Social Immobility

"Parental background continues to exert a significant influence on the academic progress of recent generations of children."

Those from the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile at age five. Those from the richest households who are least able at age three move up from the 15th percentile to the 45th percentile by age five. If this trend were to continue, the children from affluent backgrounds would be likely to overtake the poorer children in test scores by age seven.

Since the Sutton Trust demonstrated earlier in the year that Britain has the lowest social mobility of any country you can measure, its latest revelations should hardly come as a surprise. The trouble is, as we have noted previously, many of the proposed mechanisms that might tackle the issue focus on education — but this is the area that Labour appears most to have failed the country.

Beyond GDP

"They are, in a way, treating the symptoms - meanwhile, the root problems are getting worse."

Thus says one of the authors of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report claiming that one in three children in the UK is living in poverty, speaking about the Government's failing attempts to reach its 2010 target of halving child poverty. Yet, poverty is defined so that a couple with two children whose net income is less than £1300 per month after income tax and housing costs is reckoned to be poor. As someone who has never chosen a job because of its salary, I would say you can actually do quite a lot with that kind of money. It's all a question of priorities and budgeting. Now, I know we've had the debate about relative and absolute poverty before but, rather than worrying about how many televisions or foreign holidays someone can afford (not to mention expenses such as the £100 per month spent by the average 15 cigarettes-a-day smoker), I would be far more concerned about the world's ultra poor and those in this country trapped by family break-down, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness, and addiction.

Yes, we do need to make British poverty history, but we also need a different measure of poverty: one that factors in welfare dependency, poor skills, and family breakdown — one that measures the true state of our country's broken communities. The five "pathways to poverty" are problems that cannot be addressed simply by the Treasury, for they are not simply economic. There is, after all, more to human well-being than GDP.

How To Make Ultra Poverty History

"If concentrated in a single nation, the world's poorest people—the ultra poor—would comprise the world's seventh most populous country."

Until now, analysis of global poverty has tended to focus on the almost one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. A new report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) breaks this group down into those who live on between 75 cents and $1 a day, those who live on 50 to 75 cents a day, and the "ultra poor" who live on less than 50 cents a day. It finds that 162 million people are ultra poor and that, although economic growth is the factor that has had the greatest impact on poverty, for instance in countries such as China and India, the very poorest people benefit the least from reductions in poverty and typically need specific action to be taken to enable them to participate in growth. "The World's Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger" concludes:

Looking at the characteristics of the poorest, we found that the poorest are those from excluded groups, those living in rural remote areas with little education, those with few assets, and—in Asia—those without land.

The analysis suggests that interventions to insure the poor against health shocks, address the exclusion of certain groups, prevent child malnutrition, and enable investment in education and other capital for those with few assets are essential to help the poorest move out of poverty.

Once again, in the reference to those "with few assets" and "without land," we see the wisdom of Old Testament economics, where every family was guaranteed shared access to and use of the land and its natural resources. To the extent that Israel served as a model of God's original economic purposes in creation, we are surely justified in asking how these family-oriented economic principles should be applied in the wider world of modern-day secular society. How, for instance, might enforceable property rights be ensured for those who have been trapped in the downward spiral of debt, poverty, dispossession, and bondage?

Around the world, governments regularly assert ownership of land that local communities believe was theirs and collude with powerful interests to seize land and resources from the poor. Examples that come to mind include: Tajikistan, where I recall whole neighbourhoods being given just weeks to find somewhere else to live in order to make way for a new presidential development in the capital; Chile, where the government sold the Araucaria forests of the Pehuenche people to logging companies; and Laos, where some 6,200 villagers are to be displaced by the Nam Theun 2 dam project, financed by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, and resettled on insufficient land. To see what happens when property rights are not guaranteed, one only needs to look at what Robert Mugabe has done to the former "bread basket of Africa", Zimbabwe.

As the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (author of The Other Path: The economic answer to terrorism) has noted, "They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation." Without clear title to their land, houses, and businesses, the poor cannot sell their assets or borrow against them and lack incentive to invest in that which could be taken from them at any moment; and thus they remain poor. De Soto has calculated the amount of "dead capital" in untitled assets held by the world's poor to be "at least $9.3 trillion" — a sum that dwarfs the amount of foreign aid given to the developing world since 1945.

