The only one of the six recommendations that the Marmot Review on Health Inequalities that hasn’t been taken up by the Coalition Government is ‘Ensuring a Healthy standard of living for all’.
Last week we responded to a Department of Health consultation on health outcomes for children and young people. The consultation focused on a number of health related outcomes but our response focused solely on public health issues and the role that poverty and inequality play in children’s health and health inequalities. This post is based on our response, which framed ‘the health service’ in the context of a broader welfare state. Our response drew on existing evidence and was largely based on 2 summary papers published by the End Child Poverty campaign. These reports, along with other background reading I undertook, proved to be painful reminders of the effects of poverty. ‘Poverty’ may be a social construction (or a political one as someone suggested to me last week, asking why I ‘envied’ the rich) but the effects of poverty and inequality are well documented social facts that cannot be denied. The government’s child poverty strategy refers to the ‘so-called’ social gradient, although health does feature quite prominently in the document, mainly in relation to funding and structural reforms which will ‘incentivise’ improved health outcomes for poorer communities.
Sections in bold are questions asked by the consultation documents.
In your view, where is the health service falling short for children and young people, what is our weakest link and what can we do to improve things to make sure it makes a real difference to the lives of children and young people?
The NHS / ‘health service’ is not the only tool at the government’s or society’s disposal to improve health, especially where public health is concerned. It is with public health outcomes for children and young people, especially those living in poverty or low-incomes that this response is concerned with.
We believe that the health service is falling short for children and young people by not adopting the 6th and final recommendation of the Marmot Review: Ensuring a Healthy standard of living for all[1]. The priority objectives within this Policy Objective (D) propose:
- a minimum income for healthy living for people of all ages,
- a reduction of the social gradient of living through progressive taxation and fiscal policies
- reducing the cliff edge faced by people moving between benefits and work.
There is a large amount of evidence (which will be known to the health service and does not need recounting here) which demonstrates that making progress on these 3 fronts would have a significant positive impact on the health and well-being of children and young people from poorer families.
The ‘weakest link’, we would argue, is the number of children living in or at risk of poverty in the UK. In a paper for the End Child Poverty campaign[2] Donald Hirsch and Professor Nick Spencer have written that: ‘Poverty is the greatest preventable threat to health, and tackling it is fundamental to addressing health Inequalities and boosting life chances’
and that the
evidence has profound implications for public policy. It suggests that effective action to tackle child poverty would make an important long-term contribution to many health-related policy objectives, including reducing obesity, reducing heart disease, increasing breast feeding and improving mental health.
Not only does child poverty affect health during childhood, but it also affects adult health as well. In a separate paper[3] drawing on over 70 different studies, Professor Spencer argues that:
it is now clear that poverty and low socio-economic status in early life adversely affect health in ways that transmit across time and contribute to poor adult health. In other words, poor social circumstances in childhood are associated with poor health both in childhood itself and in adult life
In the UK, we are aware of the Inverse Care Law, where the people that need health services the most are the least likely to access them and often receive the worst treatment. Professor Danny Dorling, in a recent book called ‘So you think you know about Britain’ highlighted that:
‘our doctors tend to live and work in the areas where the fewest people are ill (which is in no small part caused by drawing almost all young medics from such a narrow set of privileged backgrounds and then paying them so highly for their services)’.[4]
Dorling also notes a ‘positive care law’ in relation to
‘the correlation between the locations of the population with health needs and those providing many hours of unpaid care a week.’[5]
A ‘revaluing of care’ is needed so that care provided by parents and carers for children and young people is recognised. The financial cost of having children should be recognised through the benefits system but unfortunately a number of child and maternity related benefits have either been stopped or frozen, reducing their real value. In a paper called ‘The Cuts: what they mean for families at risk of poverty’ CPAG highlight that a baby born in a low income family in April 2011 is ‘around £1,500 worse off compared to a sibling born in April 2010’.[6]
With so many different parts of the health system in place, what do they need to focus on and improve to make sure they each work together to deliver the best possible health service for children and young people ?
The work of ‘You’re Welcome’ is important in ensuring that health services take the needs and views of children and young people into account when designing and delivering services.
At a time of unprecedented change and fragmentation of services within the NHS, it is difficult to know how the health system will emerge but we would argue that addressing the social determinants of health and the income inequalities that exist within our society are as important as changing the structure of the NHS. Dorling notes that, despite recent re-structuring and increased spending in the NHS:
In poorer neighbourhoods in poorer parts of the country mortality rates have hardly fallen in the most recent decade and the numbers of people reporting they are suffering from a debilitating illness have risen quickly. In contrast, in the most affluent areas of the country, life expectancy has in some years been rising by more than a year per year, a rate that is impossible to achieve for long without securing immortality, and rates of reported illness and disability in such places have been falling rapidly.[7]
We know that socio-economic status has a profound impact on children’s health – and that of their parents and it is these underlying causes of poor health that need to be addressed as urgently , if not more so, than changes to the structures of clinical health services.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?
The profound impact that poverty and low income has on health is already well known and relatively uncontested. As such, there is not much more that we can tell you.
It is, however, unfortunate that despite this knowledge, independent estimates predict that the government’s policies will see an increase in child poverty in the coming years[8]. This news comes at a time when low income families are facing large reductions in their standards of living. As such, it is unclear how the health of these children will improve when their economic and material circumstances are deteriorating.
We have known since Victorian times that poverty affects health and so eradicating poverty must be central to any attempts to improve the health outcomes of children and young people. Dorling illustrates this graphically when he writes[9]:
‘Unfortunately, we will always suffer from child mortality, but there is no good reason, other than because of our greed and ignorance, for those mortality rates to be higher for children from poor families.’
