One-Stop State Service Providers

So, under the Government's latest harebrained idea, headteachers are not just to oversee "extended schools" that provide breakfast-til-bedtime supervision of children, their schools are to become centres for family welfare services, providing parents with information about housing, benefits, parenting skills, and health. As for the "parents council" proposal to allow parents to have more say in schools, perhaps Children, Schools and Families Secretary Ed Balls hasn't heard of parent governors and parents teachers associations.

If schools are forced to assume the role of social services and become seen as mere extensions of the state, not only will the education of our children suffer even more than it has already done under Labour, but the trust that currently exists between schools and their communities will quickly be forfeited. To borrow Ed's phrase, maybe schools need to display a new sign at their gates: "No Balls games here".

Immigration: Not A Racial Problem

Once again, Simon Heffer does not mince his words in today's Telegraph:

This week, we were told there were 11,000 foreigners in our prisons – one in seven of those inside – and the Government, with typical incompetence, is struggling to negotiate deals to have these people serve their sentences back home.

Yesterday, an independent body called the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit said that the Government's plans to build three million new homes by 2020 were not nearly adequate.

Of course they are not, because of the state's determination to allow unlimited immigration and, with it, the end of the indigenous cultural identity. The tensions of what used to be called "multi-culturalism" are dangerous enough: but so are the practical issues.

Large parts of England will be concreted over to accommodate all these new people. There will have to be new roads, railways and airports. And since we are already full up, and our public services buckling, where are we going to put everyone?

Labour has covered up its failure to control our borders by saying that our economy needs immigrants.

Well, if you are determined to have a welfare state that tolerates about eight million economically unproductive people of working age – the unemployed, those in "training" and those on various benefits because they believe they are unfit for work – then of course you will. It is time someone got serious.

Making British Poverty History

Citing evidence from former leader Iain Duncan Smith's landmark reports Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain, David Cameron has pledged that the next Conservative Government will "make British poverty history." However, he warns that "we need to make twentieth century welfare dependency history first."

He suggests that, despite good intentions, Gordon Brown has failed the country by focusing on top-down, mechanical state interventions instead of developing policies that focus on people — a flawed, one-dimensional approach that has resulted in almost five million people out of work and on benefits, almost four million people in problem debt, and over eight million people with alcohol and drug disorders.

He described a Conservative, holistic approach as one that would take into account the importance of families, communities and incentives to work:

"In place of Gordon Brown's misguided couple penalty, we will increase the Working Tax Credit that couples receive - bringing tax credits fully into line with the rest of the benefits system."

"Instead of the revolving door of people flitting in and out of benefits and work, we will draw on successful examples of welfare reform from all over the world to overhaul our welfare system. These are tailored to the individual, and they harness the private and voluntary sectors, rather than government bureaucracies, to help people get back into work."

Unfortunately, we really cannot afford to put off the radical welfare reform and the social changes that everyone knows we need for yet another two or three years until Mr Cameron becomes Prime Minister. So, let's hope that this new agenda will be the latest idea to be "stolen" by Gordon Brown...

Extended Family Care

In Labour's first term, the Royal Commission on Long-Term Care called for all personal social care to be made free to the patient. Eight years on, the state only pays for the care of people with assets less than £12,000, with many elderly people having to sell their homes to pay for care.

Given the observations made by David Willetts a month ago about intergenerational solidarity and older people being reluctant to borrow against their accumulated wealth, perhaps it is a good thing that people should need to liquidise some of their assets in retirement. After all, we do not want the state merely to take on more financial responsibility for our care, unnecessarily increasing the burden placed on the tax-payer, do we?