Those who maintain religion has no place in politics and the Bible (whose vision for society they have probably never sought to read, let alone understand) has no relevance to the many social challenges facing the world might care to reflect that the answers might have been staring us in the face all along ... or rather have been sitting on the bookshelf, just waiting for us to rediscover them.

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...

Participatory Capitalism

Remember the days when everyone knew their bank manger and the Man from the Pru would visit to collect his premium? It's not that long ago since people still seemed to have an important place in financial transactions. Now, though, everything seems to be automated or online — even applying for a loan or larger overdraft. Having unquestioningly accepted the flexibility and convenience that technology has offered our individualistic age, it might seem strange to hear anyone calling for a people-centred economy in which morality replaces mathematics in tackling problems caused by global capital. Yet, in criticising the global economic system for creating "material and spiritual poverty," that is precisely what the World Council of Churches programme executive for Economic Justice, Poverty and Ecology has done.

The Tanzanian Rogate Mshana suggests that one solution to the globalisation of capital could be the introduction of "participatory capitalism, which provides a way to connect people to their economy, their community, to their work place, and to each other," for instance through employee ownership schemes. He also called for the promotion of fair trade to respect the needs of small-scale farmers in poor countries and the support of economic initiatives that focus on social rather than economic performance.

I am reminded of an observation made in the ground-breaking Jubilee Manifesto (by Michael Schluter & John Ashcroft), it its discussion of the consequences of the debt-based financial system that has predominated in the West in recent centuries: "It is ironic that anti-globalisation campaigners decry the activities of multinational companies because of their scale, their dissociation from local communities and the frequent excesses of executive pay. These are all the inexorable results of the principle of limited liability, but rarely does one hear the correct diagnosis of the underlying problem."

If the Conservatives are serious about tilting the domestic and international balance back from "economy-friendly families to family-friendly economies" — or even, if I might be so bold as to suggest, community-friendly economies — then they would do well to listen to the likes of the WCC's Mshana.

Source: Ecumenical News International

Real Respect

Four weeks ago in Breakthrough Britain, the Social Justice Policy Group called for greater third sector delivery of public services. Today, the Conservatives' Social Enterprise Zones Task Force reinforces this call for charities and other non-governmental organisations to play a bigger role in boosting deprived neighbourhoods and communities.

Emulating the economic "enterprise zones" set up in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher to create jobs, wealth and opportunity, local authorities would be able to designate deprived areas as "social enterprise zones" in which social entrepreneurs would receive tax breaks to fight poverty. A Community Bank could also be created to channel funds and allocate tax relief where it might have the best effect. In addition, a new National School Leaver Programme would offer every young person the chance to participate in community activity at home or abroad after leaving school.

If we really want to promote community regeneration and attract investment in disadvantaged communities — if we are to have any hope of getting to grips with the sub-culture of drugs, knives and guns in places such as Hulme, the site of Manchester's latest shooting, less than a mile from where Jessie James was shot in Moss Side last September — then these "Real Respect" proposals are precisely the kind of localised, "bottom-up" solutions that government should be facilitating and supporting. As David Cameron notes in today's Guardian, these are social problems that require social as well as statutory solutions and it is a serious failing that, at present, the government typically works with large, national charities rather than smaller, locally based voluntary organisations, which are more often than not the ones most effective at combating entrenched deprivation.

The choice at the next election, whenever it comes, is clear: another four to five years of the present Government, that thinks the state knows how to run our lives better than we do, or a Party that will actually trust the people.

Brown's Pension Revolution

"Ignoring council tax, pensioners' net incomes have been rising faster than average earnings."

... Which would be fine, if only pensioners didn't have to pay council tax, which has doubled since Labour came to power in 1997. The reality is, together with energy prices soaring and food prices set to rise even further as a result of the recent flooding, Chris Grayling, the shadow work and pensions secretary, is right when he notes Britain's poorest pensioners are seeing their incomes falling by up to four per cent a year — costing them on average more than £250 — and that the gap between better-off and poorer pensioners is getting wider.

So much for Government claims that more than one million pensioners have been lifted out of relative poverty under Gordon Brown's economic management.

Brown's Coalition For Justice

Speaking to the United Nations in New York, Gordon Brown says he wants to "summon into existence the greatest coalition of conscience in pursuit of the greatest of causes" — that the world should "forge a coalition for justice" to combat what he called the "emergency" of global poverty.

