A brief guide to obscuring child poverty

As I write this Ireland are losing to Spain in the European championships – but only because we insist on measuring success by how many goals are scored. Football is about entertainment, excitement, lots of money and according to my more lecherous friends the sexiness of the players. Why insist on only counting goals?

When Sepp Blatter stands down as FIFA president Ireland should vote for Ian Duncan-Smith as his replacement. We know that poverty especially child poverty is now rising. Thursday’s announcement of reducing child poverty figures describes the situation as it existed 2-years ago. It is acknowledged probably the last positive set of figures for child poverty maybe for a decade. The solution proposed by Ian Duncan-Smith today is to change what we count. Don’t count incomes and levels of deprivation as we do now but instead count other factors he believes are important to poverty, such as addiction, “worklessness” etc.

Ending poverty by changing the definition of poverty is not an original idea, but what makes this variation particularly worrying is that it is openly driven by the need to justify lowering the costs of benefit payments – and even worse it seeks to measure factors that have been consistently used by the press and politicians to blame the poor for poverty.

Should the proposal go through, every-time that the political poison of rising child poverty figures are released they will be accompanied by the political antidote of an itemised list of the failings of parents in order to divert the blame.

Ian Duncan-Smith, when making the announcement on the Today programme, chose to tell a selective story of poverty and welfare spending during the 2000’s as a justification for the change.  The story goes that by focusing on incomes the Labour government spent huge amounts of money on benefits, which meant that 4.5 million people stayed on “out of work benefits” because it was better for them to stay on benefits than work. At one moment of revealing hyperbole he suggested that that was what caused deficits and was bankrupting the country!

Let’s leave aside the fact that enough money to pay all unemployment benefit for a quarter of a century was created on Thursday by the Bank of England in order to lend to banks suggests some more substantial causes for our economic problems. The 4.5 million workless people he talked of were not the unemployed – they were not people unable or unwilling to work – they were those on sickness and disability benefits. Their barrier to work was not that benefits were too high but that they were assessed by independent agencies to be unfit to work. I have blogged on this repeated inference that [workless = unemployed = lazy] before – and how it has been repeatedly used to stigmatise people who are least able to defend themselves.

Child Poverty and Tax credits

During the years of economic growth the labour market polarised with increasing low paid employment and vast increases for those near the top of the income scale. This created a large number of families in work but also in poverty. These families as well as those unable to work were left far behind. New Labour’s solution was to focus government money on pensioners and on families with children. It worked in reducing pensioner poverty and child poverty. This ameliorated the problem that the economy does not give the poorest any of the money generated from economic growth – but did not address the underlying problem. It also meant that the poor single and childless were in a great deal of trouble. 

The price of ameliorating this problem will continue to rise if economic growth is unfairly shared. It is obvious but worth saying this is not a trend that was caused by the poorest – it has been driven by the market demands of those with money.

Ian Duncan-Smith’s announcement neither recognises nor wishes to deal with the underlying problem, and it also rejects New Labour’s amelioration plan because of its cost. Instead it seeks to identify the “flaws” in the poor implying, contrary to the evidence, that it is these “flaws” that are driving poverty. 

Government and independent analysts recognise that without increases in benefits or radical change in the labour market the Child Poverty Targets will not be met. The new proposals will set new targets - maybe ones that can be met – but which will inevitably add more stigma to the poor while drawing attention away from the underlying problem that even when the economy is working well the proceeds do not reach the poorest.  

Welfare Reform Bill - You Can Act!

Tomorrow the Welfare Reform Bill will be debated and voted on in the House of Commons. The Government are seeking to overturn the amendments passed in the Lords. As I write another amendment protecting disabled children has just been passed in the Lords against the Government's will.

The principle that all who play by the rules should receive enough to meet their basic needs has been at the heart of the welfare system for 65 years; if the benefit cap becomes law that principle will be destroyed. Only families whose basic needs are less than £26,000 will be safe. The rare and extremely vulnerable families who have greater needs will be left behind

The principle is wrong and the best predictions are that the effects will be equally wrong.The government’s proposed benefit cap will hit many of the most vulnerable people in society. It will affect 220,000 children (75% of those affected) and 14,740 families where Employment and Support Allowance (a disability benefit) is the main household income. It threatens to make over 80,000 children homeless and will push 133,000 children into poverty or further into poverty.

 

The Bishops amendment, carried in the House of Lords removes Child Benefit from the calculation. The effect would be to remove most of the families with children from the cap. The amendment was supported by children's charities, churches, faith groups , no-faith groups and many others because injustice of impoverishing children because of an arbitrary limit is obvious and painful.