And yet, if we continue to develop our political vision (or "big idea" as the BBC chose to call it this morning) that values the family, perhaps we should welcome government proposals to scrap means-testing for long term care of elderly and disabled people as long overdue. For, the present system is clearly unsustainable, overly-complex and unfair. However, once again, this is not simply a question of economics but also social capital. Figures published last month by the University of Leeds for Carers UK value the unpaid support provided by carers at £87 billion a year — more than the annual total spent on the NHS and more than four times the amount spent on social care services by local authorities each year. This sum represents a vast network of extended family relationships and other friendships that would be lost if the state made any attempt to assume the same responsibility for care.

I remember when my parents moved a few years ago to be closer to my sister and her family, they attempted to arrange for my great-aunt to be moved to a care home nearer to their new home. However, they were told they would be required to pay the difference in the residential care funding provided by the two counties' social services as the county where my aunt had previously paid council tax would be responsible for funding her care but that their level of provision was lower than where my parents wished to move her. As a consequence, rather than living close to her extended family, with all the benefits that would bring such as more frequent visits from her family, my aunt lives two hours from the rest of us.

Given the rising challenge posed by our changing demographics and ageing population, surely government should be encouraging families, even through tax breaks or tax credits, to stay together and should be looking to maximise independence and choice for people being cared for and their carers.

Policy Blizzard's First Flurry

Talk of a "blizzard of conference policy announcements" has begun the "Cameron fight back" with what must surely rank as highly attractive, family-friendly changes to the tax and welfare system: the abolition of stamp duty for first-time buyers on homes worth up to £250,000 and an increase in working tax credit paid to two-parent families (worth up to £2,000 a year for 1.8 million families with children), funded by a crackdown on "work-shy" benefits claimants, including "aggressive" penalties for those who turn down jobs.

Whether it and the flurry of other manifesto suggestions to be rolled out this week are seen to bring together and build upon the many recent policy group reports and whether they will prove sufficiently appealing to close the double-figure poll lead that Gordon Brown now enjoys remains to be seen...

If you want a reminder of the policies that you, The Difference readers, said you would most like to see the Party put forward, when David Cameron first suggested a blizzard of policy ideas, visit Your Policy Ideas Results.

Free Lunches ... Or Just Free Cash?

When I heard Health secretary Alan Johnson announce the Government's proposal to pay expectant mothers a one-off, no-strings-attached payment of £200 from their 29th week of pregnancy, supposedly to encourage them to eat well, I thought it was such a silly idea that I didn't even think to blog about it. However, I see that Wat Tyler reckons the "Health in Pregnancy Grant" is really an attempt to get teenage mothers onto welfare:

As you will know, we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. Every year, some 80,000 under-18 year olds conceive, of whom somewhat over half go through to maternity. And the ones that do are overwhelmingly from the lowest socio-economic groups. They are four times more likely to get pregnant than the highest groups, and only around half as likely to have an abortion if they do. Which means well over half of teenage mothers are in the bottom third of society.

Now once those girls have their child, they cop a load of state welfare: indeed, in some parts of Britain it's a major career option. But before then, it's rather more difficult. Because of their youth, they don't qualify for the same level of welfare as say a pregnant 25 year old.

So what Al is really doing here is to extend state welfare to some very young girls who in all probability are currently wholly dependent on their own parents. At a cost of about £140m pa (700,000 births pa times £200 equals £140m pa) he aims to change that and make them dependent on the state.

Of course, such theories might be easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that one in three households have already been made dependent on the state for at least half their income as a result of the sweeping changes made to pensions, taxes, and benefits by Gordon Brown over the last decade. Just as I have suggested previously, Mr Tyler also believes there is much we could learn from America, where President Clinton's 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act helped reduce the number of families receiving cash benefits from the state from a record 5.1 million families to just 1.9 million.

First Impressions

Fresh back from a wonderful time in Venice and the best part of a week completely without listening to or reading any news, my first thoughts are "We're becoming as bad as America" — Police shot at in an M5 pursuit, just days after biker Gerry Tobin was murdered on the M40, and Liverpool's 11-year-old Rhys Jones the country's latest victim of gun crime.

