has done that with their leisure services – their country parks. They’ve created a new charity, which will be able to apply for sources of funding that in the past the local authority couldn’t possibly have applied for. This will obviously put them in competition with people like us for those sources of funding. So, I can see that being a problem, I can’t define the problem but it will mean there’s more demand on funding pots as they [Local Authorities] create more charities to do this work and they all apply to the same pot. That will have an impact.

What do you think your organisation might do in the lead up to the funding coming to an end?

We’ll certainly talk to Children in Need who have funded us so far, going back to them for further funding. They are impressed with what we do and I think what we do here is fairly impressive, the kids do benefit enormously. So going back to them would be the first point of call. If that wasn’t successful or we had indications that that wouldn’t be successful we would look at other grant making bodies really. We have looked at tendering but the issue is that if you do start chasing tenders you lose sight of what you’re actually good at and end up doing things that don’t quite fit so that would be a concern really. But they do sound really attractive – you put in a tender, you get paid to cover the overheads of the organisation and away you go.

We did look at a tender for alternative education provision for 14-16 year olds in Newcastle but again it’s a very complicated process to go through and we weren’t quite ready at that stage, but that would have involved working with children who either had been excluded or at risk of exclusion from mainstream education. Many of the kids we work with now are in that bracket but we weren’t quite sure how we’d deliver that, we’d need to invent some new system and it all takes time and effort really. We only had about two weeks to complete the tender so we decided to leave it. We certainly would look at tenders but I think there are dangers for organisations who deliver quite a direct service really.

How would you describe the long term future of your organisation?

I think the future is looking fairly good…I think. We’ve just got some money from the Big Lottery Local Food Programme for two years of working with local schools to develop their food grown in the schools. There’s lots of interest in the work we do because we’re linking people with nature, the value that brings in all sorts of ways. There aren’t that many organisations in this particular neck of the woods that can do that so easily and I think we do get to the heart of some of those issues.

But we are aware that Children in Need might come back in two and a half years and say ‘no, actually you’ve had your six years now, go somewhere else for your money’ and that then puts the whole youth programme at risk and for the kids involved it’s important stuff.

Lastly, what would your key messages be to central government, commissioners and funders?

They must be aware of the fact that if they reduce the amount of money being made available to local charitable organisations then they are going to increase the competition between those groups. That can be a good thing, it could make us work more creatively and in partnership to try and deliver the same for less, so I can see in some respects that will be a positive driving force for change. But clearly when it goes too far you see things being cut that are essential to the local community. Government knows the value of the voluntary sector, they know what it brings to society, and they already know that, they’ve got the figures. If all these people providing services on a voluntary basis stop doing it, it’s a massive cost to society if that wasn’t being done. I do think it is a danger when you make every decision based on the cost of it rather than the value of it. I suppose we have seen it before from government of similar colours, where you save the money centrally and pass the problem on to people further down the line, with no real thought for the impact on the communities who rely on them and who benefit enormously from the local charities who do tremendous work.

Government has all the evidence on how important it is to engage people with the natural world. We tick so many boxes from the point of view of the mental health of people who get involved, local food production is a massive part of what we do and certainly organisations now are looking at that aspect of the local area for all sorts of reasons, including sustainability of a local food supply. The Big Lottery has put a lot of money into local food projects and we just got money from them for this.

Government know the value of what we do and there is a deluge from the top at the moment to the bottom but if there’s no money there it’s not going to happen. When we talk about individuals, all of the kids benefit enormously from the experience they have and the relationships they develop with the staff and other members of the group are just so important to them. If we weren’t doing that, that would be another group of kids not getting that level of support from anywhere really. The impact of the young people involved in the project, meeting positive role models – if those things suddenly stop, the reality is they’re back on the streets doing things that kids of those age who don’t have role models get involved in. How do you pick up the cost of that?

Amanda Hannen

VONNE

Chris Francis

Scotswood Natural Community Garden

chris@sncg.org.uk

This interview forms part of work carried out by North East Child Poverty Commission, with support from VONNE, to identify the impact of the spending cuts and recession on VCS services to children and young people in the region. It forms part of the sector-wide campaign, ‘Surviving not Thriving’, led by VONNE.