The Methodist, Baptist, Quaker, and United Reformed Churches jointly wrote to every MP, explaining their objection to the principle of the Benefit Cap and urging them not to overturn the Bishop's amendment in tomorrows debate.

If you wish to contact your MP to express your concerns about the Welfare Reform Bill press the Church Action on Poverty button below. The emailer link will ask for your email address (for replies) and  your street address (to find your MP). It will then offer you a draft email which you can edit or accept as is before sending it to your MP with one more click.

Click to Email Your MP

Useful Links:

• The idea of a benefit cap is initially appealing to some. Many within churches - even former Archbishops - have supported it. 
• Go here for a simple explanation of why the Churches have said that the principle of a Cap is flawed:
• Today's Press statement of the Baptist, Methodist, Quaker and United Reformed Churches is here:
• You can read the letter that was sent to MPs here.

"Doing the Right Thing" - the new deserving poor

The quest to identify those impoverished people who are not to blame for their poverty from the other poor people - who by inference are receiving the poverty they deserve- is as old as the hills. Rowan Williams wrote last week of “a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving” poor’” within the political debate. He was right to do so.

The phrase “deserving and undeserving” is no longer used but there are many codes in its place. The new acceptable discriminator is to talk of “people who do the right thing”. The phrase crosses the political divide, David Cameron used the phrase 7 times in one pre-election debate; Ed Milliband used it last week when suggesting some deserving people should have preference in going up housing waiting lists. It is an obvious phrase, which tests well in focus groups, but its implications are, in my view, both socially damaging and profoundly contrary to Christian teaching.

The Government has now begun to haphazardly convert the rhetoric of the “those who do the right thing” into policy. Initially Benefit Caps – limiting the total amount of benefit which could be received - were to apply to all. As time has passed those “doing the right thing” have been exempted - the old, the disabled, the war widow(er)s, and other special cases. Every Housing Benefit claim will be reduced by mathematical formula but now a discretionary £200m will go to those considered to be unjustly affected, to be determined by individual local authorities – these will be the old, the sick.... The welfare cuts are gaining similar grossly underfunded exemptions on a daily basis.

The problem is that it is easy for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to supply examples of the feckless poor to be derided in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph – but it is much harder to define a group as undeserving with any degree of justice or accuracy. Whole categories are labelled so that the majority of the public believe them undeserving (alcoholics for instance) but talk to your minister or others who work with addicts and very quickly it becomes much harder to use words like “undeserving”.

The hunt for the undeserving poor, despite many attempts, has never found large enough numbers of people to save significant amounts of money. This enthusiastically publicised scrounger hunt has served to stigmatise people who least deserve it and have little opportunity to fight back. The unjust sigma is also used to penalise those who clearly have “done the right thing”. The reason being if you just take money from the “undeserving” it doesn’t save much and don’t be fooled into thinking it does. But even if making moral judgements on past behaviour was a fruitful exercise I would argue for a benefit system focussed on meeting needs rather than judging behaviour.

Some of the most compelling Gospel stories are of Jesus’ encounters with people as he went about his ministry. My reading of these encounters show Jesus to be profoundly disinterested in someone’s past commitment to “doing the right thing”. Jesus was unimpressed by the Pharisees - who made a fetish out of “doing the right thing” – yet those who society judged harshly - those who hadn’t “done the right thing” eg - Zacheaus or the Woman at the Well – seem to emerge from their encounters with Jesus much better. Jesus seemed much more concerned with meeting the needs of the person he met than judging them on past behaviour.

Our liturgy says we have “all sinned and fallen short”. In past times Christians would describe themselves as “wretched” or “sinners” or other colourful words to acknowledge the fact that even the best of us have not always “done the right thing”. The very heart of the Christian faith is the acknowledgement that although we do not always “do the right thing” we are still loved, still valuable and still acknowledged as made in the image of God. A Christian who wishes others the full consequences of “doing the wrong thing” should really ask themselves if this is a rule they would be happy to see applied to themselves.

My view is that Christians should not set themselves up as the uninvited judges of others behaviour, nor ask the DWP to judge others’ behaviour. Christians instead should be focused on ensuring that people’s needs are met – irrespective of how they came to be in need.

Scapegoats and benefit statistics...

The Churches have received some media coverage this week for calling the Chancellor, George Osborne MP, and the Department of Work and Pensions to account over the use of statistics.