Commenting on a past post about gun crime, Jeremy from Liverpool suggested using dog training to help reform disruptive teenagers. Has anybody else got any suggestions about how the worsening trend towards a gun culture might be reversed, besides the Government's usual more legislation?

UPDATE #1: I have now seen Iain Duncan Smith's excellent piece in the Daily Mail:

This social decline has come about because of the breakdown of the family, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, and the collapse of any political will to uphold the law.

Britain is now truly the sick man of Europe, with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, divorce, alcoholism among the young, drug misuse and educational failure.

He suggests introducing a policy of zero tolerance towards all anti-social behaviour, ensuring the courts act more efficiently in dealing with offenders, and that the police, who he says "are not only weighed down by bureaucracy but have been rendered almost powerless against offenders by the State's obsession with human rights" must reclaim the streets. Picking up on last month's Social Justice Policy Group report, he also discusses practical steps to tackling family breakdown, reforming the welfare state and dealing confidently with drug and alcohol abuse.

In case anyone had forgotten, this is but one very solid reason why we need a Conservative Government after the next general election.UPDATE #2: "Anarchy in the UK"

I see that Cameron has also been busy while I was away, calling for the Human Rights Act to be scrapped and replaced with a new Bill of Rights and for a strengthening of family and community bonds to help counter the rise of yob culture:

We need to make men realise that having children is an 18-year commitment - not a one-night stand. We need to make mothers realise that it's work, not welfare, that offers their family the best future. We need to help couples stay together, not drive them apart with the tax and benefits system. And we need to make society as a whole - that's you and me - realise that we all have duties to our neighbours.

Now I just need to check out Louise Bagshawe's Reasons to vote Conservative at ConservativeHome.

Labour Wreaks Happy Families

"I cannot see how 'Dave' offering my £1000 a year to vote Conservative would influence me to get married if I wasn't already going to do it. All it is, in my view, is a cynical attempt to buy votes from those who are already married."

Thus opined Norfolk Blogger about Iain Duncan Smith's Social Justice Policy Group proposals earlier this week. He clearly misses the point that for many who are struggling to makes ends meet, the Government's present perverse policies DO result in families breaking up around the country who would otherwise seek to provide their children with the stability they need and most benefit from. The News of the World carries the story of a married couple who have chosen to split up purely because Gordon Brown's tax and benefits system encourages them to do so:

A MARRIED couple revealed how they split up —because under Britain's crazy benefit system they are BETTER OFF living apart.

Sean Ash and wife Chloe agreed to break up after realising they would lose out even MORE when he takes a new job.

They spoke in the wake of a major political row this week, sparked by Tory leader David Cameron's tax-break pledge to give married couples an extra £20 a week.

Sean and Chloe, who have both been on benefits, explained why they decided to join what Mr Cameron called "our broken society".

As a couple, they had a joint net income of £1,702 a month. But after the split, Sean now gets £1,184 and Chloe £1,396—making a total of £2,580.

That means they are £878 a month in benefits better off leading separate lives.

Highlights From Breakthrough Britain

Writing in the overview to the Social Justice Policy Group's report, Breakthrough Britain, Iain Duncan Smith says, "Breakthrough Britain advocates a new approach to welfare in the 21st century. We believe that, in order to reverse social breakdown, we need to start reinforcing the Welfare Society. The Welfare Society is that which delivers welfare beyond the State." He identifies two specific areas why their approach is unique: "Firstly, we have recommended a range of policies which are designed to break the cycle of disadvantage in the early years of a child’s life. Secondly, we wish to strengthen families by removing the perverse disincentives in the fiscal system which are an obstacle to stable families."

