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

Ending child poverty: a child’s right or a parent’s responsibility?

This year the European Union will publish its Recommendation on Child Poverty. This is expected to be based on three ‘pillars’ – access to adequate resources, access to services and opportunities, and children’s participation – and to argue for a strong rights-based approach to eradicating child poverty. In 2011, the current coalition administration published the first government child poverty strategy in the UK. At its heart, lies a commitment to ‘strengthening families, encouraging responsibility, promoting work, guaranteeing fairness and providing support to the most vulnerable’. Tracy Shildrick and I explored these two very different approaches in an article for the current edition of the CPAG Poverty magazine.

The article can be found here

Other articles from the magazine can be found here

 

What is made can be unmade

I was recently invited to say a few words about the work of the North East Child Poverty Commission at the Mayor’s Reception in Gateshead. Councillor Malcolm Brain, a member of the Commission, has been named as the Mayor of Gateshead for the coming 12 months and he has nominated the Commission as one of his ‘good causes’. So, not wanting to depress the audience, I tried to focus on reasons to be optimistic about efforts to tackle child poverty.

It may seem strange at the current time to be thinking optimistically about the future but I believe there is good reason why people working on the child poverty agenda should remain positive, in the longer term at least. I also appreciate that the content of my recent blogs has not been overly cheerful and I wanted to write something that provided an alternative view to the one which you normally get here……

This week, we have already seen CPAG release an excellent report focusing on different aspects of child poverty, looking at where progress has been made and highlighting lessons that can be learnt from previous policies. Whilst the publication of the HBAI statistics tomorrow will inevitably show that the government missed it’s own 2010 target, they will also highlight that hundreds of thousands of children were lifted out of poverty as a result of a strong policy focus on this agenda.

Reasons to be positive (if not cheerful)

There are lots of reasons to be positive. There is (publicly at least) cross party support for a legally binding commitment to ending child poverty. According to the 2011 British Social Attitudes Survey 82% of the public think that it is ‘very important’ to reduce child poverty in Britain (a further 16% think it is ‘quite important’) with 79% of people thinking that central government should be responsible for doing this. A relatively new focus on a children’s rights based approach to tackling poverty ‘offers the potential to orientate current policy debates in positive directions’ (p23). The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) ‘takes as its starting point not deprivation but assets’ and ‘the strengths and capabilities of people living in poverty’. The Webb Memorial Trust have recently announced that they are going to ‘spend down’ their resources over the coming years with an emphasis on ‘solution focussed literature’.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation have estimated that the cost of child poverty is almost as high as what it would take to end it. They are also currently working on a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy for the U.K. CPAG’s manifesto identifies ’10 steps to reduce inequality and put children first’. The Smith Institute have produced a comprehensive document looking at what we have learnt from a century of anti-poverty policies. Richard Dickens has looked at the record of the Labour government in an article called ‘Child Poverty in Britain: past lessons and future prospects’. The Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty found that, when participants in discussions were presented with the reality of life in poverty, there was a ‘willingness to countenance higher taxes and redistribution to combat poverty and disadvantage’. Do we really need a shiny ‘new’ approach or, as I have suggested here before, just a robust one?

Political priorities

So, in my humble opinion, we know quite a bit about how to end child poverty and ‘what works’ in this area already. Nandy and Minujin, talking about global child poverty, state that:

No new scientific or technological breakthroughs are needed to deal with any of the dperivations or domains of poverty identified by international definitions; governments already know how to provide their populations with safe water, sanitation and adequate housing. What is lacking (as it has always been) is the necessary political will to prioritise children’s needs and to choose to spend the reources required. (original emphasis)

Speaking about the potential cost of domestic child poverty in a chapter called ‘Utopia calling: eradicating child poverty in the United Kingdom and beyond’ from the same book as the Nandy and Minujin statement, Ruth Levitas, highlights that:

‘what is conceivable in terms of public intervention now needs revision, in the light of the vast sums of public money poured into bailing out the financial sector: it is a matter of political priorities’

and

‘High wages and salaries, and City bonuses, are not determined by supply and demand, but frequently, as has recently been so clearly demonstrated, by the power of certain groups to reward themselves. Conversely, it is not inevitable and natural but a matter of social policy that 80% of children living in households with no one in paid work are in poverty’

(my emphases)

This chapter is one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking I have read and I would recommend people read it where possible.* Levitas goes beyond the goal of ‘eradicating’ child poverty (getting it below 10%) by 2020 and argues that ‘the utopian method serves to highlight the limitations of current policy and the framework within which future plans are constructed and constrained’ and that this should be the ‘necessary starting point for social justice in the future and the real eradication of child poverty’

So, hopefully we can see that there is much to be positive about in tackling poverty. The short term picture may not be particularly rosy but there has been a lot of progress made since, for example, John Moore declared, slightly prematurely, ’the end of the live for poverty’ in 1989. Child Poverty is not a natural phenomenon, it is not something that will always be with us and it is not an inevitable part of modern day life. Nor is it imaginary, invented by ‘sociologists like Peter Townsend (who) wanted to argue that poverty was still a major problem in Britain’. It is real, it is measurable and its effects are social facts that cannot be denied.

If poverty is the product of political decisions (and I believe it is) and not cultural or genetic differences then political decisions can end child poverty. What is made, therefore, can be unmade.

