Ahead of the budget at the end of this month, the liveliest debate is over how much Rachel Reeves will set aside to invest in infrastructure. As the chancellor has made clear, her priority is to lift economic growth in the UK – in order to allow her to put more money into public services and welfare. A version of this argument has been used by politicians and policymakers for decades, and it is premised on there being a trade-off between growth and redistribution, between efficiency and equality. That assumption was always questionable and it is now beginning to receive serious interrogation. However, you don’t need to be an academic to see what’s wrong with the premise – you can simply consider children.
The future of any country lies in its young people. They are the next generation of workers and governors. Yet they also carry forward the failures of the current generation, in terms of cash-strapped schools, or crisis-hit healthcare, or plain disparity between parental incomes. This last point is made forcefully by Danny Dorling in his new book Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation.
A professor of geography at Oxford University, Dr Dorling is also an expert in how inequality can warp even seemingly successful societies. His latest book imagines the lives of seven five-year-olds, each born in the autumn of 2018 into a different stratum of the class system. Toddlers when Covid arrived on these shores, they started school with Rishi Sunak in Downing Street, and have just started year 1 under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. As Dr Dorling points out, their lives and so this country’s future will be shaped by how much their parents earn.
The very poorest child he looks at is born into a household whose income after housing costs is £118 each week. She is in the poorest seventh of all children in this rich country. At the other end of the spectrum is a child in the richest seventh, whose parents have £984 left over after housing costs each week. In the same society, that child is more than eight times better off than the other.
What does such a gulf mean? For the first child, it means growing up in a house that is cold in winter – as was the case for more than 800,000 children even before the cost of living crisis. It means your immediate family can’t afford to cook your meals in the oven, or to buy you felt-tip pens to colour in. It also means your parents feeling stressed and guilty that they can’t provide more. Further up the income scale, it means parents spending more on a child’s education and extracurricular activities so they don’t fall behind. As Dr Dorling shows, inequality has a corrosive effect on the middle and upper-middle classes, too.
Politicians have long preached that the route out of poverty is for people to get into the workforce, and this new government is no different. While unemployment among poor households with children and two adults has fallen sharply since Tony Blair was prime minister, poverty and inequality have not dropped at all. In fact, inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) has not budged since the month before New Labour came to power in 1997.
Imagine if, over those three decades, successive governments had worked to make the UK fairer, and to give kids at the bottom a better chance starting out. Would that not have been a fantastic investment in our future?
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