Ending Child Poverty
A Northern TUC Report on Child Poverty
CHILD POVERTY
Sometimes it can be difficult to persuade people that modern Britain has a poverty problem. Many people regard poverty to be obsolete or an affliction of the developing world. Sadly poverty remains prevalent today, even though it may appear in different guises. A general lack of widespread public awareness allows poverty to fester unnoticed, generating a vicious cycle that threatens to lock in disadvantage and perpetuate inequality. Uncertainty and confusion surrounding accountability and responsibility for interventions to address poverty absolves people of a shared duty to ensure wealth is distributed fairly in modern society. What clearly emerges from this debate is a common obligation to realise that poverty touches all of our lives and work collectively to create a society in which everyone can thrive and prosper.
Child poverty in the UK remains worse than in most other European countries. Despite a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity there are still 3.8 million children living in poverty in the UK. There are 1.3 million children living in severe poverty. On average their parents have just £19 a day for food, electricity, gas, clothes, washing, transport, furniture, activities for the children and other essential items. [1]
Throughout Britain hundreds of thousands of parents are striving to shield children from the worst impacts of poverty. One third of a million children do not have celebrations on special occasions because their parents cannot afford them. Nearly two thirds of a million children cannot have friends round for tea once a fortnight because their parents cannot afford it. Even today well over a million parents cannot afford enough bedrooms to make sure girls and boys aged over 10 do not have to share. [2]
This report seeks to highlight the extent and impact of child poverty in the northern region. It emphasises that trade unions, as actors in the workplace and as key social partners, have a role to play in tackling poverty and in challenging the institutional, social and political dynamics that trap people and whole communities in deprivation and the ills associated with that.
Poverty from Birth
Even before conception poverty can deal a bad hand. Women who were poorly nourished when they became pregnant are more likely to have low birth weight babies than those working in professional and managerial occupations. Poverty itself is stressful, and the children of women who are stressed during pregnancy are more likely to have emotional and behavioural problems in infancy. Poor people often live in poor neighbourhoods. Bad housing and a substandard physical environment are health risks for pregnant mothers and their babies.
Poor Health
Poor nutrition and accommodation are linked to childhood health problems including asthma and other respiratory diseases, diarrhoea and vomiting, developmental problems, skin conditions, immune system problems, depression and stress.
Stress and depression associated with poverty can reduce parents' reserves of energy and resilience, and this can have an impact on parenting - especially if poverty is experienced over a long time. Poverty can impact on relationships and be linked to domestic conflict, which can trigger biological stress responses in children, which have long-term health effects.
Low Educational Attainment
Pre-school development can determine outcomes for the rest of your life. By the time children start school, class inequalities in achievement are already apparent. Middle class children overtake poor children who were ahead at two years old, but start to lag behind by the time they start school. During school years, the gap widens. In 2002, more than three quarters of the children of 'higher professional' parents achieved five or more good GCSEs, compared with just under a third of the children of parents classified as 'routine manual'.
Poor parents can often struggle to match involvement in children's education, highly esteemed as an element of 'good parenting'. Attending meetings at school, for instance, can mean that parents have to pay for childcare and transport, which may only be practicable if their jobs allow the sort of flexibility that middle income earners take for granted.
Children in low-income families are less likely to have a balanced diet. Children in sub-standard accommodation are likely to have worse health, and thus a worse record of absence from school and may have difficulty studying at home. Cramped accommodation, worries about debt and other stresses of poverty often cause conflict between parents and teenagers, and this is another factor linked to low school attainment.
Low Aspiration
One of the saddest messages from academic research into poverty is the effect on children growing up and how they perceive themselves. Teenagers who grew up in poverty are more likely to feel they are 'failures' or that they are 'useless'.
Increased Risk of Offending, Early Pregnancy, Unemployment & Substance Misuse
Leaving education without moving into further education, employment or training is linked strongly to later involvement in crime, early pregnancy, continuing unemployment and substance abuse. Most young people from workless households are not in education, employment or training when they are 16.