It is understandable that media coverage has so far focused on the group's marriage and tax-related suggestions. After all, the Government has spent ten years creating a tax and benefits system that perversely penalises married couples, perpetuating poverty for the 76% of children who live in couple households. However, any attempt to heal our broken society will need to change more than just the tax system. Duncan Smith explains the significance of the five pathways to poverty identified by the Group:

"Our approach is based on the belief that people must take responsibility for their own choices but that government has a responsibility to help people make the right choices. Government must therefore value and support positive life choices. At the heart of this approach is support for the role of marriage and initiatives to help people to live free of debt and addiction. Government has to be committed to providing every child with the best possible education and giving the most vulnerable people the necessary support to enter active employment. The problems of family breakdown, drug and alcohol addiction, failed education, debt and worklessness and dependency affect us all, either directly or indirectly, as Breakdown Britain showed."

The Difference offers the following list of highlights from the report that it is hoped will receive due attention in the coming hours, days, and weeks:

Family Breakdown

• Relationship education in schools
• Creative ways for delivering more respite care
• Targeted assistance for parents who currently struggle to nurture their children, rather than steering them towards local authority childcare
• Removal of the bias towards state-provided childcare.
• A review of family law conducted by a dedicated independent commission
• Reinstatement of the use of ‘marital status’ in government forms and statements

Economic Dependency

• Clear work expectations must be attached to the receipt of benefits for people who can work
• Back-to-work services should be state determined but not state delivered
• A serious and thorough review of the Housing Benefit system is needed
• Parents should be given the opportunity to front-load child benefit

Educational Failure

• £500 p.a. educational credits for disadvantaged children to fund supplementary educational services such as a year’s extra maths tuition, six months intensive literacy support and a year’s group music lessons
• An end to bureaucratic overload
• ‘Booster classes’ for pupils falling behind
• More alternative provision to pupil referral units

Addiction

• An integrated addiction policy to replace the separate drugs and alcohol treatment
• A devolved responsibility to local Addiction Action Centres
• An expansion of third sector proven provision of ‘holistic’, value added, abstinence-based treatment

Serious Personal Debt

• UK credit unions should be strengthened, supported and expanded
• Local community based debt advice should be supported
• The benefits system and Social Fund should be reviewed in detail
• Education in personal finance should be improved

Third Sector

• Gift Aid should be made easier to claim
• Introduce Charitable Remainder Trusts as tax-efficient vehicles for planned giving
• Launch a 'V Card' reward scheme to boost volunteering
• Greater third sector delivery of public services
• Less bureaucratic and prescriptive Government funding
• Introduce voucher schemes to empower users of government-funded services
• Enhance the third sector's voice in Cabinet and Parliament
• Create a level playing field for faith based organisations

Yes, all this will come with a cost. But, as the report also notes, social breakdown presently costs the UK £102,000,000,000 per year, or around £3500 per taxpayer — that's a lot of money that could be better invested.

Substance With Style

Today's much anticipated report, Breakthrough Britain, from the Conservatives' Social Justice Policy Group, headed by Iain Duncan Smith, is the result of 18 months work of consultation with over 800 experts, organisations and charities, the policy proposals will propose a completely fresh approach to tackling poverty in the UK.

Having previously identified the five interlinked "pathways to poverty" — family breakdown, education failure, welfare dependency, debt, and addiction — today's proposals, if adopted by the Conservative Party will "reset the balance" that currently makes it advantageous for couples to break up, or to pretend to be "living apart together" — a term referring to the 200,000 more people claiming benefits for lone parents than there truly are lone parents in the country.

The Conservatives are not proposing a return to the married person's tax allowance, which Duncan Smith accepts had flaws. Neither are they suggesting that lone parents should have less money. Instead, married couples would qualify for a £20-a-week tax break and receive higher benefit payments of £32-a-week, bringing the benefits awarded to married couples into line with those currently awarded to single parents. This will be paid for through welfare reform targetted to encourage recipients off one of the five "paths to poverty".

Labour is already trying to claim that these proposals would be unfair on the children of single parents or those whose parents choose not to marry. However, there is nothing unfair about levelling the playing field. Indeed, one could argue that such an egalitarian approach achieves what socialism has always failed to deliver: social justice.

The Elderly - Who Cares?