The problem is, while he talks a good talk, his record just doesn't give any confidence that he will deliver on his promises of empowerment and free trade:

We need a compact - the rich accepting their responsibilities to invest, to support, to end protectionism and to deliver our promises; the developing countries accepting their responsibilities to reform, to open up to trade, and to be transparent and free of corruption. But our objectives cannot be achieved by governments alone, however well intentioned; or private sector alone, however generous; or NGOs or faith groups alone, however well meaning or determined - it can only be achieved in a genuine partnership together.

So it is time to call into action the eighth of the Millennium Goals so we can meet the first seven. Let us remember Millennium Development Goal eight - to call into being, beyond governments alone, a global partnership for development, and together harness the energy, the ideas and the talents of the private sector, consumers, NGOs and faith groups, and citizens everywhere. The sum of all the individual actions working together to achieve real change. Some people call it the mobilisation of soft power...I call it people power. People power in support of the leadership of developing countries.

After all, he has spent the last ten years taking power away from the people under his influence, so what makes anybody think he will begin giving it back to us all now? Consider what he says on protectionism:

Perhaps for too long we have talked the language of development without defining its starting point in wealth creation - the dignity of individuals empowered to trade and be economically self sufficient.

No country has moved to development without opening up to trade.

So I accept an immediate obligation on world leaders to address protectionism and work to make what we promised - the development trade round - happen this year.

If he really means what he says, presumably we will see Britain adopting a new tough stance in Europe as we withdraw from the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy? I, for one, won't be holding my breath...

In It Together

Poverty is a denial of human potential. The stifling of dynamism, creativity and intelligence that attend poverty affects us all. Unleash that potential and we will all benefit through an explosion of thought, culture and trade.

In the twenty-first century extreme poverty is not only a preventable economic absurdity but a moral disgrace. That is what has motivated this group in its work.

But even if we were driven purely on the basis of self interest then act we must. Poverty undermines our security and prosperity as well as our humanity. It is necessary for our own well-being that we work together to remove the scourge of poverty that so blights our time.

The bald fact is that extreme poverty does not affect only the few, it harms the many. We are all in this, like it or not, together. And that is the only way that poverty will finally be eradicated: together.

So begins Peter Lilley in his introduction to the second of the Conservative Party's policy group reports, published today. Unlike the Social Justice Policy Group's recent report, media coverage of In it together: the attack on global poverty, from the Globalisation and Global Poverty Policy Group, has so far been very poor.

Overall, with its emphasis on trade and training instead of aid and tariffs, it looks good, although expecting the World Bank and other multilateral organisations to track corruption seems rather naive. In all, the group makes 76 recommendations, all of which could be funded within the current commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on international aid. Here are a few of the highlights, listed under the report's six headings:

Aid

• DFID’s process for allocating bilateral aid should be adjusted from a cliff edge to a slide. So when low income countries pass the middle income threshold they should no longer risk losing all their aid.
• DFID should continue to develop funding mechanisms which provide longer term, more stable and more flexible aid funding. This principle should apply both to bilateral aid and that provided through NGOs and local partners.
• We recommend that DFID should allocate its aid budget so as to encourage NGOs to develop specialist competences and focus on them, and should be more willing to use smaller NGOs which have already specialised in a particular function or country and proven their ability and integrity.
• DFID should create a Human Rights Review Panel to advise whether aid should continue to flow to governments after human rights abuses occur and DFID should respond speedily but proportionately to any deterioration in standards, thereby obviating the need for a more drastic response later on.
• The UK must make a long-term commitment to training medical staff in countries with the greatest need for them.

Economic development

• Increased UK support for skills and enterprise training for young people is necessary.
• The UK should endeavour to extend its support for secondary education, to assist low income countries in moving towards universal secondary education.
• We support the provision of development funding directly to private sector enterprises and entrepreneurs, if this offers the best way to tackle poverty.

Trade

• There is a strong case for allowing low income countries, in particular, i) open access to EU and other developed country markets; and ii) flexibility as to how rapidly they liberalise their domestic markets. Real Trade involves both.
• The UK should aim to spend a larger proportion of its existing aid budget to 2013 on aid for trade.
• The UK should press the EU to take up the US offer of an end to all market distorting support as part of the Doha Round. At the very least the UK should press for the EU to meet the G20’s request for deeper reductions. The UK should also seek to hold the EC to its earlier offer to abolish all subsidies on exports from the EU ... The UK should push for an immediate end to certain CAP programmes such as tobacco and cotton subsidies.