Ending Child Poverty
Ending this cycle of deprivation will obviously make a difference to poor parents and their children. Eliminating child poverty will make the world a better place for the rest of us as well.
Child Poverty and Economic Success
Eliminating child poverty also offers huge potential economic gains. Children are the workers of the future, and children who grow up in poverty are going to be less productive workers. They will tend to have worse health, which means their working lives will be shorter and they will have more and longer absences during their economically active years.
They will tend to have fewer skills and qualifications, so they will be less able to get the most out of developments in technology and new work processes. If they fail to update their skills they will be more likely to leave the workforce early and face poverty from their late middle age.
Children growing up in poverty are more likely to be isolated and less able to develop the social skills many commentators believe will be increasingly expected of 21st century workers. [3] To compete in a globalised world we need a highly skilled and adaptable workforce. Child poverty hinders this, and is just one more reason why tackling inequality must be part of the response to globalisation, not accepted as its inexorable consequence. The government says that more than a fifth of children are poor. This is a huge fraction of the future workforce that is at risk of being less able to participate fully in the labour market of the future.
The impacts of poverty at each stage of a child's development are easily transmitted to succeeding generations. Children living in poverty often grow up to be parents in poverty. This means child poverty is not a one off cost: failing to lift a child out of poverty now increases the likelihood that, later on we will have to pay the costs of child poverty.
Child poverty carries extra costs. The social services poor families are more likely to need, benefits and extra health care costs, the costs of crime and anti-social behaviour. This is a problem that is getting worse: people who were poor teenagers in the 1980s were twice as likely to go on to be poor thirty-somethings as people who were poor teenagers in the 1970s.
Poor children have less healthy and therefore less productive working lives. This costs the healthcare and benefit system and the wider economy. The TUC estimates that the costs of child poverty to the UK from reduced productivity and economic output are £13 billion a year, the raised costs of crime are £13 billion and the costs of poorer health are £12 billion. This works out at £40 billion or £640 a head or more than £2500 a year for a couple with two children. [4]
In Work Poverty
But it is important to remember that people can have a paid job and still be poor. Although the Government is right to focus on workless families (just 8% of children in families where all the adults have a job are poor compared to 60% in workless families) [5] , a majority of poor children actually live in households where someone has a paid job. There is still some way to go before in-work poverty is a thing of the past.
It is important to recognise that inequality is not a condition for economic success, but also imposes costs on middle and low-income families and holds back wealth creation. Action to tackle child poverty is a crucial part of tackling inequality.
Child poverty blights the future lives of the people it affects, damaging their health, education and employment prospects. It reinforces harmful social divisions, divides nations and regions in the UK and magnifies the social exclusion of disadvantaged groups therefore undermining social cohesion.
Child Poverty in the North East
The North East is one of two regions in the UK where the prevalence of child poverty exceeds 30%. [6] Although the proportion of children living in poverty has fallen in the North East over the past five years, there has been no narrowing of the gap with the rest of the country. The proportion of children estimated to be living in households suffering from income poverty is second only to London with nearly a third of children falling below the official threshold. The Index of Deprivation shows that over a quarter of children in the region live in income deprived households, the worst rates outside London. [7] There are widespread pockets of deprivation affecting children within inner city areas of Tyne and Wear, Tees Valley and Middlesbrough, and in the former mining communities of Northumberland and Durham. About one in three children in the North East are living in poverty and there are 48 wards where the percentage of children in families receiving out of work benefits is twice the national average. [8] There is a strong link with lone parenthood and living in poverty. In the North East there are higher concentrations of lone parent benefit claimants in Newcastle upon Tyne, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton on Tees.
Why is child poverty a particular problem in the North East?
Child poverty seems to be a deep-seated problem embedded in the structure of the economy in the region. The North East has suffered a significant period of economic decline, which was particularly acute in the latter part of the 20th century. This was caused by a variety of factors, including the ability of the region to respond to globalisation and the decline of heavy industry, leading to poor economic performance and a sharpened gap in prosperity between the region and the national average.
