Once Labour set up a child poverty taskforce, it was predestined that the two-child benefit limit would be abolished. Every authority consulted confirmed it as the fastest way to rescue the most children from a life of direst poverty. Every authority, that is, except the general public, who oppose removing the cap by 56% to 31%, YouGov finds. This was an unpopular act knowingly taken for good reasons. Not many will read the taskforce’s findings, but if they did, even the meanest mind might soften: the dismal facts of a child’s life in poverty are, as ever, shocking.
All the many measures in this far-reaching policy will lift 550,000 children above the poverty line by 2030 – the most achieved within one parliament. But that leaves behind about 4 million poor children living without the basics. That still makes us among the most unequal and most poverty-stricken of similar European countries. This is a major factor in why British five-year-olds have now become up to 7cms shorter than children of the same age in Europe.
Streams of reports emerge from thinktanks and charities describing the plight of desperate people. It’s a story so familiar that it’s easy to be numbed into accepting that a third of the children around us are poor, often without adequate food or heating, many without a home, with no internet connection for homework and no joining in what classmates take for granted: “my holiday”. Labour governments don’t hide these brutish facts of British life. The government’s new strategy lays bare our social disgrace in painful detail, promising annual updates on all the causes, effects and remedies. In 1999, Tony Blair stunned experts with his promise to eliminate child poverty within 20 years: by the halfway mark in 2010 good progress had been made, but the country was not quite there. There’s never time to get enough done, before the right takes over to reverse and vandalise everything. Think of the 3,500 Sure Starts mostly closed or left without the people and services to provide families with the support that changed lives.
One of the lucky survivors, a model to remember, is the Jubilee children’s centre in Brixton, south London: beautiful, spacious and purpose-built with every kind of children’s activity and support for adults. On Thursday, parents were in a sewing-machine class, while outside a food bus project was selling fruit and veg at low cost as it travelled round local estates. Two of the ministers, Liz Kendall and Alison McGovern, who together with Bridget Phillipson were lead authors of the strategy chose this location to share their findings, promoting a long list of initiatives across departments from health to housing and transport: getting children out of squalid temporary accommodation that is several bus journeys away from their school is a key promise. Strings of policies designed to root out disadvantage count the ways poor children “do less well in school, are more likely to be unemployed when older and earn less throughout their lifetimes”. Billed as a decade-long strategy, this “is just the first step on our journey to drive down child poverty”, it says. Will Labour get the time?
For the contrast between right and left governments, just look at child poverty graphs to know who was in power when. George Osborne’s savage benefit cuts, mostly targeted at families, came with toxic messages pitting the strivers against the skivers, the family sleeping behind the blinds in the morning while next door leave for work. His poison was taken up by programmes such as Benefits Street, which selected choice feckless cases to pillory as examples of everyone on social security. The message accompanying the new strategy is emphatic: almost three-quarters of children in poverty now come from working families. Jobs don’t guarantee escape from poverty – a word the Tories never used, preferring the description “low-income”. On it goes, with Kemi Badenoch labelling this “a budget for Benefits Street” 10 years after the programme ended, stirring up moral panic without admitting that total benefit costs are not spiralling: non-pensioner benefits have stayed at 4-5% of GDP for the past 40 years.
Are we by nature nastier? Belief that the criteria needed to qualify for benefits aren’t strict enough has grown in the past few years, says Patrick English of YouGov. Gideon Skinner of Ipsos tells me that younger people in Britain are the most generous, with 18- to 24-year-olds most in favour of abolishing the two-child cap and older people most strongly against. Asked what spending should be cut, voters put welfare top.
Never underestimate the life-long foghorn influence of the rightwing media both on- and offline. Here are the Sun’s responses to the budget: “Jobless mums hail Reeves’ ‘Benefits Street’ budget as ‘dream come true’ and vow to cash-in by having more kids”; “Families will foot handout bill for skivers”; “Labour is layabouts party”. Arguing against that is an uphill task. The Blair government ducked persuasion, doing good by stealth instead, rebadging benefits as “working tax credits” to sound better. Successful back-to-work programmes for young people emphasised stick not carrot in public, though kindly, well-attuned help was what worked, not threats.
“You have to make the case about poverty time and again, for every generation,” Kendall says, recalling what it took for Harriet Harman to steer the Blair-Brown government towards nurseries. She quotes the theme of the strategy’s foreword: beyond pity for lives wasted, it warns of “the cost of inaction that our economy – and future generations – cannot afford … in poorer health, worse educational attainment, lower skills and lower earnings”.
It was a sadness to see one of the remaining Sure Start centres; a reminder of what might have been everywhere by now. This government is rolling out new Best Start hubs, aiming for one in every council area in England by 2028. Pressing on means making children every department’s priority. It helps that Phillipson and Wes Streeting themselves come from poor backgrounds, in the most working-class cabinet ever, which is likely to prevent this child poverty strategy from becoming a one-day policy. A government lacking a coherent theme would do well to make children the focus and the purpose of everything from now on.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