Corruption and governance

• DFID should live up to its promises and respond more vocally, robustly and proportionately to evidence of corruption affecting UK aid.
• Aid to promote good governance should be used to help both stimulate and satisfy demand for greater accountability, by strengthening the capacity of civil society to challenge governments over issues of corruption, human rights, and transparency and accountability.

Conflict, fragile states and humanitarian aid

• The UK should support an International Arms Trade Treaty to curb the flow of weapons to conflicts.
• Pledges for quick-onset emergencies should either be made from existing contingency funds or from new money, and should not involve the re-allocation of previously allocated funds.
• What is needed is greater coordination, not centralisation. If donors duplicate, this is a waste, but if the UN were to attempt to centralise all donors and then assign tasks this could take up valuable time – putting lives at risk. Attempts to centralise responsibility under a single agency should be resisted by the UK Government.
• The UK should welcome and undertake to uphold the commitment of the international community at the UN Millennium Review Summit in 2005 to ‘take collective action [to protect vulnerable populations] in a timely and decisive manner . . . should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities [be] manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity’.

DFID - the aid effectiveness challenge

• DFID should, as a leading bilateral donor, take a much more robust line with multilaterals, demand evidence of effectiveness and performance, be ready to withhold discretionary funding where necessary and through this more assertive stance create real impetus for change.
• DFID must focus on results, rather than processes, and must develop methodologies and techniques that will enable a results-focused comparison of different projects and programmes.
• Our proposed option for the evaluation of DFID’s effectiveness is the creation of an Independent Evaluation Group which would report to Parliament via the International Development Select Committee.

Polarisation of Poverty

For the third day in a row, we have yet another report highlighting the very real challenge of poverty in this country. This latest, a study from the social policy research and development charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation, reveals that Britain is moving back towards levels of inequality in wealth and poverty last seen more than forty years ago, and that rich and poor are living further apart.

Looking at how the geographical distribution of wealth in Britain has changed in the last 40 years, the authors of Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005 argue that in order to understand social inequality it is crucial to understand what is happening to those people and households that are not poor. They conclude that over the last three decades, "slowly and not particularly steadily, more and more families became excluded from what it was normal to be able to do." Households in already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier, more households have become poor over the last fifteen years, and the widening gap between rich and poor has meant that there are fewer "average" households — neither rich nor poor.

The report raises serious questions about what Britain will look like in ten years' time if trends continue and concludes by asking, "Who wants to be born in a neighbourhood where, odds on, you will grow up poor? Who wants to be born average where so many are poor, where the rich are gaining more and more and the exclusive rich are such a tiny group? Who will put up with that and who is going to change this?"

The sad thing is, although the methods used may be novel and although the results may shed additional light on the debate, all these reports merely confirm what we all already know and can see around us. How many more diagnoses of this problem do we need? Surely the money used to conduct all this research would now be better channelled to investigating best practice elsewhere to identify possible solutions? Perhaps the charities will now take a lead from Iain Duncan Smith and the Conservatives' Social Justice Policy Group who, having first defined the problem, went on to make specific policy proposals for how we might heal our broken society and improve the well-being of us all.

Telly-Addicts

Two new reports this week provide yet more damning insights into the lives of the most deprived children in British society. Firstly, yesterday, in a report that the media covered as showing no link between poor diet and low incomes, the Food Standards Agency found higher levels of smoking and alcohol consumption and lower levels of activity in low income families.

Then, today, the National Consumer Council, summarising research into the viewing habits of children in the "tween" years (aged 9-13), concludes: "Perhaps one of the most important findings of our study is the uncovering of a divided society, in which different communities display very different attitudes to media consumption and, concomitantly, display very different levels of materialism. In this study, commercial influence was shown to be exerted unevenly across the population, as children in deprived areas seemingly had a great deal more unrestricted TV and computer access."

Children in affluent areas were found to spend substantially less time in front of TV and computer screens. What they watch differed qualitatively as well as quantitatively: "Less than half of the children from disadvantaged areas list children's programmes in their top three favourite programmes; nearly three-quarters in affluent areas do. Almost 30 per cent more disadvantaged kids watch music TV; 25 per cent more watch horror; and 13 per cent more watch soaps. Twice as many of the children from the affluent areas, on the other hand, watch nature programmes and documentaries."

