Q
106John
Howell: I do not think that I have quite got the answer
about the additionality issue that I am seeking, regarding your own
view about what you will be doing differently as a result of the Bill.
You say that there might be a different type of commissioning, but is
there anything else there? After all, local government already has a
generalised indicator and a whole lot of sub-indicators that it can
work to. I am just trying to grasp how you see the landscape differing,
at a practical level, after the Bill is passed.
Neera
Sharma: Some of the differences would be in the
softer outcomes. So, most of the families that we work with are not
employed and there has been intergenerational poverty. So we would want
to look at the soft skills that people need before they reach the
labour market. For example, more volunteering opportunities would be
useful, so we would seek to work with our local partners on providing
those opportunities, or signposting people, if they have mental health
problems or other issues, so that they build up those pre-employment
skills. Then, we would work in greater partnership to look at how we
could help people to access the right sort of child care or to move
into employment. Bringing lots of partners to the table will help to do
that at a local level. As local authorities formulate their sustainable
community strategies, it will especially give partners a greater say in
what needs to happen locally for children and
families. Kate
Green: I hope that we might be able to find it easier
to have a dialogue with local government to help shape local service
design. There is already a real appetite for that among some local
authorities. Only this morning, I was invited to Be Birmingham, the
Birmingham city council local strategic partnership, specifically
because it was holding an event about putting together its child
poverty strategy. There is an opportunity for real engagement and
dialogue between organisations such as ours and the chance to talk
about our intellectual understanding of policy issues and the
experience that—not, I must say, the Child Poverty Action
Group—the other organisations represented here gain from
delivering local services and the interest that local authorities have
with their partners in thinking about the whole landscape of service
provision and how it might impact on poor
families. For
the Child Poverty Action Group, the issue is likely to be about
influencing local government and its partners to think about a broad
range of activities in the local authority and how they can be shaped,
designed and delivered, and about explaining and working with it to
identify the impact on families and children in poverty in the local
area and help it to think about ways in which it can reconfigure and
offer services in a more accessible way.
An example of
that policy might be to encourage local take-up campaigns. I can
envisage our providing an analysis of why take-up might be low in a
particular community or area, and what can be done to drive it up. We
have already worked with the Local Government Association to reproduce
the “Quids for Kids” toolkit, which comprises take-up
materials for local authorities. There would be quite a lot of interest
on both sides in sharing good practice and
expertise.
Q
107John
Howell: What, given your experience so far of having
worked with local government, do you think it needs by way of
additional resources to make the policy
work? Kate
Green: Not all local authorities have shown the need
for additional resources to make the policy work, although additional
spending on low-income families will be good both for those families
and the local economy, because if there is more money in the household
budgets of poorer families, they immediately spend it on local
businesses. It is also true that some local authorities have already
begun to look at the way in which they make spending choices within
their existing funding arrangements. A good example of that is Kent,
which has made some quite deliberate choices to fund the provision of
free school transport, for example. Presumably, it has had to make
choices not to offer another public service provision, but it is a
matter of balance between the need for leadership and sufficient
resources at local level. Furthermore, the process is one of local
strategy development with local people in which they are making
informed and deliberate
choices. Kate
Bell: The process of setting out a child poverty
strategy will lead to less duplication of work at a local authority
level. Parents often ask us why five different people are telling them
about employment and skills policy, and we hope that the provision of
the strategy might help them to say that their resources into advice
provision and take-up are going here, and their resources into
employment skills are looking across the partner authorities as well,
where action can be done more efficiently to achieve the goal of ending
child
poverty. Fergus
Drake: We, in Save the Children, are particularly
interested in being a bridge with regard to the voice of children,
especially in local child poverty strategies and needs assessment work.
We have looked at whether it would be useful to have some form of kite
mark, which says that we believe that a particular needs assessment has
actually gone down on the ground and that we have listened specifically
to children, thus involving them at every point as each strategy is
worked on. That area is something to which all the organisations
represented here could add tangible skills as well as the resource
matter that we have just talked
about.
Q
108Ms
Buck: You have been quite upbeat about the benefits of
decentralising some responsibility to local government, and I am sure
that there are some grounds for that and that more good practice can be
encouraged. But can I push you further on the flipside of that? There
is a risk, particularly in a much larger country than the Nordic
countries, with a much more decentralised press, with much less
scrutiny and political pressure on individual local authorities, that
some authorities—I would probably say many—will find ways
of possibly not taking some decisions that are hard to
deliver. They will have strategies, but they could easily say that the
big-ticket items for dealing with poverty are the benefit system, the
tax system, employment and pay, all of which are outwith the
responsibility of a local authority. It will actually be quite
slippery—quite hard—to hold to account those authorities
that have other priorities than child poverty. What would you encourage
Ministers and Parliament to do to ensure that there are measures for
and means of holding to account those authorities that will sign up to
a strategy but are not going to be the ones in the forefront of good
practice? Kate
Bell: At the risk of being upbeat again, the
advantage of having strategies is that you can at least try to progress
against them. It is also really important that we have a national
strategy. One of the things that a national strategy may want to do is
to pick out local areas that are doing particularly badly. I think the
point that Kate was making earlier around authorities therefore being
quite keen not to be seen as falling behind is something that the
national strategy can also help
push. Neera
Sharma: Local authorities will need resources and
support, also sharing of good practice—local authorities that
are doing well could partner up with local authorities that are not
doing well to share learning and experience and to have mentoring
schemes. So, there is a possibility of being quite imaginative as to
how local authorities get support and the knowledge that they feel they
might
need.
