Big bold ideas and birthdays

Little Village turns 4 this week.

I’ve started this year feeling tired and edgy and I feel like this has a lot to do with the world in which I’m working. For the first time in my career I’m wondering whether it is actually possible to make positive changes on the vital issues of the day. The scale of the challenges we face — climate crisis, power and data identity, soaring inequality and rising poverty — feel more overwhelming than ever, and they are being compounded by a public politics that is divisive, cynical and mean.

It couldn’t be further from where I started my career 20 years ago. I had just finished a stint on the NatCen graduate trainee programme and I had joined the Women’s Unit in the Cabinet Office. It was the heady days of early New Labour. Tony Blair had recently surprised a gathered audience of community activists, academics and journalists in East London by making a huge commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020.

And I will set out our historic aim that ours is the first generation to end child poverty for ever, and it will take a generation. It is a 20-year mission, but I believe it can be done…. Poverty should not be a birthright. Being poor should not be a life sentence. We need to break the cycle of disadvantage.

Back then, the sense of optimism and action was infectious. Money was being poured into tax credits and early years services. The National Minimum Wage had been introduced and childcare support was being radically extended. Objectives were clear and anything felt possible. WE WERE GOING TO ERADICATE CHILD POVERTY. It didn’t feel like a cynical bit of spin doctoring, it felt like a goal we were going to achieve.

Fast forward to 2020. This is the year that we should have waved goodbye to child poverty. Instead, it has already risen since 2010, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts a 7 per cent rise in the number of poor kids between 2015 and 2022. The Child Poverty Act has been dismantled, and its targets have been abandoned. Measures of family poverty based on income are no longer reported on, and it took an extended campaign to secure a simple government promise in law to publish regular data on child poverty figures. We have a PM who claims poverty is falling when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Amidst this depressing picture, Little Village turned four this week. Beyond the love and gratitude I feel for our incredible team of staff and volunteers, I feel there is little to celebrate as we reach this milestone. A report published today by the JRF underlines this. Their annual review of poverty shows that while overall figures have slightly reduced, child poverty, especially for children under the age of 5, continues to rise. For all the focus on ‘levelling up’ and improving life chances in other parts of the country, London continues to hold the dubious title of city with worst rates of child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies notes that severe poverty is 37–47 per cent higher in London than elsewhere. 53 per cent of kids in London with single parents are growing up without the basics they need to thrive. Analysis by the Runnymede Trust shows that half of all black children, and half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children in London are living in poverty.

This map shows most of our 3189 fulfilled referrals from 2019.

And trust me, if you think these kinds of statistics are hard to stomach, you should reflect on some of the situations we hear about. Mums like Sarah, who we met this week and who has fled domestic violence, has a very poorly toddler, and has been housed at the other end of London from where her older children go to school:

“We have to leave at seven in the morning to get the kids to school in south London and don’t get home ’til about 5.30. I’ve kept them at school in south London because if I have to take my son to hospital, I wouldn’t have anyone to pick them up if they were at school in north London. It costs me a lot of money to travel across London every day, and hospital stays are expensive…. I try not to think about everything, I think if I did, I’d have a breakdown. As long as we’re together we’re OK. It’s the same with my son, I try not to stress about his health as it doesn’t help, but going out across London every day isn’t good for him.”

Sarah’s story isn’t unusual at Little Village. One in three of the families we see are homeless or in temporary accommodation. Whole families are cooped up in single rooms, struggling to access basic amenities like cookers, play areas, laundry facilities. One in five parents we meet have no recourse to public funds and are existing on less than £40 a week. One in five parents have someone in their household in work, but are still struggling to make ends meet, thanks to either low wages or insufficient hours.

The families we meet live on the brink of crisis all the time. Think how exhausting and stressful that feels. They have no cushion to offer security and piece of mind. Low wages, high living costs, and social security cuts have created a perfect storm of anxiety, fear and rising need — in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. They are at the mercy of an unexpected expense, illness or injury, or a change in work hours. Any one of these can result in a default on rent, leading to eviction or debt. Any one of these can create a difficulty in getting to work, leading to the loss of a job.

Moving with the times

Returning to that bold commitment Blair made to end child poverty: his speech took place at Toynbee Hall, a residential community in East London, whose famous alumni include Clement Atlee and a 24-year old William Beveridge, who arrived there in 1903 to study the ‘causes and cures of poverty’ against a backdrop of overcrowding, slums and deep deprivation. His community work and research into the nature of 20th century poverty informed his plan for the ‘abolition of want’ that ultimately shaped the emergence of the welfare state as we know it in the post-war era.

Residential volunteers, including William Beveridge, at Toynbee Hall in 1903.