Perhaps most seriously for this under-privileged generation of "screen kids," the study suggests their television viewing habits leads to a devastating cycle of family friction, low self-esteem and materialism. Children who spend more time in front of the TV or computer screen were found to have a lower opinion of their parents and to argue with them more. Although the report does not say so, presumably they also have a lower opinion of and argue more with other authority figures, such as teachers. Little wonder headteachers, the police and society at large face such a struggle with antisocial behaviour.

Of course, we need to separate cause and effect: taking away children's televisions won't solve the underlying problems. However, giving serious consideration to the many proposals made by Iain Duncan Smith's Social Justice Policy Group last week just might.

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.

From Breakdown To Breakthrough

The BBC reports that "the Conservatives will put the battle against poverty and deprivation at the heart of their campaign to win the next general election."

Social breakdown is clearly a problem that has got worse under Labour, just as economic breakdown was so clearly the problem in the 1970s. The Difference therefore looks forward to next week's report from the Conservatives' Social Justice Policy Group, Breakthrough Britain, which will offer a wealth of proposals how we might rectify the issues identified in their other recent report Breakdown Britain.

There is a risk, however, that media coverage will once again be hijacked by a debate on the definition of poverty. You may recall that it was revealed earlier this year that the number of children living in relative poverty in the UK rose by 200,000 last year, that the number of people living on less than 40% of average income had increased under Labour, and that even using the Government's standard of relative poverty — people living in homes on less than 60% of average income net of housing costs — Labour was likely to miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010. At that time, the press was more interested in Greg Clark's suggestion that Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee rather than Winston Churchill ought to frame the terms of the Conservative Party's social agenda:

"The traditional Conservative vision of welfare as a safety net encompasses another outdated Tory nostrum - that poverty is absolute, not relative. Churchill's safety net is at the bottom: holding people at subsistence level, just above the abyss of hunger and homelessness. It is the social commentator Polly Toynbee who supplies imagery that is more appropriate for Conservative social policy in the twenty first century."

The truth, as revealed a couple of weeks ago in a report from Save the Children, is that one out of every ten children (that's 1,300,000 children) in the UK is living in severe poverty, lacking basic necessities that most people in the UK take for granted — a horrifying, even unbelievable statistic that the government currently does not even attempt to measure.

If we are to heal our broken society, the public debate must move beyond simply describing thresholds of poverty or counting the cost of social breakdown. There must be a commitment to discuss practical recommendations that will genuinely empower those who have been left behind.

World Poverty - Who Cares?

"Existing trade barriers, agricultural subsidies and restrictive rules on intellectual property rights reinforce global inequities – and they make a mockery of our tall claims to eliminate hunger and poverty from our world."

The United Nations' mid-point progress report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), published today, notes that although extreme poverty is beginning to fall in sub-Saharan Africa and the poorest are getting a little less poor in most regions of the world, poverty reduction has been accompanied by rising inequality and half the developing world remains without basic sanitation.

The report claims that the MDGs are still attainable and affirms that "The world wants no new promises." However, if success is to be achieved in the poorest and most disadvantaged countries, "Developed countries need to deliver fully on longstanding commitments to achieve the official development assistance (ODA) target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income (GNI) by 2015." In particular, it notes, the Group of 8 industrialised nations need "to live up to their 2005 pledge to double aid to Africa by 2010 and European Union Member States to allocate 0.7 per cent of GNI to ODA by 2015."

Speaking at today's meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in Geneva, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the heads of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation, "The world desperately needs a successful conclusion to the Doha trade negotiations." However, any realistic chances of a deal have already been dashed with the collapse of talks last month between the so-called "G4" group of the World Trade Organisation's four most powerful members—that is, the European Union, United States, Brazil, and India.

The Only Way Is Up?

Yet another study confirms that children born in the 1970s have a worse chance of escaping poverty than those born in the 1950s, that Britain has the lowest social mobility of any country you can measure, and that the Government's education policy fails poorer children.

There is cause for encouragement, though. For one thing, not only has the issue so clearly been identified as a problem, but many ideas are now being put forward for how to reverse the trend. Just consider the following three lists.

Firstly from David Willetts, who last month identified four areas that would help advance social mobility: ensure all children can read to a competent standard when they leave primary school; make vocational training more worthwhile to help tackle the poor performance of boys when compared with girls; increase home ownership; and reduce means-testing for families with several children staying on at school.