The NHS Blog Doctor has a brilliant dissection of today's Times article, Who cares? Both the article and the good doctor's response are rather long, but here's his conclusion:

The NHS was set up and funded to deal with illness, not old age. The problem in the UK is that the Welfare State mentality has turned us into a nation of welfare payment scroungers. Why do families in this country not take responsibility for their own elderly? Why should the taxpayer pick up the bill for the social care of elderly, wealthy businessmen?

Why do we not care for our own elderly relatives? It can be done. Some British families do it. Families of Indian and Pakistani origin. I have never, in all the time I have been practising medicine, heard an Indian or Pakistani say “We cannot look after mother because we have jobs and families of our own” Somehow, they manage.

My practice looks after three large old people’s homes and an EMI [Elderly Mental Illness] unit.

There is not a single patient of Indian or Pakistani origin in any of the old peoples’ homes. There is one hopelessly demented elderly Pakistani lady in the EMI unit. She probably gets more visits than the rest of the patients put together.

There must be moral in this.

Lock Up Fat Parents

In a little reported survey published at the start of this week, we learnt that almost one child in four is overweight (18%) or obese (5%) at age three.

Today the BBC informs us that obesity has been a factor in at least twenty child protection cases in the last year and many within the British Medical Association believe the government should consider childhood obesity in under-12s as neglect by the parents. Quite clearly we are looking at a public health problem, but are we really also looking at a child protection issue?

This Government clearly believes that the nanny state can do a better job of bringing up the next generation, that parents are untrustworthy and should hand over responsibility for their offspring from when they wake until they are ready for bed. However, do we really want to criminalise and put into care the children of parents who, largely as a consequence of their own upbringing or poor education, do not know how to feed their children properly? Given that the problem was virtually non-existent in the twentieth century†, what has changed in recent years suddenly to make this an issue? Is advertising and the cheap availability of unhealthy meals to blame? Has the ability of parents to raise their children properly been undermined by the way the traditional nuclear family has been put under pressure, single parenthood incentivised‡, and mothers encouraged into the workplace? Lastly, what are the roles and obligations of parents, schools, school-food providers, and the government in tackling childhood obesity?

† By the way, this is not just a British problem, as reported late last year in Medical News Today: Belly Fat Of US Children Grew By Over 65% Since 1999

‡ A fact confirmed again today in the second study by former Labour welfare reform minister Frank Field in a report for the think tank Reform, Welfare isn’t working—Child Poverty, in which he argues that Gordon Brown's tax and benefit system "brutally discriminates" against two-parent families.

Our Twilight Years

28% of elderly people say their lives have got worse in the last year and 93% say their lives have not improved, according to a landmark report from Help the Aged, in which the charity calls for:

• a clear commitment to ending pensioner poverty;
• a new Government strategy of paying benefits automatically to older people  on the basis of information it already holds on them;
• public bodies to promote age equality in the same way they promote race, disability and gender equality;
• a ban on age discrimination, extending beyond the workplace, in the forthcoming Single Equalities Bill;
• a greater focus on health, more opportunities for activity and employment and better planning for the future.

As I noted in a recent exchange with Ruth about pensioner poverty, it is a scandal both that almost two in three pensioners are now caught by the welter of Gordon Brown's means-tested benefits and that around half of them fail to claim the benefits they are entitled to. Therefore the charity's Director of Policy is surely right when he says, "Far from being people's twilight years, this report shows that life for older people in the UK is much darker." However, I have to wonder what proportion of the population at large, not just the elderly, believe their lives have not improved and have in fact got worse in the last year.

Perhaps I should have titled this post NuLabour's Twilight Years?

New Deal's Woeful Failure

Gordon Brown's flagship New Deal scheme to help young unemployed people is a "woeful" failure and not adapting to fit the needs of participants or the current labour market, according to former Labour welfare reform minister Frank Field in a report for the think tank Reform.