Since then, the world has changed. The UK has transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service economy; technology and globalisation have redrawn the contours of the labour market. Women have entered the workforce in numbers that Beveridge could never have imagined. We understand more than we ever did about the far-reaching impact of growing up poor, on everything from educational and employment outcomes, to mental and physical health, and ultimately life expectancy. Any anti-poverty strategy would need to recognise these seismic shifts.

So the eve of Little Village’s birthday, I have an urge to reconnect with the imagination and boldness of both Beveridge and Blair. Whatever you think of their politics, they dared to imagine a future where we have eradicated child poverty. I have a hunch that I’m not alone. I see the incredible commitment and dedication of our 400-strong volunteer army at Little Village, who work week-round to alleviate the immediate consequences of poverty. That energy is reflected up and down the country in the 100 other baby banks, the 2000 food banks, and the countless other charities who are supporting families when things are tough. My hunch is possibly also reflected in public opinion, with Mori showing that concern about poverty and inequality are the highest they’ve been since 1997.

The foundations of a strategy to address child poverty

What if we built on this still-latent but emerging public appetite address child poverty? There are plenty of people who could talk more knowledgably than I can about the specific policy options. But when it comes to identifying the elements of a child poverty strategy for the 21st century, there are some priorities that are very clear from our work at Little Village:

1. We need to find ways of addressing the deep instability created by uncertain jobs, variable hours and clunky social security systems that struggle to work with unpredictable wage income.
2. We need to put more money in people’s pockets, through ensuring benefits keep up with rising standards of living, and that they provide a basic level of the income needed during periods when the state doesn’t expect people to work (e.g. when caring for another person, or in the first three years of a child’s life).
3. Housing issues are a theme in the story of nearly every parent we meet. Government statistics show that 70 per cent of kids living in temporary accommodation live in London, compounding the insecurity and instability already felt. Many of the families we meet are living in the private rented sector, and National Housing Federation figures show that 46 per cent of kids living in this kind of accommodation are living in poverty. The PRS needs to be more closely regulated, and as Shelter has so powerfully argued, we need more social housing.
4. Any successful plan would need to tackle the social and emotional impact of living on very little as well as considering the economics. That means investing in relational support, built around the family. It was heartening to hear Robert Halfon, chair of the Education SElect Committee, promising this week to fund for ‘family hubs’ (although his job might have been easier had the last government not cut funding for 3500 Children’s Centres by over 50% between 2010 and 2017….).
5. Underpinning all of this, there needs to be a deeper shift in beliefs and attitudes about poverty that the New Labour era did nothing to address — and in fact they arguably made it worse. Blair and Brown’s re-engineering of the welfare state around work as the answer to poverty reinforced unhelpful cultural tropes of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’. It undermined the notion of social security being a safety net we could all rely on when times are tough and instead over-emphasised the notion that hard work would pull people up in society. That is simply not reflected in the experiences people are having of poverty today. While employment rates are high, 2 in 3 poor kids have a parent in work, suggesting the economy isn’t working for everyone. Work is not, in today’s world, a guaranteed route out of poverty. Campaigners and charities need to keep talking about the systemic nature of poverty, countering views that it is the result of a lack of personal effort alone.
6. Finally, any strategy needs to grasp the issue of rising inequality as well as tackling poverty. The wealth of the top 1 per cent has risen unchecked for decades now, and study after study has shown that this level of inequality hurts us all. One of my favourite US wonks, Jacob Hacker, has called this ‘predistribution’ — the way in which pre-tax wages and wealth are shared — and he argues compellingly about why we need to focus on it as much as we do on the redistribution of taxes from rich to poor.

Happy birthday Little Village

At the time of that Toynbee Hall speech, three in ten kids were growing up poor. That figure in London is now four in ten, and rising. Each of these children are experiencing cold, hunger and shame. They are growing up in a world of anxiety and precariousness.

What concerns me, alongside the direct impact and far-reaching consequences of these diminished childhoods, is the sense of fatalism that seems to have taken hold in the corridors of Westminster. A sense that poverty is something that will always be with us whatever we do (remember that Ronald Reagan ‘joke’ — “we fought poverty — and poverty won”). This is a pernicious belief that will make it much harder to take concerted action. It feels a million miles from my early career days at the Women’s Unit.

Here at Little Village we are trying in our own small way to show that it is not only possible, but also vital to tackle child poverty. As Beveridge said, aged 80, ‘I am still radical and young enough to believe that mountains can be moved’. At the grand old age of 4, it’s something that we believe at Little Village too. We are fighting for a time when organisations like ours are no longer needed. I very much hope we won’t be around long enough to celebrate too many more birthdays. Let’s work together to move that mountain and give all children the start in life they deserve.