In the Chancellor's speech announcing the Comprehensive Spending Review, and in DWP documents, the charge has been repeated that the country suffers from £5 billion benefit fraud. Mr Osborne said:

“Nor will fraud in the welfare system be tolerated any more. We estimate that £5 billion a year is being lost in this way - £5 billion that others have to work long hours to pay in their taxes. This week we published our plans to step up the fight to catch benefit cheats and deploy uncompromising penalties when they are caught.”

However when you look at the figures from the Government and HMRC, these reveal that of this £5 billion, benefit fraud is estimated at £1billion, and tax credit fraud is estimated at £0.6 billion, making a total of £1.6 billion. The exaggerated figure of £5 billion is derived by adding the fraud estimates to the estimates of error - errors made by Government as well as claimants.

We agree with the Government that benefit fraud is a serious offence, but implying that the poorest perpetrate this offence three times more than is the case is clearly unjust. The Baptist Union, the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church, together with the Church of Scotland, the Salvation Army, Church Action on Poverty and Housing Justice, have written to the Prime Minister asking that these statistics should not be misused again in ways that stigmatise benefit claimants, and that the public record should be corrected. We are waiting for the Prime Minister's reply. You can see here how the story was covered by the BBC , by the Guardian, and by the Telegraph .

Penny Pinching or Really Hurting?

Photo by nogoodreason and used under Creative Commons (2) licence

Today the government announced the public will get a say in where and how cuts should happen.  After the release of the governments spending (the treasury's COINS data), this could be another welcome step towards an open style of government.

However, before we leap to our keyboards - calculator in hand - it is worth taking some time to think and reflect about where the money is spent and what it achieves.   As Christians we are called to be both defender and advocate for those who live in poverty based on God’s preferential option for the poor and within all of us - religious or not - there is a commitment to principles of justice and fairness which need to prevail in constructing this social contract. These principles need to be applied in our response to ensure that those least responsible for the financial crisis (which is largely to blame for the budget deficit) are not those required to pay the highest personal price.

Let us consider the  £102.10 billion work and pensions bill as an example of the thinking required. We may think that there is room for manoeuvre within this cost centre. Perhaps there is, but to make that move we need to ensure that what is cut doesn’t add to the difficulty of claimants transitioning from reliance on benefits to meaningful work and potentially renewed sense of dignity!

Do not forget the human impact of claiming benefits. It is not an uplifting experience as the claimant is put under immense scrutiny at a time when he or she could be feeling vulnerable and exposed.  Besides the trudge to the benefit office, there are perceptions about being a 'scrounger' or 'not taking a job when there are lots of jobs about'. 

This is when the lines between public perception and reality begin to blur.  Recent figures indicate there are 2.5million people unemployed and only half a million jobs available.  As a result, one area of change within employment has been with the significant increase in the number of people taking part-time jobs.  The increase is due to the fact that:

“The number of employees and self-employed people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 25,000 on the quarter to reach 1.07 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992”. (Source Office of National statistics)

Oxfam's recent 'Something for Nothing' briefing report explored perceptions of poverty and benefit claimants within the media and the general public.  They found the difference between perception and reality (with particular reference to policy makers) centred around the transition period from benefits to work.   The transition can leave a person on a low income even more vulnerable.  The reason for this, is due to a problem within policy thinking regarding benefits and work.

"The problem with this (thinking) is twofold.  Firstly, work is generally paid in arrears, whereas the associated costs need to be paid for upfront.  This involves dipping into (generally non-existent) savings or, more realistically, going in to debt and bearing all the additional costs that this entails" (Source: Oxfam Something for Nothing Report)

If we are all to have a say in where and how cuts should happen it might be wise to start by looking at a passage of the bible regarding sheep and goats.   In the story in Matthew's gospel we are confronted with the sobering insight that our treatment of the destitute, sick and imprisoned ‘other’ equates to our treatment of Christ - who often comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor (to quote Mother Teresa).   Under the cloak of 'an age of austerity' or 'helping people move off benefits' we could risk getting stuck in a number crunching exercise whilst forgetting that each benefit payment ends up in the hands of an individual endowed with human dignity with legitimate claims to the social goods of society .  The question we should be asking is not 'are we paying them too much' but ‘are we enabling decisions to be made that help claimants to realise their full human potential by meeting their basic needs whilst providing the opportunity for them to enhance their job prospects in an affordable and sustainable way. This is the path to human flourishing which we should all aspire to in the UK in the difficult months and years ahead!