Local authorities local duties and local action for circulation

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“Local government (is) in essence the first line of defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment”

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A copy of the presentation delivered at the launch of the report 'Child Poverty: local authorities, local duties & local action' on Friday 19th October 2012 at St. Aidan's College, Durham University

Transcript of Local authorities local duties and local action for circulation

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“Local government (is) in essence the first line of defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment”

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Winifred Holtby, 1936

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Child Poverty: local authorities, local duties & local action

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Background

“Poverty should not be a birthright. Being poor should not be a life sentence. We need to sow the seeds of ambition in the young. Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty, and it will take a generation. It is a 20 year mission but I believe it can be done”

Tony Blair (1999)

The Child Poverty Act which achieved Royal Assent on 25th March 2010

“requires responsible local authorities and their partner authorities to cooperate to reduce, and mitigate the effects of, child poverty in their local areas”

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The report

Methodology:

• Documentary data produced by Local Authorities in response to the local duties

• This includes Child Poverty Needs Assessments, Child Poverty Strategies (both ‘stand-alone and ‘embedded/integrated’ strategies), reports and minutes of relevant meetings

• All 12 Local Authorities in the North East provided information in support of the report.

• Thematic analysis carried out on priorities and actions identified in the Child Poverty Strategies

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Part 1…..

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Raising Aspirations

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Raising Aspirations

“…revealed low aspiration levels in some areas of (LA area), in many cases as a result of second and third generation family unemployment … further work … has shown low aspiration to underpin many ‘negative outcomes’ such as poor attainment, teenage conceptions and anti-social behaviour.”

“There are parents in (LA area) who have had bad experience of schooling and do not see the benefit of education; this attitude perpetuates the continuous cycle of low aspirations”

“Transforming the aspirations and ambitions of children growing up in poverty and their families is essential if we are to tackle child poverty”

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Raising Aspirations

“The widespread emphasis on raising aspirations, in particular, does not seem to be a good foundation for policy or practice. Teachers and other professionals may need to revise upwards their estimation of the aspirations of parents and children.”

“Young people had high aspirations; they wanted to go to university andattain professional and managerial jobs in greater numbers than thelabour market could fulfil. There was little evidence of fatalism facedwith depressed labour markets, or of a belief that not working wasacceptable”

“Many working-class parents were strongly exercised by their children’s formal education, saw it as necessary to a good start in life, and manifested a strategic orientation towards their children’s educational success. Other working-class parents manifested a more limited sense of efficacy in influencing their children’s educational future.”

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Reducing worklessness

“We will work towards enabling people to break the cycle of benefit dependency; encouraging a culture of work in every household”

“Improve parents’ skills portfolio … Action is required to support parents / carers of children living in poverty to develop the skills and qualifications to enter and progress in employment.”

“highlighted a number of areas of concern … the problems of cultures of low aspiration and worklessness in some of our communities”

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Reducing worklessness

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Reducing worklessness

Iain Duncan Smith (15 March 2011)

“And those who have no interest in work…

…because they have seen their parents, their neighbours and their entire community sit on benefits for life…

…have simply had their destructive lifestyle confirmed..”

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Reducing worklessness

“Perhaps one of the strongest single findings of the study is that interviewees, trapped in the low pay, no-pay cycle over years expressed great personal commitment to employment”

“Pre-occupation with supply side issues … often dramatically over-estimates what skills policy can achieve. This is because it totally neglects the issue of whether, and how, increasingly well-educated citizens have their skills deployed in the workplace”

“employers were content to keep jobs low skill and foundlittle difficulty in filling vacancies. Given their current product and production strategies there was limited demand for a more skilled workforce … even if the prospects of some workers are improved, it will be at the expense of others, as long as the structure of jobs and of their design remains unaltered.”

