Pay any price to beat poverty

Published 26 November 2001

If there is not an argument at the highest levels of government about the merits of spending on health and education against the merits of spending on poverty - and such reports are always denied, often by those who prompted them in the first place - there ought to be. This is the issue that politicians on the left always fudge, and it should not be trivialised into yet another dreary, pantomime quarrel between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. There is something very simple at the heart of it: the cheapest and most effective way to raise educational standards and to improve national health is to reduce poverty. It is also the cheapest and most effective way to reduce crime, family breakdown, drug addiction and many other ills that scar society and drain the public purse.

The connection between poor homes and low school attainment is strong and consistent throughout the world. So is the connection between poverty and poor health. Though the evidence is overwhelming, you do not need to be a statistician or sociologist, familiar with regression analysis and other mysteries, to believe it. Common sense will do. A child who goes to school hungry - or after a fractured night's sleep in a noisy, overcrowded house situated next door to a pub on a busy main road - is less likely to be attentive than the child from a five-bedroom home in a leafy suburb. People who live in damp houses and eat cheap junk food will have worse health than those who live or eat better. Poverty induces stress (a point lost on middle-class professionals, who think that stress consists in worrying about school fees) and stress is bad for learning and health.

Almost any international survey from the 1990s shows that Britain and the US have higher percentages of children in poverty - whether measured in absolute terms, by what their families can afford, or in relative terms, by how they compare with other children - than any other developed country. These are also the countries that perform badly in international league tables of educational attainment. On both counts - the extent of poverty and the children's test scores - the contrast between the US and Britain, on the one hand, and such countries as Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Taiwan on the other, was dramatic and shaming.

Yet even centre-left politicians have been reluctant to confront the implications. They launch campaigns to persuade the poor to eat more apples and to read to their children at home, which are just kindly ways of blaming the victims. They dream up elaborate and expensive schemes - usually adorned with such words as "priority" and "action" - to improve schools and health services in poor areas. Quite plausibly, they argue that, if poor children can be given the best possible schooling, poverty will disappear in the next generation. And, indeed, the whole issue can be reduced to an argument about causation. Are poor people poor because their health is bad? Or are they unhealthy because they are poor?

The sensible answer - that it is a bit of both - will not quite do. As a result of measures taken since 1997, the proportion of children in poverty should fall from 26 per cent to about 20 per cent, at a cost of £5.5bn, or 0.6 per cent of GDP. This has been achieved partly through stealthy taxation of the affluent, partly through economic growth. Yet it still leaves us with a higher child poverty rate than most of our European partners. Neither economic growth nor stealthy taxation will be as readily available in Labour's second term as in its first (though Mr Brown's textbook behaviour over the economic cycle leaves scope for borrowing). And promises on education and health impose further demands on the public purse. Thus new Labour now confronts, for the first time, the language of political priorities.

The pressure to prioritise schools and hospitals will be enormous, for political and ideological reasons. The political reason is that education and health are attractive to all social classes and particularly to the middle classes who tend, whatever the intentions of policy-makers, to derive the greatest benefits from more spending on such services. Welfare payments, by contrast, appeal to sectional interests, particularly now that the very poor are more ghettoised than ever and benefits are means-tested. The ideological reason is that public services can provide a focus for that sense of community and social purpose that centre-left politicians seek in place of the fractured individualism of the right.

But when all the provisos are made about chickens and eggs, and it needn't be an "either-or", and Labour should be bolder on taxation, the first emphasis must be on the relief of poverty. By creating intolerable pressures on such public services as policing and schooling, high levels of poverty build in failure to an extent that no amount of money for those services can ever overcome. This may be a hard argument, and it is not for us mere mortals to know precisely where either Mr Blair or Mr Brown stands. But it is an argument worth having, and those who will pay any price to beat poverty should win.

How to get better service

Hutber's law, coined by a now deceased journalist, states: "Improvement means deterioration." In other words, whenever a public body or private company claims to be improving its service, expect a worse one. But even Patrick Hutber's fertile mind might have boggled at the latest from the Royal Mail. It plans to drop the second post in order, says its managing director, to make its service "more relevant to modern lifestyles". In reality, we learn, it plans to drop the first delivery: to get a letter before 9.30am, we shall have to pay a fee or collect it ourselves. The logic, apparently, is that the Royal Mail often fails to make a first delivery anyway. More organisations could apply Hutber's law in this manner. Morning newspapers could provide a better service (fewer errors) by arriving in the afternoon. Failing schools could improve if teachers turned up at lunchtime (fresher, better-planned lessons). Rail companies could offer passengers, if the driver is sick, the chance to drive the train themselves.

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