The demise of heavy industries like coal mining, shipbuilding and engineering, combined with persistent weaknesses in the regional economy, produced long-term unemployment, sickness and disability, fostering a dependency on benefits. With 20% of working age people claiming benefits, the North East has the highest rate of all English regions. [9] As a result there are high levels of unemployment and economic inactivity in the North East. For those in work, employment tends to be concentrated in lower paid, lower skilled occupations. The North East has 18% of working age adults with no qualifications.
Owing to the region's industrial legacy the North East has the highest rate of households which have one or more person suffering from a limiting long term illness at nearly 42%, well above the English average 34%. [10] People suffering from ill health or with a disability endure poverty due to life circumstances, which inevitably can have a detrimental impact on children.
There are also attitudinal barriers to improved economic performance. Low aspiration, particularly amongst young people reinforces a climate that is reticent about economic and social change. Born out of economic hardship, concentrated areas of severe deprivation, poor health, high levels of economic activity and lower rates of educational attainment presents the North East with a number of major social and economic challenges; not least overcoming widespread, ingrained poverty and inequality in many of the region's communities which contributes to child poverty.
Eradicating poverty requires policy makers to seek new ways of promoting sustainable development and regeneration, including measures to ensure everybody has the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Inter-generational effects of economic and social decline threaten to lock in poverty. Therefore addressing the impact of poverty on children will be vital to the future success of the region.
The Way Forward
Tackling economic exclusion and inactivity will be vital to improving future economic prosperity and quality of life in the North East.
Policy interventions are needed to improve the relative economic prosperity of the region. Generating sustainable and inclusive economic growth creates an environment conducive to tackling poverty. Achieving this objective necessitates an improvement in both productivity and participation in the regional economy. This means improving the productivity of the existing workforce and bringing more people back into the labour market. [11]
Enabling individuals and communities to benefit more from and contribute to economic growth requires a number of separate but related actions:
Assisting people to overcome the barriers that prevent them from working clearly must be a consistent focus of public policy and public resources, focusing support on individual need and circumstances. Public policy must accept this is a critical intervention and an investment that must be specific to each individual situation.
Investment in skills and training to facilitate access to and enable progression within the labour market, helping to enable the region to move from a low-wage / low skills economy to a high-wage / high skills equilibrium.
Tackling under employment to challenge the restrictive access to higher-level job opportunities, which intensifies competition for employment at the lower end of the labour market. This prevents people from progressing, and limits the numbers of accessible opportunities for individuals with lower skills, as well as failing to maximise the potential contribution of high skilled individuals due to boardroom or senior management discrimination and prejudice.
Addressing inequality of opportunity - there is evidence to suggest that employers are more likely to recruit those already in work. Consequently those not in work tend to face extra barriers to work and discrimination, compounded by their life circumstances and background, trapping people in situations of deprivation.
Promoting Equality and Diversity is essential to enable broader and more participative engagement in the labour market; diversity and equality must be at the heart of the region's economic and social fabric so that we make the most of the talents of everyone who lives and works here.
Improving the quality of employment on offer - low wages coupled with poor terms and conditions contribute to economic and social exclusion, trapping people in poverty and making it difficult for people to access or remain in employment. There is still some way to go before in-work poverty is a thing of the past.
It is important to look at the social aspects of child poverty too, since poor children typically experience multiple disadvantages.
Public services are critical both to ameliorating the impacts of growing up in poverty and also intervention to improve life chances and break the cycle of deprivation. [12]
Current practices and policies have successfully managed to reduce the numbers of children living in poverty, but new and imaginative solutions need to be found if the gains are to be sustained. This requires systemic long-term intervention to cure poverty and enlist public support for redistributive policies. [13]
An integrated approach to regeneration is needed, incorporating economic and social objectives so that the two developments go hand in hand with the aim of ending child poverty. The outcome of the Sub-national Review of Economic Development and Regeneration signalled this thinking is beginning to converge. This has implications for how different partners, including trade unions think about their work and how they need to work together to achieve more sustainable outcomes.