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Reducing worklessness

Table 1: The number of JSA, ESA, IBSDA and IS claimants of working age split by statistical group and duration of oldest claim in the North EastNovember 2010

    AllUp to 3 months

3 months up to

6 months up to

1 year and up to

2 years and up

5 years and up to

10 Years and over

Region       6 months 1 year 2 years to 5 years 10 Years  North East

All 265,610 50,530 26,320 26,830 27,080 35,720 35,970 63,160

Job Seeker 76,590 36,670 16,200 12,730 8,950 1,800 200 50ESA and incapacity benefits 144,190 9,680 6,300 8,720 10,400 22,550 28,650 57,880

Lone Parent 32,770 2,370 2,600 4,090 6,230 9,100 5,300 3,070

Carer 7,340 540 470 780 1,020 1,570 1,300 1,660Others on income related benefit 4,730 1,270 740 520 480 700 520 510

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Early Intervention

“Ensure that children that live in poverty are safe”

“Investigate the feasibility of establishing a Families at Risk Team”

“develop integrated neighbourhood models of service to re-target and deliver Early Years and Early Intervention”

“improve early identification of child poverty including integrated family support and staff training”

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Early Intervention

“It would, in our view, be fallacious to conclude that because there is an association between parenting and poverty that the solution to poverty is to encourage (or force) poor parents to emulate their middle-class peers rather than address structural inequality in society

On the other hand, the balance of evidence in this review suggests that attempts to change parenting style, practices or beliefs by simply raising the income of parents are likely to fail. The way that parents relate to their children does not simply arise out of economic adversity or advantage.”

“By arguing that ‘what is needed is a much wider culture change towards recognising the importance of parenting’, the (National CP) strategy rather unfortunately begins to fall very quickly into the popular, but completely erroneous, trap of equating child poverty with poor and irresponsible parenting”

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Maximizing household income

“Helping families to maximise their income … Ensuring that all families are able to access debt and financial advice … Ensuring that families are aware that energy providers can provide social tariffs … Promoting financial literacy in school and with parents … Encouraging employers to promote financial literacy as part of their workforce strategies.”

“Increase the focus on financial inclusion to reduce debt and increase access to affordable credit, including benefit take up”

“plan for and mitigate the effects of welfare reform by establishing a core group of relevant organisations to identify impacts of welfare reforms on residents and appropriate organisational responses”

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Maximizing household income

“many of the poor are very good managers of their poverty. They are resourceful and use their money and time with great expediency. They are precise about planning household accounts and ruthless about expenditure, savagely cutting back to keep out of debt. They set priorities and cut out luxuries. Despite this they understandably describe such work as sacrifice and relentless struggle.” “in general, poor people manage their finances with care, skill and resourcefulness. There is no evidence to suggest that there are two types of poor families – those who can cope and those who can’t”

“Sometimes I go swimming. Things like that I feel bad about doing. Because of the cost, it’s a fiver to go swimming. It’s just a fiver that probably doesn’t really exist, it should go on food”

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Improving health and wellbeing

“Health initiatives to promote healthy living, advice and support in localities.”

“increase the birth weight of babies and increase the uptake of breastfeeding to maximise the babies’ life chances”

“encouraging healthy choices and behaviours can create the conditions in which children and young people are able to realise their potential.”

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Improving health and wellbeing

“Once you accept that crap food is an economic, not a moral choice, you have to accept a whole raft of unpleasant outcomes as a function of deprivation, not an illustration of a lack of backbone”

“There is no good reason, other than because of our greed and ignorance, for … mortality rates to be higher for children from poor families”

“Having insufficient money to lead a healthy life is a highly significant cause of health inequalities … In England there are gaps between aminimum income for healthy living and the level of state benefit payments that many groups receive.”

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Improving health and wellbeing (75 years ago)

“Poverty and Public Health was a groundbreaking empirical study which challenged the Conservative–Liberal political orthodoxy of the time that considered the link between poverty, nutrition and mortality to be the fecklessness of poor mothers who either squandered their money or weretoo ignorant to provide healthy meals.”

“His Stockton studies showed clearly that the vast majority of poorer families, whether employed or unemployed, did not have an incomethat was sufficient to sustain a diet that was adequate to ward off disease and death: poverty, not ignorance, was the cause of morbidity and mortality amongst the poor and this poverty was not the fault of the individual families but of a society that provided inadequate wages and welfare benefits.”