Surviving or Thriving case study: Gateshead Community Network

Guest post by Amanda Hannen (VONNE)

Gateshead Community Network (GCN) supports local people to have a voice in the planning, delivery and decision making of all services for the public. It is open to all residents of Gateshead and to voluntary and community sector groups who want to have an influence on the decisions that affect them and their communities.

Following a 20% cut in funding from Gateshead Council, Gateshead Community Network is restricted in its ability to deliver the Junior Network, which engages children and young people in decision making.

In the past, the Junior Network has worked with primary schools throughout Gateshead, running conferences around themes linked to Gateshead Strategic Partnership’s Vision 2030 – The Sustainable Community Strategy for Gateshead. Through these conferences and events, young people get to learn about what the council and its partners are doing and to feed in their views. Mark Shilcock, a Community Development Officer at the Gateshead Community Network, said:

“One of our previous conferences focused on democracy. We held a ‘Question Time’ style debate where councillors addressed questions posed by the young people. Afterwards, the councillors said it was the hardest question and answer session they’d ever had!”

In the past, the Junior Network has influenced policy to reflect the needs of children and young people in Gateshead.

“We surveyed 5-11 year olds in primary schools on internet access. Within 7 days we received over 700 responses back.  These were used by the Local Authority in their Young People’s Plan.  Because we’ve got the connections and the regular contact with the schools it’s something we can do quickly and effectively.  Without a fully-functioning Junior Network, this will be much more difficult to achieve.”

The added value of the Junior Network is that the teachers who attend the conferences with the young people also gain from sharing experiences and knowledge with colleagues in other part so the borough.

Whilst Gateshead Community Network are exploring ways of providing a limited Junior Network over the coming months, they believe that further funding is needed to provide full opportunities for the young people to participate and to provide meaningful engagement in decision making locally.

Amanda Hannen

VONNE

CPAG Guest post: The death of the social fund?

Guest post by Rys Farthing

One of the many welfare reforms currently underway is the localisation of the social fund. Currently administered by the DWP, the discretionary elements of the social fund are being devolved to local authorities, who will each need to develop and implement their own localised replacement schemes by April 2013.

 However, the funding made available to each local authority to develop a localised replacement scheme represents a significant reduction in the funding that was previously provided to households in each region. Based on a sample of 12 Local Authorities who shared the details of their settlement with CPAG, the average reduction in funding for the social fund replacement schemes in 2013/14 compared to the funding for the nationally administered Social Fund in 2011/12 is 13.9%, rising to 15.6% in 2014/15.(1) However there was significant variation across regions, with some regions indicative settlements being 5.8% lower in 2011/12 than 2013/14, spanning up to a massive 20.4% lower.

The percentage reduction in “social fund scheme” spends between 2011/12 and 2013/14 and 2014/15 across 11 different Local Authorities.

These reductions continue a recent trend in reducing support available for the social fund. Reforms introduced in 2011 meant that Crisis Loans were no longer available for items such as beds and cookers (exceptions were allowable for disasters such as after a flood); the rate of living expenses was reduced from 75% to 60%, and a cap of three loans per year was introduced. These were significant changes in themselves and already represent a reduction in the support that was available to households for many years previous. If you compared the reductions indicated in the settlement letters with the amount of help available in each region in 2010/11 (before this first round of reforms were introduced), the localisation of the scheme represents an even more significant cut. For example in one local authority, comparing the indicative settlement for 2013/14 with the actual 2010/11 spend highlighted a 41.6% reduction (2). The social fund was already under pressure before its localisation.

 While Local Authorities received around 20% on top for administration (which simply reflected the costs of administering the scheme at a national level), many authorities CPAG spoke to were worried that this amount, combined with start up grants as low as £4,000, would not adequately cover the costs of developing and implementing an entirely new scheme by April 2013. Some felt that they would need to dip into programme funding during the first year to cover these costs – further increasing pressure on the funding available to develop a localised scheme.