Q
109Ms
Buck: You mentioned some good practice, and you are all
meant to be doing some work with local authorities. Tell me where there
isn’t good practice. Are there any authorities that are not
really stepping up to the plate and not showing a great deal of
interest, or is every local authority in Britain engaging in
this? Kate
Bell: We do not have the resources to look at every
local authority in Britain. One of the reasons for being a small
charity and lobbying at national level is to put in place the framework
so that those who are working at a local level can challenge things. I
think that that is the other really important thing about the child
poverty strategies—empowering groups, which are working on a
smaller level and do not have access to national lobbying, hopefully to
be able to say, “Here’s a strategy, here’s what
you are not
doing.” Kate
Green: In England the Government offices have an
unfortunate role in terms of using the national indicator set
proactively to maintain pressure on the local authorities in their
area. The other thing that I would say is that we have observed a real
step change in local authority interest over the past two or three
years. I think that three or four years ago the extent to which local
government was engaging, in the sense that it could do anything about
child poverty at all, was very patchy. I think that has changed
significantly, I am sure in part because of the debate that has been
going on around this
legislation.
Q
110Julie
Morgan: I want to ask about the devolved countries and how
you think they would fit into this UK-wide strategy. Obviously Wales is
going to have its own new poverty strategy this year or next
year—how do you think that will fit into the overall UK
strategy? Neera
Sharma: We think the proposals in the Bill for the
devolved Governments to formulate their strategies to fit into a UK
strategy are right. We are hoping that
there will be an overarching UK strategy. Obviously the income targets
are not devolved, but we think that in formulating the devolved
strategies and the UK strategy, the devolved Administrations will have
the flexibility to look at the kind of issues that should be in their
building blocks to drive progress in their nations. We know, in
Barnardo’s, that our colleagues are working with their officials
and their Governments to look at the Bill and that they are having
discussions with the child poverty unit on how to make it
work. Julie
Morgan: Obviously some of the policies in Wales and
Scotland, such as free prescriptions or free breakfasts for children,
have an impact on poverty. Some of those initiatives are, say, not
available in England, so there will have to be different measures than
for a UK-wide
strategy.
Q
111Mr.
Stuart: How should incentives be altered for those in
local authorities such as chief executives and others? All Governments
talk about not rewarding failure and rewarding success, but the
tendency is towards precisely the opposite. You inevitably get drawn
in, such as when Liverpool was failing in the 1980s, with Governments
giving the authorities money because they cannot let people sit with
failure. The real incentives for success are rarely there for those on
the ground, so the rich areas get less and the poorer areas get more.
The poorer the area, the more money it gets. Do you have any thoughts
on incentives and how we should align them so as to ensure that we get
positive feedback all the way through, and do not suffer perverse
eddies in the incentive
structure? Kate
Green: I am not a great expert on this, but I make
two points. First, I observe a strong commitment to public service
across local government, and to the drivers that people feel to deliver
high-quality services in their local community—you want to build
on the positive there. Secondly, although I understand your point that
rich areas never get the money and that it always goes to poor areas
that are failing—the reward for failure—we need money to
reach the families and communities that are failing the most.
The real
problem with saying, “If you succeed, we will give you a bit
more money to do more,” is not that we do not want to reward
success but that we do not want to punish individual families when
there has been a failure to meet standards and targets. It seems to me
all the more important that funding reaches those most disadvantaged
communities. It is not reasonable that individuals should bear the pain
for administrative failure. You can see that, for example, when housing
standards are not met and extra funding is then not available for
further refurbishment of social housing estates. That is extremely hard
on the people who have to live in that housing, and it is no fault of
theirs that they are in that situation.
Q
112Mr.
Stuart: You make the extremely good point that Governments
of all colours always act in the way that you say, despite the
pronouncements that they make. How can we cut through that to ensure
that the most positive incentives are put in place? Successive
Governments have wanted to challenge poverty and underachievement, and
have put in place resources towards that end, but in many places we
have not seen the response that we would have liked.
Kate
Green: I think that you are taking me out of my
depth. In terms of how you incentivise public servants, you are
probably going some way beyond the remit of any of our
organisations.
Q
113Mr.
Stuart: Is it possible that the Bill could end up having
perverse effects? Is there a way in which local authorities and local
government could go for short-term measures? For instance, as has been
mentioned, the IFS says how much can be spent on benefits, yet the
Centre for Social Justice has reported on the disincentives in the
system. The Minister spoke this morning of her belief that there had
been improvements, which would obviously be welcome, but are there
dangers that we need to watch out for? Are there changes that could be
made to the Bill to ensure that we do not allow the short-term
political desire of meeting the target to go against the long-term
desire of creating opportunity for all and the other broad policy
changes that are
needed? Kate
Green: That is a very important point, and it has
been important since we first had child poverty targets and interim
targets were set. It is really key, therefore, that the strategies that
are produced, and the commission’s examination of those
strategies—and the bite that the commission has—are
strong as a result of the Bill. When the commission reports, we will
want it to say not only, “This looks like it will make a bit of
a difference this year,” but, “Is this helping to drive
towards the 2020
goal?” Neera
Sharma: I think that the sustainability of any
success is absolutely key. Both on the income targets and on the
building blocks, the way in which the strategies are delivered and how
this is all implemented must be sustainable. As Kate says, the
commission would hopefully have a key role to play
there.
Q
114Mr.
Stuart: Could we end up with many people just above the
artificial 60 per cent. figure—with them being pushed over that
figure to meet a target? Is that a realistic
danger? Kate
Bell: The suite of targets—not just the 60 per
cent. relative income target—does, to a certain extent, try to
avoid that. You have the material deprivation targets in there, which
look at poverty in a much more experiential way. Also, you have the
persistent poverty target. Looking at those is at least trying to get
beyond that problem. I also think that the fact that the strategy is
three years, whereas the reporting is annual, gives you a longer-term
horizon as well as that short term. That is progress being made. I
think that that interaction is quite
important.
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