We simply have to discuss child poverty in Britain. And thank you to the New Statesman for this special edition which has brought policymakers, anti-poverty campaigners, concerned celebrities and children’s champions together to create a new coalition of compassion to make Britain child-friendly once more.
For the tragic but true reality is that child poverty is Britain’s single largest cause of social division today, a blight on our national conscience, and an affront to the soul of the nation. Seventy-five per cent of the population, as a new opinion poll commissioned by me and the New Statesman finds, think child poverty is “morally wrong”.
But choices made a decade ago by former Conservative ministers still have a long shadow from beyond their political tomb. They have made sure that, by refusing to give newborn third-borns £66 a week, child poverty – at a record 4.5 million when they were in office – is set to rise to 4.8 million children by 2029. They have also rendered impossible the most recently heralded achievement for being “ready to learn”: the target of the government is to make 75 per cent of five-year-olds ready for primary school by 2028. This will not be achieved if just 65 per cent are not in poverty.
These figures address relative poverty, but on all other indicators – from the proportion of children in destitution or near destitution, to a definition of how much is required for a dignified existence, to a broader definition encompassing absence of wealth as well as absence of income – child poverty is increasing. Almost one million children attempt to sleep at night without having a bed of their own.
Over 2.7 million live in households that are unable to afford replacing faulty electrical items like a washing machine or fridge or lack proper toiletries, soap or toothpaste. And three million children are systematically denied regular meals due to a shortage of cash with which to purchase food. The outcome is that, by the normal measures, rich and poor are as far apart and humiliatingly so now as they were in the “loadsamoney”, “greed is good” Thatcherite 1980s.
It is cheaper not to invest in children than to invest in them, as Ashley John-Baptiste and Emma Revie’s (published in the Spotlight supplement that accompanies my guest edited issue of the New Statesman) articles demonstrate: for every 1,000 children pushed into residential care due to the poverty of their family, we shell out up to £300m annually. And evaluations of the Sure Start program, slain by the Conservatives since 2010, demonstrate that healthcare expenses, special needs education and youth crime are saved more than double the cost of intervening.
To their credit, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves established the Child Poverty Review to honour the Labour pledge “to cut child poverty this parliament” and to bring an end to the necessity to depend on food banks. And the solution is to provide a fairness lock, an anti-poverty lock, so that no family who is working hard or getting it right should end up stuck in poverty.
The George Osborne argument – middle-class families who can’t afford children paying tax so poorer parents can have more children and scam the benefits system – doesn’t ring true. Yes, his characterization of parents on the dole as feckless and workshy is inaccurate: over 70 per cent of poor children and 60 per cent of families hit by the two-child cap have one working parent, and the majority of the remainder are victims of illness or recent but temporary redundancies, or don’t have access to childcare.
Of course, the Treasury could redirect to children the savings which result from action on fraud. And, as Mike Brewer suggests in Spotlight, breadwinners retraining to work could cut the benefits bill by £2bn and cut child poverty by 130,000. But if that is to be reallocated towards other activity against poverty, an additional £9bn of funding can be drawn from public and private sources, none of which breaches the government’s fiscal rules or any taxation manifesto commitment.
We could raise, as Harry Quilter-Pinner demonstrates, £3bn from taxing the hyper-profitable online gambling sector, now appropriately open to a Treasury consultation. Another £3bn might be raised from a tiered system for remunerating cash banks hold at the Bank of England, suggested here by its ex-deputy governor Paul Tucker. Third-sector anti-poverty organisations might see another £3bn through changes to Gift Aid (£740m on its own through recovering the full value of donations from top-rate taxpayers), corporate giving (donations haven’t increased at the same levels as profits: on this basis companies are donating £3bn less than in 2015) and from a new £1bn fund laid out here by Sir Ronald Cohen for funding children in the most deprived areas.
The two-child rule is not widely appreciated by those to whom it does not apply, but among polling I have commissioned with the New Statesman from Focaldata, 42 per cent already believe it should be ended, and over three-quarters of those who do currently support it state that it must be ended if abolishing it is demonstrated – as is highly likely – to be an effective way of decreasing poverty.
The people view the necessity for change in yet another survey that was carried out for my guest-edited version of the NS by Hope Not Hate and Survation; 87 per cent of those with an opinion stated that they feel that we should tax gambling to fund action on child poverty. An 82 per cent majority of those giving an opinion for or against the policy endorsed a levy on very profitable banks. Three-quarters (74 per cent) of those who replied for or against ring-fencing these levies to tackle child poverty stated they would be more inclined to support the policies if they knew it would raise money to help solve this issue. Since the survey points out, they think children are our future, that we are all touched by child poverty and better off if we limit it.
In fact, as the polling and the eloquent testimony provided in these pages by David Tennant, Kit de Waal, Armando Iannucci and others attest, we cannot be at ease when so many of our fellow citizens are uncomfortably at ease, at ease when so many people are ill at ease and happy when there is so much discontent. Most of our fellow citizens share the view that as a society we are poorer when we neglect our poor, less secure when we don’t support the insecure, and that when the powerful assist the vulnerable it makes us all more powerful. So child poverty is not destined. A Labour government has removed millions of children from poverty before. If we are to improve the chances of a next generation of children who are stuck in poverty, now is the time to act again.