What practical measures would help to alleviate child poverty?
Childcare can contribute to the goal of ending child poverty. Moving into work is a good route out of poverty and helping more parents, who want to take up jobs, must be a vital part of Government's child poverty strategy.
But getting a job doesn't guarantee a family freedom from poverty. 12% of children where all parents in the household are working are poor, as are 37% of children where at least one adult is in work. [14] Getting a job isn't always a permanent solution. Moves into poor quality, low paid, irregular work can be disruptive to families and research shows that it is families who experience frequent moves between working, or not working, end up in the most severe poverty.
In work poverty means many children who have a parent(s) in work are still living in poverty. With high costs for housing, transport and energy parents working for a low income still struggle to make ends meet, with no slack in the budget. Families in this situation are often hardest hit by unexpected shocks and the insecurity of vulnerable employment.
Many of the jobs lone parents find are low paid and carry low status, with little means of getting in work training or advancing to a position with higher status or pay. To date part of the Government's strategy has concentrated on finding a job, but parents, particularly lone parents can find combining work and family life is still a challenge leading to some returning to benefits. Access to good quality employment is vital, plus more support for parents after they have moved into work with greater access to training to help people make the best of their skills.
Trade Union actions to help tackle poverty in the North East:
ensure work pays through highly skilled, good quality employment with better earnings, alongside an increase in the minimum wage, in work benefits and tax credits;
make sure parents are not trapped in poor quality jobs by investing in skills and training to help the disadvantaged to keep and progress in employment,
increase household income by enabling parents to return to work or secure further education and training,
provide good quality, affordable, accessible child care. Parents, particularly those on a low income face huge challenges in finding an employer who will offer working patterns that fit in with their family life.
promote flexible working policies. People must be given the choices and opportunities they need to balance work and family responsibilities.
develop and expand effective equality and diversity policies and practice essential to enable access to employment opportunities for those excluded from the labour market and to enable workers to progress in work away from vulnerable employment.
Ending child poverty fundamentally requires parents to fare better in the workplace, with improved pay and opportunities. Long-term policies include better education and training for disadvantaged groups, improved childcare and the promotion of equal pay and greater equality of opportunity. [15] Economic and social policy, community cohesion and sustainable development strategies all need to take clear account of the ambition and challenge of eradicating poverty as a central goal.
Trade unions too have a crucial role improving the conditions and participation of working people and their families in the region's economy and communities so that everyone can live a life free from poverty, injustice and inequality. It is essential that trade unions place anti-poverty measures on their bargaining agendas with employers.
[1] TUC Report: Cutting the Costs of Child Poverty p3
[2] Ibid
[3] What Will It Take to End Child Poverty? Joseph Rowntree Foundation July 2006
[4] TUC Report: Cutting the Costs of Child Poverty, August 2007 p7
[5] Ibid
[6] 32% of children live in households receiving Income Support or Working Families Tax Credit with income less than 60% of the median. Coates, Adrian and Bolam D (2006) Child Poverty: Brief Analysis of Data Relating to the North East, Government Office for the North East, 4 October
[7] The Index of Deprivation 2004 (ID 2004) produced by the Social Disadvantage Research Centre at the Department for Social Policy and Social Research at the University of Oxford for the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM). There are two additional Indices which relate to Income Deprivation Affecting Children
[8] Summary of DWP data compiled for JRF by Thomas Hirsch and Donald Hirsch (National and regional figures from HBAI 2004/05
[9] Coates, Adrian and Bolam D (2006) Child Poverty: Brief Analysis of Data Relating to the North East, Government Office for the North East, 4 October
[10] Ibid
[11] Leading the Way Regional Economic Strategy 2006 One NorthEast
[12] HM Treasury 2004 Child Poverty Review Norfolk HMSO para 2.7 p 16
[13] Knight B, 8 June 2007, Child Poverty in the North East,
[14] DWP (2007), Households Below Average Income. An analysis of the income distribution 1994/5 -2005/6
[15] Joseph Rowntree Foundation
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