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Improving neighbourhoods

“Focusing attention on the most deprived areas in (LA area), where families face a multitude of problems”

“address poor quality family housing in our most deprived neighbourhoods to ensure all children grow up in a healthy and safe home environment”

“mitigate the effects of fuel poverty”

“High quality green spaces for play … Exciting, safe play areas and equipment”

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Improving neighbourhoods

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Improving neighbourhoods

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Improving neighbourhoods

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Improving neighbourhoods

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‘Child Poverty proofing’ strategies

“Make child and family poverty everybody’s business through adopting an approach to ‘child and family poverty proof’ Strategic Plans of all Partners as routine practice”

“it is important that all organisations working for families in (LA area) are involved in developing a Child Poverty Strategy.”

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Summary

“Poverty is expressed in the form of unacceptable behaviours deviating from the 'respectable‘ behavioural norms of dominant society or as dysfunctional to standards of conformity, for instance as the deprived or depraved lifestyle of a subculture or 'underclass'. The inadequacy of people's power over resources is seen as irrelevant to the question of how they behave.”

“The focus is on the poor not on society as a whole”

“Othering can be understood as a discursive practice which shapes how the ‘non-poor’ think and talk about and act towards ‘the poor’ at both an interpersonal and an institutional level”

“it is most important to find whether the over-confident division of the population into ‘we the people’ and ‘they the poor’ has to be modified”

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Part 2…

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What’s not in the report

“All too easily the social scientist can be the unwitting servant of contemporary social values, and in the study of poverty, this can have disastrous practical consequences. He may side with the dominant or majority view of the poor. If, by contrast, he feels obliged or is encouraged from the start to make a formal distinction between scientific and conventional perspectives, he is more likely to enlarge knowledge by bringing to light information which has been neglected and create more elbow room for alternative forms of action”

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Institutional behaviour

• The ‘relentless rise’ of in-work poverty

• “Services for the poor will always be poor services”

• Co-production – “involves reclaiming territory for the core economy – territory lost to the commodification of life by all sectors of the monetary economy, public, private and non-profit.”

• Localised elements of welfare reform - “Councils in England could choose to protect entitlements to council tax support and fill the funding gap from elsewhere, as the Scottish government is doing”

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Deprivation

“Deprivation may be defined as a state of observable and demonstrable disadvantage relative to the local community or the wider society or nation to which an individual, family or group belongs”

Of children living in low income families in the NE:

• 34% could not afford a holiday away from home at least 1 week a year

• 8% could not afford swimming at least once a month

• 20% could not afford enough bedrooms for every child over 10

“Children who have friends over for tea once a fortnight and those who go swimming once a month are more likely to be happy … Children who have their own bedroom, bike or other leisure equipment are also happier”

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The right to be heard

“The worst thing about living in poverty is the way it gives others permission to treat you – as if you don’t matter”

“The worst blow of all is the contempt of your fellow citizens. I and many families live in that contempt”

“We hear how the media, and some politicians, speak about us and it hurts”

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The right to be heard

“Child poverty and social exclusion are a denial of children’s fundamental human rights, which can affect their development today and undermine the realisation of their full potential in the future. An approach to poverty based on fundamental rights shifts the focus from needs and charity to ensuring socially and legally guaranteed entitlements for children”

“… offers the potential to orientate current policy debates in positive directions. Primarily, the use of rights-based language shifts the focus within these debates from the personal failures of the ‘poor’ to a focus on the macroeconomic structures and policies implemented by nation states and international bodies’”

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Conclusions

“a colossal gap between rhetoric and reality”

“improving social mobility is the principal goal of the Coalition Government’s social policy.”

“If, by contrast, he feels obliged or is encouraged from the start to make a formal distinction between scientific and conventional perspectives, he is more likely to enlarge knowledge by bringing to light information which has been neglected and create more elbow room for alternative forms of action”

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Small steps…….

1. Use – and add to – the evidence base

2. Examine institutional behaviour – ‘do no harm’

3. Give people living in poverty a voice“(people in poverty) don’t need to be taught and they don’t need to be told. They need to be

trusted, respected and heard.”

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“Local government (is) in essence the first line of defence thrown up by the community against our common enemies – poverty, sickness, ignorance, isolation, mental derangement and social maladjustment”

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Contact details

[email protected]

www.nechildpoverty.org.uk

(0191) 334 9107