 On top of these pressures on the scheme, settlements to authorities are not ring-fenced. At a time when councils are feeling the strain of overall budget cuts and attempting to localise council tax benefit cuts fairly, pressure on any localised scheme is going to be intense. So intense that many authorities we spoke to are worried that even referring to their schemes as “social fund replacement schemes” will set claimants expectations too high. One of the core messages authorities wanted to send to central government was to stop saying the social fund was localising and to start saying it was being abolished to help them manage expectations. As one local authority officer recently said to us, ‘The social fund is not being localised, the social fund is dead’.

 CPAG is opposed to the government’s plans to abolish the social fund and leave councils to fill the gap with fewer funds. The death of the social fund is risking the wellbeing of children and families and could potentially leave them with nowhere to go to meet exceptional needs, for example when they have no cooker to feed their children or bed for them to sleep in. Ministers will need to be ready to intervene in the eventuality that local authorities are unable to meet the need.

Rys Farthing

Senior Policy Officer, CPAG 

CPAG has produced two reports about the social fund:

How the social fund can be delivered at a local level in London and the Localisation of the social fund – and note for and from practitioners (England)

(1). Calculated by comparing the indicative settlement figures provided to Local Authorities by DWP to data about Social Fund spends in regions for April-Sept 2011/12 which have been doubled out, to estimate a full year spend. OBR CPI predictions used to keep calculations real to 2011/12 value.

(2). Compared to a 13.6% reduction between 2011/12 and 2013/14 in the same Local Authority.

Surviving or Thriving case study: The Junction

Guest post by Amanda Hannen (VONNE)

Tees Valley has some of the most deprived areas in the country. The Junction is providing more and more support to children and young people in Tees Valley as they face increasing economic and social pressures and the children they work with are coming forward with issues at a much younger age.

On one contract The Junction has lost 50% of its funding from the Local Authority and yet is working hard, creatively and successfully to meet the increased demand for their services, seeing up to 300 children and young people a month.

The Junction strives to make a positive difference to the lives of disadvantaged children, young people and families in the Tees Valley. The organisation prides itself in being somewhere that children, young people and their families feel able to approach for support when they need it.

The Junction believes the key to success is building positive relationships over time, which requires sustainable funding and continuity of provision.  Talking about the value of their work, Chief Executive Lawrence McAnnelly states:

“One young women is 17 and we’ve worked with her over a period of 8 years, that’s half her life.  When you hear this it starts to sink home that it’s more than just a contract for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, the commitment has been for half that girl’s life, we’ve been one of the constants in what has been a complex and challenging life.

The Junction are responding to the funding cuts by working hard to demonstrate the difference they make, by being competitive and working in partnership with other organisations locally to provide the best service possible. However, funding is required to continue to deliver such a vital service.

Part of competition is essentially to drive up quality and drive down price and I see that, I recognise it’s a major part of our society but we’ve got to get the balance right.  I think for young people there is a massive danger that we just leave them behind, particularly in the North East.  I do worry that we’re going to get lots of children and young people that just get lost and their futures will be severely prohibited.

We’ve seen an increase in demand for services but I’m guarded because we’re now recording this much, much better than we’ve ever done before. For instance, our figures for last year talk about 145 young people per month, now it’s more like 250-290 per month. There are two things, we’re collecting the data better and there’s an increase in demand for services.

I think the pressures on young people are increasing– it feels like we’re going back 20 years in terms of what’s potentially happening around unemployment, complex issues they’re facing, of lack of services etc. I think it’s bubbling, I think some of the lack of services will hit home at some point in time. I do worry about the generation now planning for their future, I worry that young people may just almost give up or settle for less.

Recently we went down to London to collect an award for a film some of the young carers had made. Afterwards we walked down Pall Mall and Buckingham Palace and I realised actually, there are more affluent places than Grangetown and Southbank in Redcar. There’s no Poundland down the Pall Mall’. It’s really sad that a man of my age needs to do that to think – it hits home that things aren’t equal by any stretch of the imagination and it feels very, very much like there’s a high degree of inequality and that we’re used to dealing with people at the bottom end or towards the bottom end of that.”

Karl a young carer and volunteer at The Junction – the photo above is as he receives a Young Leader Award at the North East VCS Awards Ceremony 2011

This post forms part of a series of posts looking at how voluntary sector organisations working with children and young people in the North East are coping with austerity measures and budget cuts.