Secondly from Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt, describing elements of a framework to promote social mobility: get rid of the multiple disincentives that trap people in poverty; tackle the root causes of poverty, such as poor education, family breakdown, and dependency on alcohol or drugs; create an environment in which local communities, charities, social entrepreneurs and private enterprises can apply themselves over the long term to establishing what works in helping people deal with the problems that trap them in poverty, to be rewarded fairly and dependably for the results they achieve, and to be allowed to take risks in return for results; and establish asset-building as a key policy objective, whether it is personal assets such as a great education or material assets such as a home, a pension and savings.

Thirdly, these seven suggestions from Sir Peter Lampl, the chairman of the education policy group The Sutton Trust, that commissioned the latest study:

• Invest more in early years support that reaches the right families.

Sure Start, the government plan to help parents and young children, has too often failed to reach the families who need it most.
• Make school choice a reality for all.

There should be a national school bus system to ensure poorer parents – who are less likely to have access to private transport – can reach the better state schools in their area, even if they cannot afford to live next to them.
• Open up grammar schools to bright children from nonprivileged backgrounds.

David Willetts was right to point out that existing grammar schools serve too narrow a social pool.
• Democratise access to independent day schools.

Open up the top 100 or more private day schools on a needs-blind basis, with parents paying a sliding scale of fees according to their means.
• Supply high-quality provision out of school hours to develop young people.

All children should have access to meaningful opportunities beyond the school day to enrich their learning.
• Give the brightest and best the opportunity to prosper.

Introduce a measure of potential, such as the American Sat tests, to be used in conjunction with A-levels to identify bright children who may not have had access to the best education.
Also move to a system of true postqualification application, where students apply to university once they know their exam grades.
• Create an independent body to monitor education performance.

An education policy committee may be a step too far, but an authoritative body to look independently at standards, both across time and in relation to other countries, is desperately needed.

With such a wealth of suggestions, let us hope that a new government under a new prime minister might seek a new cross-party consensus to implement the kind of changes that will make a genuine difference to those who are currently unable to reach their full potential—and to society at large.

Your Questions For IDS

"The social fabric of many communities is being stripped away... We need a system that understands that while material deprivation must continue to be dealt with, poverty isn't just an issue of money; while money is important, so is the quality of the social structure of our lives. To improve the well-being of this country it is necessary that we help the people of Britain improve the quality of their lives or we will all become poorer." Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP

Commissioned by David Cameron to come up with ways of dealing with acute social problems, Iain Duncan Smith has spent the past year consulting with academics, experts, voluntary-sector workers, and those who are feeling the effects of poverty and social breakdown. The result is a report called Breakdown Britain, which outlines the grim facts of relative poverty in the UK, points to the government policies that have exacerbated it, and outlines a way forward that can help people trapped on what it calls the five "pathways to poverty": family break-down, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness, and addiction. Highlighting failed Labour initiatives such as tax penalties for marriage, means-tested benefits that can make working parents less well off than those who don't work, and drug policies that seek damage limitation rather than abstinence as a goal, the document claims that the government is failing citizens and out-of-touch with what they want and need.

In our next issue, The Difference will be interviewing Iain Duncan Smith about the findings of the consultation and we want your input. This is a unique opportunity to question a senior Conservative policy-maker about their vision. Do you think the analysis in Breakdown Britain is accurate? Are there viable solutions to the problems it highlights? Do these findings throw light on the real issues?

If there's a question you would like Iain Duncan Smith to answer, then now is your chance to ask it. Post your questions in the comments here by 9am Monday and we'll bring you his answers!

Generation Blair

A child's start in life is still determined by the class, education, marital status, and ethnic background of its parents. By the age of three, children from disadvantaged families are already lagging a full year behind their middle-class contemporaries in social and educational development.

That is the damning conclusion of a study monitoring around 16,000 families of children born across the UK in 2000-2. An assessment of vocabulary revealed that children of graduates are ten months ahead of those with the least-educated parents, and a separate assessment measuring children's understanding of colours, letters, numbers, sizes, and shapes found an even wider gap of twelve months between the two groups.

Parents' education was not the only significant factor, however. For, although black African parents were more likely to have degrees than white parents, a quarter of the black Caribbean and black African children assessed were delayed in their development, compared with only 4% of white children. Here the difference appears to be caused by the children's family background: a third of black African (32%) and almost half the black Caribbean children (47%) were being brought up by lone mothers, compared with just 14% of white children and 5% of Indian children who had lone parents. This is an important factor, as the analysis also showed nearly three-quarters (72%) of children with single parents live below the poverty line.

