I will eat my hat – or several – if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don’t soon find the money to bury the pernicious two-child benefit cap. The sum is very small: a mere £1.7bn to lift 300,000 children out of poverty. With a quarter of children in absolute poverty, nothing else they could buy at that price could do so much; and it would show their intent to return to Labour’s ambition to abolish child poverty. In her first budget, expect Reeves to find the funds for this, and other public spending not yet announced. Every child taken out of poverty is an investment in the future.
Labour MPs are right to clamour for this. I doubt there’s a single one on those benches who isn’t appalled by the cap: Labour voted with passion against it when it was introduced by the Conservative government in 2017. Some worry that Starmer and Reeves will be deterred by the campaign to force them to pay up, fearing it would signal their willingness to capitulate and splurge on everything else. I don’t think they’re that frit, with the markets and everyone that matters backing them. It would demonstrate surefooted self-confidence.
Any doubt about their good intent vanished with their creation of a new child poverty unit. Set in the Cabinet Office, it reports to the taskforce co-chaired by Bridget Phillipson and Liz Kendall. These two longtime studiers of social research know that every piece of evidence they collect from thinktanks such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Resolution Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, along with the great array of children’s organisations whose representatives met Kendall this week, will tell them that lifting the two-child cap is the essential first step on that long uphill task. Every Labour government always reduces poverty: this one will be no exception. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown substantially cut child poverty by 2010. Expect no less from Starmer and Reeves, and probably more – they will learn from last time.
As a reminder, this week I went back to the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, south London, to the place where Blair, in his first weeks as prime minister in 1997, made his inaugural prime ministerial speech on social justice. Standing at the top of a stairway, addressing a lot of women with prams in the sunshine, he talked of the homeless, the workless and the excluded, promising: “There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build” and “no no-hope areas”. It was a “source of national shame” that Britain had “shot up the international league tables for inequality”.
After 30 years as a tenants’ association campaigner on the Aylesbury estate, Jean Bartlett MBE is still at it. We’ve met often there over the years, and yesterday we talked over the programmes of the previous Labour era and hopes of a revival. The boldest was the new deal for communities that picked 39 deprived areas and gave them a large sum to be spent by the people themselves, with genuine community power. Aylesbury got £56m promised upfront over 10 years – Jean talks of recruiting tenants who had never engaged in anything before, who learned about planning as they drew up a master plan together: “Some people like me left school at 15, married at 16, ended up getting degrees,” she says. “It enriched my life and all of us who got involved.” Findings from a final evaluation of the Aylesbury programme included a 7% drop in workless households, fear of crime cut by half and the number of Aylesbury pupils getting their five good GCSEs going up to 68%, to only just below the national average.
It all ended immediately when the Tories came to power, “Like so much,” Bartlett says. They not only axed Labour programmes, but they didn’t want to know the facts. Labour’s annual social Domesday Book was called Opportunity for All, in which the Department for Work and Pensions monitored the government’s progress on social justice. With a raft of annual indicators of deprivation, it was remorselessly frank and its charts often depressing. Though most figures moved upwards, some stayed obstinately flat – Labour publicly reminding itself of how hard inequality is to shift. The Tories stopped it immediately, presumably knowing their policies were bound to send those graphs into reverse.
Despite the cuts, Southwark council has managed to keep Sure Start centres on this estate. The Aylesbury master plan continues to play out, with Southwark council renewing it bit by bit. The long bleak block where Blair spoke is still there, mostly empty, waiting to be rebuilt. Southwark council leader, Kieron Williams, regrets the passing of the new deal: “Labour would have continued it. It was the model for how to involve the community by devolving real power and money.”
He is one of 20 council leaders writing this month to Angela Rayner as new secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, warning that far from increasing social housing, “council housing finances are completely broken and the system’s future is in danger”.
His emotional plea for council homes and their ability to give “ families the security needed to put down roots, flourish in childhood, get on at work, stay healthy and age well,” will get a sympathetic hearing. He’s optimistic the government can kickstart some council housebuilding “with the stroke of a pen” and “by cutting red tape that stops us spending right to buy money”.
My hat is in the ring. I am betting that at the end of 10 years, this government will do better than the last Labour government on poverty and inequality, although the task is harder and the money tighter. And they will start by hurling the two-child benefit cap into the dustbin of atrocious Tory policies.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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