*If you can’t get hold of a copy of the book, Ruth Levitas has an excellent introduction to the concept of Utopia and what it can offer sociology and social policy, from her inaugural lecture in 2005, is available free and called The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society.

I am going to try and post another blog or two here in the near future looking in more depth at Utopianism and the work of other organisations such as the New Economics Foundation and Compass who have both developed  ideas for a better society.

The cartoons included in the blog are from the Jacky Fleming website – lots more can be found here

The Right to be Heard (and to blog and tweet….)

I’ve been lucky enough to attend two fascinating seminars in the last week that have explored rights based approaches to tackling poverty. Aoife Nolan discussed ‘Child Poverty & the Law’ in Newcastle last week and Ruth Lister presented on ‘Power not pity’ in Durham earlier on today. I intend to post some (most likely jumbled) thoughts on those discussions at a later date but one of the things that was mentioned at the event today was the potential for social media to help give people with direct experience of poverty a voice and so I thought I would share a couple of examples that I’m aware of and ask readers to share others via the comments facility. So here goes…..

(Clicking on each of the pictures should take you to the original source)

The Wrong Trainers

A series of short animated films narrated by children and produced by the BBC

 

Spent

An excellent short interactive game produced in the USA but which travels well and which forces players to make decisions that people on low incomes have to make every day…..

Benefits. A lifestyle choice

A short 4 minute film, fittingly made on a low budget, by the Poverty Alliance as part of their EPiC (Evidence Participation Change) project which seeks to give people with experience of poverty a voice in decision making processes.

All of the above examples, you will have noticed, have involved organisations using social media tools to promote the views or experiences of individuals or groups with experience of poverty so these experiences are still, well, mediated to some extent.

The best examples I have come across in terms of individuals (as opposed to organisations) using social media have been those involved with the Spartacus Report calling for responsible reform, and associated with campaigning around the Welfare Reform Bill. Blogs such as ‘Benefit Scrounging Scum’, ‘Diary of a Benefit Scrounger’ and ‘The Broken of Britain’ all document daily life dealing with disabilities by the people who directly experience disability.  I’m not aware of any similar blogs which exist that deal more explicitly with life on a low income. I’m sure there must be some…..

The situation for child poverty is, of course, complicated further when children might be involved, although this example from Newcastle City Council’s Children’s Rights Team, made with the help of 300 young people, called ‘Our Lives. What we do. And where we live’ shows it can be done.

We also re-blogged a post earlier this week about a photographer who has used Google maps in the US  to highlight images of poverty and there is nothing to stop individuals doing this. Children North East are also currently exploring ways to develop their work with children and young people using social media and we will keep you updated with this as and when it comes to fruition.

Finally, before I leave you, here’s a particularly uplifting social media event advocating Power to the People in Tynemouth. Not particularly poverty related and not necessarily involving people on a low income, but a good example (I hope) of the potential of social media to bring people together, do things they might not usually do, generate discussion, convey messages and promote events and stories that mainstream media may not be particularly interested in…..

So, please share your knowledge with us and, indeed thoughts about the potential of social media to help facilitate people with poverty having a greater say in discussions about poverty. Without your input, it’s not really ‘social’ is it?

Best wishes,

Steve

Weekly Round up 30/03/2012

News in Brief

Riot report 

The Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel released their report this week and the press gave attention to 500,000 ‘forgotten families’. The Guardian letters page looked at the ‘riot’s deeper roots in poverty and alienation’, the Family and Parenting Institute released a very brief statement but which was made the very clear point that parenting ‘does not take place in a vacuum’ and the Centre for Social Justice released their response which suggested that:

“From chaotic families, failed parenting, absent fathers and 16 year old school pupils utterly unprepared for the real world, to a revolving door prison system which does nothing to change lives. The riots were a disgraceful warning shot from a drifting generation which is cut off from the mainstream of society “

The mid-week post next week will hopefully be about the apparent ‘mixing’ of the troubled families and child poverty agendas, following on from a discussion at a recent policy network meeting a couple of weeks back.

Thriving or Surviving Survey

Together with VONNE, the North East Child Poverty Commission are carrying out a survey exploring the effects of the cuts of children and young people’s charities and voluntary organisations in the North East. If you are a voluntary sector organisation in the region that delivers services to children and young people, please take 10 minutes or so to tell us about the impact on your organisation. The survey can be found here.

Regional Economy  

A blog on the New Start website looked at the ‘problem with regional pay’, a Survation poll compiled on behalf of Progressive Polling  showed little support for regional pay and The Economist looked at what an independent Scotland might mean for the North East. Meanwhile, Channel 4 reported that Britain’s working poor were ‘at tipping point’

General comment

Sir Stuart Rose (of Marks and Spencer fame) suggested that ‘we need to have an urgent debate on pay’

A very interesting post on the Arts Council website highlighted the role that libraries can play in tackling poverty

And an article from America looked at the specific issues that single mothers face in trying to escape poverty

Signposts

The new national and independent Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission are now looking to appoint members

The Centre for Economic & Social Inclusion updated their Child Poverty Toolkit facility

As part of the Danish Presidency of the European Council 2012, a conference was held on the themes of children’s rights and child poverty

Graphics of the week

Public responses to the proposal to introduce regional pay, courtesy of Left Foot Forward

Best wishes,

Steve