You still have time to respond to the consultation as the deadline was extended until 31 May 2012. The link to the consultation is below:
[1] Fair Society, Healthy Lives, The Marmot Review, 2010
[7] So You Think You Know About Britain, Dorling 2011, p144
[9] So You Think You Know About Britain, Dorling 2011, p140
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth
Yesterday the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a ‘leading think-tank’ (their description, not mine) published a report called ‘Rethinking Child Poverty’ and issued an accompanying press release calling on the government to ‘scrap flawed child poverty targets’.
Child Poverty Action Group and Channel 4’s Fact Check have already examined some of the assumptions and statistical work in the release and found it wanting, perhaps an example of the ‘educational failure’ that the CSJ mention as a cause of poverty. The CPAG report suggested that one of CSJ’s claims was ‘nonsense’ and could ‘only stem from a failure to understand the difference between the median income (the middle income) and the mean income (the average income)’ while the Factcheck blog suggests the report is ‘misleading’. Both of these responses are worth reading and I will not duplicate what they have covered.
Miles Corak, in a blog post, predicted what the criticisms of a UNICEF report released on the same day would be and his comments are also relevant to the CSJ report. He wrote that the response from critics would include:
Relative poverty rates are not poverty at all, they are measures of inequality, the critique continues, and as such can never be eliminated.
The CSJ wrote:
The first methodological flaw of the Government’s central measure of poverty is that it is defined in relative terms. The result of this is that the poor will always exist statistically, as it is inevitable that some in society will have less than others
Entirely predictable then. What is also unsurprising is the way that poverty is framed and this post concentrates on the language used in the press-release (and which is echoed throughout the report) which, once again, sets out to link poverty with individual or family ‘problems’ and behaviours. Here’s a few examples:
Poverty is about more than money – it is about the family breakdown, addiction, debt-traps, and failing schools that blight the lives of our children
the accent would be on measuring the underlying causes of blighted young lives, such as family breakdown, welfare dependency and educational failure, rather than the symptoms of low relative income
The ‘relative’ yardstick takes no account of the true, underlying causes of a deprived upbringing, for instance whether a child has the love and care of two parents, whether he or she has the role model of adults who go out to work for a living, or whether drug or alcohol addiction scars family life
Yet we know from our own extensive research as well as the research of others that the key drivers of poverty are family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency and worklessness, addiction and serious personal debt
Other factors that should be taken into account include the ability to save, the quality of a child’s parenting, family stability because children from broken homes are twice as likely to suffer behavioural problems than those from intact families, levels of worklessness in households because children tend to repeat the work habits of their parents, access to good schools, truancy rates, drug and alcohol addiction and levels of household debt
The press-release consistently ignores the potential for any kind of link between income and family circumstance, ignores the centrality of money in our society, portrays that society as largely benign and passive and lays the blame for child poverty at the door of the parents. No mention is made of political or societal responses to these examples of ‘social breakdown which fuel’ poverty. But if family breakdown is a driver of child poverty, why are poverty rates for lone parents different in different countries? Are differing levels of unemployment symptomatic of different cultures and attitudes to work, both regionally and internationally (and what about in-work poverty). Poverty is the result of political and economic decisions and there isn’t a great deal of ‘evidence’ worthy of the name that suggests otherwise. Anecdotes are not quite the same thing.
The ‘extensive’ evidence that they mention largely consists of their own work and government commissioned research. No academic publications feature in the report at all, which should be, but isn’t, surprising. The CSJ speak highly of their Alliance, a group of over 300 ‘grassroots poverty-fighting charities’ who tell them what life is like for people in poverty. Why not speak to the people themselves rather than relying on intermediaries? Academic research (including work that we’ve covered here by Kathy Hamilton and Chris Warburton-Brown) that has actually gone out and spoken to people on low-incomes has found that money, and more specifically a lack of it, plays a central role in people’s lives.
Regular readers will know that this is an issue that we cover quite frequently here and I’m beginning to get a bit sick of reading (and writing) about this stuff, but it is, as a colleague said to me, a ‘zombie arguement’: no matter how much you think you’ve killed it off, it keeps coming back to life and, unfortunately, it appears to be particularly resilient at the present time. But, as Franklin D. Roosevelt argued,a lie does not become a truth no matter how often it is repeated.
What is particularly worrying, in my mind, is the opportunity that this intervention, and others like it, presents to the government to discuss poverty in a different way and which legitimises the ‘new approach’. There have already been reports of a desire within the government to scrap the income related targets and the CPAG response notes that:
it is difficult not to regard many of the arguments advanced in the CSJ report as little more than a smokescreen to allow the government to claim to do ‘something’ about poverty without spending any money. If poverty is about income, self-evidently we need to bolster family incomes. But those who attack poverty measures (however poorly) provide cover for the coalition to keep cutting the incomes of poor families, while claiming to champion their cause
while over on the Conservative Home website, Jill Kirby from the Centre for Policy Studies (believers in freedom and responsibility) was writing:
Given the CSJ’s reputation for researching and analysing the causes of poverty and deprivation, its intervention in the debate should provide the coalition with a welcome opportunity to replace Labour’s narrow and self-defeating policy with a more authentic and constructive approach. It could also present the Prime Minister with a chance to reaffirm his commitment to tackling social problems by supporting and strengthening families.
Many of you will be aware that Iain Duncan Smith founded the Centre for Social Justice and that Christian Guy, the MD of CSJ, is his former speech writer. It is unlikely that this report came as a shock to the government. Interesting times lie ahead….
Regards,
Steve
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4 Comments | tags: addiction, centre for social justice, drivers and causes of poverty, family breakdown, poverty, social breakdwon, troubled families agenda | posted in child poverty, comment, in-work poverty, poverty, social exclusion, Troubled families, welfare reform