What he says is, of course, not new. Other reports, such as last month's by The Prince's Trust, have noted that twice as many 16 to 24-year-olds are classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET) as are unemployed.

What is new is that a former Labour minister, albeit one who has been a long-standing critic of the Chancellor, now accepts that this is the case. Noting that, despite £3.5bn in funding, there are now 70,000 more 18 to 24-year-olds out of work than when the New Deal scheme began in 1998, Mr Field says, "The results show that even if the money was available, which it isn't, more of the same won't work and will be a betrayal of young unemployed people."  Just last week the National Association of Head Teachers criticised the Government's obsession with targets and testing, saying that schools are producing an "army of the unemployable" with tens of thousands of teenagers quitting education without any qualifications.

Mr Field echoes criticism made by the Conservatives, who have long claimed that many of the young people helped into employment by the New Deal would have found jobs anyway. He also adopts the suggestion made by Conservatives that time limits should be set for recipients of benefits — a policy that has proved successful in encouraging people back into work in America. In 1994, a record 5.1 million families were on American welfare. However, as a result of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act introduced by President Clinton in 1996, today just 1.9 million families get cash benefits—and in a third of those only the children qualify for aid. Overall, child poverty has been reduced by over 1.6 million, with unprecedented declines in poverty occurring among children of single mothers and the greatest decrease happening among black children. Whereas in Britain people on benefit frequently discover they will lose out financially if they seek employment, in America people who return to work are the ones who get help with child care, job training, and transportation.

The new American system has not been without its problems, but there is clearly a lot we could learn if we are to transform our own bloated state dependency and answer fundamental questions about how to guarantee the stability and security upon which the economy and well-being depend, such as:

• How can we best help poor families without fostering unintended consequences such as economic dependency and broken families that simply perpetuate rather than end poverty?
• How can we help children in poor families without rewarding the decisions of parents that may have contributed to their children's disadvantaged circumstances?
• How can we redress racial or ethnic inequality without adversely affecting the opportunities of others?

Brown's Reverse Robin Hood Budget

Gordon appears to have misread Robin Hood. As a good socialist, he was supposed to tax the rich and give their money away to the poor. Instead, as even MPs in his own party have pointed out, by abolishing the 10p tax rate, he is effectively taxing the poor (especially those without children) to keep those on middle incomes happy (especially those with children). The rich will probably be unaffected either way by today's spectacle. Furthermore, he's also taxing small businesses to the profit of big businesses.

Maybe the great leader-in-waiting has simply lost the plot...

Weapons of Mass Instruction

As we embark on the fifth year of the war in Iraq, I thought I would highlight the Weapons of Mass Instruction campaign that is being run by Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people. They are calling on the government to invest in learning opportunities to help end homelessness, and thereby reduce the amount that currently has to be spent on the consequences of homelessness, such as unemployment, addiction, and mental health problems.

If anything is to be done about social breakdown in this country, this is precisely the kind of shift from state welfare to social welfare that we need to see. For, although the Government claims that it wants to get disadvantaged groups into jobs, just 2% of Learning and Skills Council funding goes directly towards voluntary organisations helping those most in need to gain the qualifications necessary for work.

Antimarriage

I've just noticed the following excellent letter in today's Times:

Sir, The Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, says that benefits policy should be “bias-free”. Yet the tax credit system is biased towards parents who live separately, encouraging unmarried couples to commit fraud by pretending to “live apart together”. At least 200,000 more people claim lone parent benefit than there are lone parents.

We may ask why marital status has been abolished from government forms and research in the face of robust evidence showing distinct and important differences in parent and child outcomes. Mr Johnson may also want to find out why government has completely ignored evidence-based relationship education programmes that can prevent and reduce family breakdown.

His non-argument — that not all marriages are brilliant and not all other family arrangements are doomed — is obviously true, in the same way that not all smokers die of cancer.

HARRY BENSON
Bristol Community Family Trust,
Kingsdown, Bristol