In a worrying confirmation of the extent of another problem that has emerged in the last five years, the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, who carried out the research, also reports that almost one child in four is overweight (18%) or obese (5%) at age three. This study also revealed a similar difference attributable to race and class. Just 9% of Indian children overweight or obese compared with 23% of White and 33% of Black Caribbean children. Equally, children in more advantaged areas of England and Scotland were less likely to be overweight or obese than those living in less advantaged areas.

Late last year, Tony Blair claimed the Sure Start programme, designed to help the children in Britain's most deprived families, was "one of the Government's greatest achievements." Can anyone tell me what NuLabour has actually achieved with the £3,000,000,000 of tax-payers' money that it has poured into the scheme?

Canute Climate Change Demands

"The temperature of the winter season, in northern latitudes, has suffered a material change, and become warmer in modern, than it was in ancient times. ... Indeed I know not whether any person, in this age, has ever questioned the fact."

Christian Aid, which represents the cooperation of 40 denominational and ecumenical groups in Britain, believes it is crucial that this week's G8 meeting "agrees to the principle of a ‘stabilisation goal’ for atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, which would limit global warming to 2°C"—an arbitrary target also favoured by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

If for one moment we might be permitted to entertain the heretical possibility that a significant proportion of currently observed climate change might be attributable to natural causes, such as variability in solar activity, then any demands to limit global warming to 2°C, or any other level, will prove as effective as those of King Canute to hold back the rising tide.

The real challenge facing our politicians, as I have stated previously, is how we are going to end our dependency on the world's finite reserves of oil and to achieve energy security without damaging either our economy or our ability to compete internationally. The international challenge for groups such as the leaders of the Group of Eight richest economies is what we are going to do to ensure poor countries get access to clean, renewable sources of energy, and thereby help eliminate global energy poverty.

Just to prove that some things never change, the quote with which I began came from Noah Webster ... in 1843!

Upwardly Mobile

Whatever happened to social mobility?

So ask the shadow ministers for charities, Greg Clark, and for disabled people, Jeremy Hunt, in The Spectator, echoing David Willetts' recent CBI speech. They conclude:

"To have governed for a decade and seen the poorest grow in number and fall further and further behind the mainstream is little short of a disaster for a government whose moral purpose was to advance social justice. After ten years, Tony Blair has admitted ‘we need a radical revision of our methods for tackling social exclusion’. He is right. The enduring solutions to Britain’s social problems lie not in big government, but in healthy communities, strong families and in harnessing the dynamism and enthusiasm of individuals to improve their personal situation."

The question, of course, is what specific policy ideas might help reverse the decline in social mobility. Proposals that have been made in recent months, some referred to by the authors in their article, include:

• Increase home ownership
• Encourage personal pensions and savings
• Introduce a free school transport system
• Reduce means-testing for families with several children at school
• Delay secondary school application until after grammar school selection
• Integrate state religious schools into non-denominational education
• Improve the quality of vocational training

As you can see, most of these focus on education. If you wish to comment on any of these suggestions, do so in the comments here; otherwise, if you have any others, you might prefer to submit them for inclusion in David Cameron's Blizzard of Ideas.

Labour's Poverty Legacy

Once again we have another report highlighting the scandal of poverty in Britain after ten years of Labour mismanagement, this time from the social policy research and development charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The charity's research shows that the rate of poverty among minority ethnic groups is double that found for the white majority (40% compared with 20%) and that minority ethnic groups are still being overlooked for jobs and being paid lower wages, despite improvements in education and qualifications.

On the Today programme this morning, Iain Duncan Smith highlighted the role that language and culture plays in preventing first generation immigrants from being able to integrate into society and noted that Government figures claiming success in getting these immigrants into jobs when they first arrive overlooks the facts that a great proportion of them are unable to hold down those jobs and find themselves unemployed within thirteen weeks. Although this clearly is a factor, the JRF research also shows that the poverty problem is not confined simply to first generation immigrants.

While there are clearly issues that need to be addressed if we are to tackle worklessness amongst ethnic minority communities, the wider scandal is that the number of people of any ethnic background living on less than 40% of average income has increased under Labour, and that fewer people are able to escape the poverty trap now than were able to a decade ago – that is, anyone born into poverty now is more likely to find themselves struggling with poverty as an adult than they would have done a decade ago.