When Stephen Crabb replaced Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, it was an opportunity to hope for a different approach, and a change of direction from the DWP. Alth
When Stephen Crabb replaced Iain Duncan Smith as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, it was an opportunity to hope for a different approach, and a change of direction from the DWP. Although Mr Crabb displayed a worrying lack of knowledge about disability benefits, believing that people in the Work Related Activity Group of Employment Support Allowance were fit for, and seeking work, there seemed cause for hope. His tone was softer than his predecessor’s, and his talk of never forgetting that behind every statistic is a human being seemed to be a tentative acknowledgement of the fact that for years now, the DWP has adopted an aggressive and hostile tone towards people in need of support.
However, his first major speech was, ultimately, disappointing. On the positive side, Mr Crabb’s rhetoric continues to be much less harsh than his predecessor’s, and his tone more conciliatory, which is very welcome. He spoke of an all out assault on poverty, and again expressed a wish to talk to people and hear new ideas. But the substance of his speech indicated no reversal of any of the damaging policies that have been pursued in the name of welfare reform, and there were no significant announcements.
Perhaps the venue and context of his speech was more revealing. It was a conference of the Early Intervention Foundation, which was advertised as; “Looking at key themes including parent-child interaction in the early years, multi-agency working to spot risks early, the importance of couple relationships and the interplay between epigenetics and early intervention”
(It is interesting to note the inclusion of genetics here, as there is growing support on the right in what Toby Young refers to as ‘progressive eugenics’, with Adam Perkins, supported by the Adam Smith Institute amongst others, seeing social security policy as a means to achieve eugenic aims.)
Now, one would have thought that the government departments most likely to engage with such issues would be Health and Education, along with local authorities. The fact that it was the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who attended seems significant. Perhaps it indicates how far the DWP has moved, from being a department which exists to administer pensions and working age benefits, to a department that is becoming ever more involved in trying to ‘nudge’ and change the behaviour of working age citizens who happen to be on low incomes. It reflects the tendency on the right of politics to see poverty not as an economic problem, but the result of the personal shortcomings of individuals.
Baroness Stroud, formerly of the DWP, was at the conference and tweeted, “The EI Foundation’s focus on quality of parental relationship across all family types is a way forward for policy”. The Baroness is on record as saying that to tackle poverty, the government must tackle family breakdown, and the Secretary of State seemed to endorse this approach, with talk of an expansion of the controversial Troubled Families scheme.
But the root cause of poverty is not the quality of family relationships. The root cause of poverty is simply the fact that the money in society is not shared out fairly, so that some people can work very hard and still be in poverty, whilst others can do very little and be very rich.
The current government is, however, ideologically unable to concede this point, and so seeks out social problems and labels them as causes of poverty. It is easy to spend relatively small amounts of money on schemes that are billed as addressing the causes of poverty – far easier and more politically acceptable to the government and its supporters than tackling economic injustice by any major change to fiscal policy.
Of course, early intervention where a child has a problem, be it with mental or physical health, or in any other area of development, is very much to be supported. Relationship counselling and support is also to be valued. But where a child is living in a family that doesn’t have enough money to live on, please don’t let us pretend that by helping to improve parental relationships, but leaving the family still choosing whether to heat or eat, we are actually tackling poverty.
So Mr Crabb’s all-out assault on poverty is a very noble aim, but there is little evidence that he will correctly identify the causes or make the bold moves he would need to succeed. As Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said: “Universal Credit, which could have been a worthy tool for the ‘all-out assault on poverty’ that Crabb promises, has been crippled by repeated Treasury raids so that it will now leave people worse off than under the current system and ministers refuse to say what impact it will have on the number of people in poverty.
“What we now need is action to match the rhetoric, or else Stephen Crabb will be faced with the very real threat that this Government’s main social policy legacy could be the biggest rise in child poverty for a generation.”
For those on the lowest incomes to be helped rather than further impoverished, we would need a significant reversal of many welfare cuts, which at the moment seems extremely unlikely. The sad truth is that for this government, social and welfare policy is dictated by, and is very subordinate to, fiscal policy. And that being the case, unless he has the strength and courage to seriously challenge George Osborne, Mr Crabb may be powerless to launch an all out assault on poverty, and may have to content himself with trying to alleviate some of its symptoms.
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© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden