Six must-adopt ideas to tackle social injustice

Gordon Brown's 10p U-turn is unravelling.  Over at CentreRight, Simon Chapman has the latest.

It's clear that the Government handled the 10p row very badly.  Through his tax on lower income Britons, Gordon Brown - as David Gauke MP has written - trashed his reputation as a champion of the poor and as a master strategist.

The Conservatives can only be pleased with current events but they have fallen short in one crucial respect.  The 10p row was an opportunity to present the party as a champion of hard working, lower income workers.  Lord Forsyth - followed by today's Sun and Telegraph - urged the party to focus on raising the threshold for paying income tax.  A reluctance to do so has meant the party has missed an opportunity to do the right thing and add a key group of voters to the conservative coalition.  By 63% to 28% the insiders that make up PoliticsHome.com's daily index do not believe that the Conservatives have emerged from the 10p tax row with a stronger connection with lower income voters.  That's a pity.

As the Conservative Party looks ahead it can do no better than to pick up more of the ideas from Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice.  The CSJ has been monitoring the party leaders' pick up of its ideas.  Gordon Brown has adopted 16 ideas so far.  David Cameron has adopted 27.

As part of our Agenda 2008, here are seven yet-to-be-picked-up ideas that we think are most worthy of being adopted:

A national programme of relationship education.  The SJPG’s proposals did not promote marriage at the expense of single parents but included many measures intended to support people in all types of families, for example by better integrating them into the communities of which they are a part.  Relationship education has proven to reduce divorce and break-ups among couples. To help couples fulfil their aspiration to have healthy relationships that go the distance, the SJPG proposed the roll out relationship education across the nation recommending a national relationship and parenting education ‘invitation’ scheme for couples and parents at key life stages.

Pilot localisation of welfare to work provision to local consortia. Chris Grayling’s green paper in January showed that the party has accepted most of the SJPG’s welfare-to-work proposals.  However they have not adopted the proposal to facilitate innovation in the welfare system by piloting the devolution of decision-making, funding and contracting of welfare-to-work services to local employment consortia.

A Home-School Support Champion for every primary school in poor areas. To improve home-school links in deprived areas, the SJPG proposed introducing full-time Home-School Support Champions in disadvantaged primary schools. The Champions would help parents to support their children’s education and therefore improve attainment, attendance and pupil behaviour.

A drug rehabilitation wing in every prison. To tackle the appallingly high levels of addiction among prisoners, the SJPG proposed a therapeutic community or 12 step programme wing in every prison, expanding the existing 16 such dedicated programmes (currently mainly provided by RAPT and Phoenix Futures) to every prison within the estate.

Preparedness to enforce greater competition in doorstep lending.  Doorstep lenders in many poor areas enjoy a near monopoly on estates, one of the reasons they are able to charge rates of interest approaching 200% APR. To help ensure the poorest have access to more affordable borrowing, the SJPG recommended that if competition within the home credit market is not forthcoming it must be enforced from the outside.

Empowering service users and local people in government funding of poverty-fighting charities. The Conservative Party has not yet decided whether to support a radical shift in the way in which government funds charities to allow service users and local people a much greater say in which groups receive public money. The SJPG advocated doing this through a much greater use of voucher schemes and creating Community Growth Trusts to give local charities the right to deliver a progressively increasing range of services in return for proven competence.  In order to protect the diversity and innovation of the voluntary sector’s work in tackling poverty, the best charities need to have a fair chance to access government funding, irrespective of their size. At the moment a small elite of the biggest service-delivering charities, who tend to do the government’s work in the government’s way, are hoovering up the vast majority of funding.

PS It was good to see John Rentoul acknowledging Greg Clark MP's understanding of these issues (even if it was somewhat at the expense of David Cameron).  This is what Rentoul wrote:

"One Conservative is really on to something. Fortunately for Brown it is not David Cameron, who yesterday repeated his intention to vote against the 10p tax change without saying what he would do instead. That is not the stance of a Prime Minister in waiting.  No, the Tory with the sharpest analysis is Greg Clark, spokesman on charities, who isn't even in the Shadow Cabinet yet. At a Conservative seminar on "Fairness and Equality" (a title that was itself a revelation) last month, he presented some figures on the growth of "underlying poverty" under Labour.  Yes, more people are in work. And, yes, help for children and pensioners is more generous. But if it weren't for this more generous state help, many more people would be poor now than 10 years ago. In other words, the state has to keep transferring more and more money from the better-off to the poor to keep the gap between rich and poor from growing.  This is not what was supposed to happen. New Labour were elected to "cut the bills of failure" as Blair and Brown called social security payments. Instead, those bills have risen. Now, Mr Clark doesn't have the answers any more than his leader does, but he is closer to asking the right questions."

Comments

[Umbrella man]

Tim and Sam: I agree with all of this although you should make a clerarer distinction between measures to help low income workers and measures to tackle extreme poverty.

[Editor]

Good point UM.

There's lots of overlap but you make a very fair point.

[David Belchamber]

Talking of the party picking up ideas from various sources, what about all the (good) ideas emanating from ConHome?

"Lord Forsyth - followed by today's Sun and Telegraph - urged the party to focus on raising the threshold for paying income tax".

Some of us (Tony Makara, Mark Wadsworth et al) have been proposing that one for ages now.

Nearly two years ago we spoke out against irresponsible lenders and for months we have been trying to get the shadow treasury team to focus on demolishing once and for all Brown's favourite "fake facts" i.e. the real rate of inflation and the fact that interest rates and unemployment are not the lowest in Europe.

[Rachel Joyce]

I agree that I think we have missed an opportunity here to take a more high profile lead.

It really infuriated me to hear in the media saying that it was "Labour rebels" that were holding Gordon Brown to account on this matter.

I blog on three main topics, it seems - the failed Labour government, the NHS (which is obviously my interest as a doctor), and poverty/dependency and social breakdown - the area I see as the most important issue facing Britain today.

We need to be seen to be the party of the working poor and the party that will help those trapped on benefits.

[Tanuki]

Many aspects of this appear to be a horrible extension of current Labour-style low-level-meddling and expansion of the role for 'social-worker' types.
We took significant stick over 'Section 28'; I kind of hoped we'd learned our lesson on such value-judgemental-nastiness but ideas like "relationship education" sound worryingly dirigiste [who is to say what are 'valid' relationships?] and any "enforce greater competition in doorstep lending" will inevitably come with a slew of expensive overseeing/enforcing quangocracy.

The best way to "empower service-users" is through tax-cuts to let people keep more of their own money to spend as they see fit, not for the government to give tax-monies to charities to spend on behalf of their 'clients'.

[Pisaboy]

These policies are win-win. Especially like the relationship education one, it's one of the few things the state can effectively do to help marriages.

[Tony Makara]

"contracting of welfare-to-work services to local employment consortia."

It would also be good to see the job-matching that Gordon Brown promised but never delivered. Those struggling on JSA could be put on a placement with an employer where they work for a set period, say, two to four weeks, while drawing benefit. Then if the person proves reliable the employer should be expected to offer the person a job which they in turn would be expected to take. I'm sure business would be happy to take people on if it meant they could boast that they were helping a vital government back-to-work programme. Where possible those offering placement work-trials and resulting employment should be rewarded by way of tax relief. Also those on JSA wishing to learn a certificated skill like hairdressing or plumbing, should be allowed to train while drawing benefit, this would involve attending college or a training placement everyday, being unemployed would become being in training. There should be no policy of 'Standstill' after a given period of unemployment, there must be options available.