Poverty

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for pursuing this important issue so single-mindedly, building on what he achieved with the Big Issue. Recently, in his Big Issue column, he distinguished between poverty advocates, of whom he was rather critical, and poverty dismantlers. I suspect that he would classify me as a poverty advocate, but I believe that this is a false dichotomy because most poverty advocates also want to dismantle poverty and agree on the need for upstream measures to prevent poverty in the first place. We also believe that we must do what we can to ameliorate poverty in the shorter term, to relieve human suffering, which is very real in this rich country of ours.

Of course, we all agree that we need to tackle the causes of poverty, but there is less agreement on what those causes are, and whether we should seek them primarily in individual agency and behaviour or in structural, societal, economic and political forces. For all their talk of tackling root causes, the Government, who emphasise individual behaviour, tend to conflate and confuse causes, consequences, symptoms and risk factors, and to ignore the distinction between underlying causes and proximate risk factors. So, for example, family breakdown, which the Government often cite as a cause, is a risk factor, but the extent to which it causes poverty varies between societies, reflecting, for instance, labour market, childcare and social security policies.

It has become fashionable to reject the idea that lack of money causes poverty. Of course, it is not an underlying cause. It does not explain why someone has an inadequate income. Nevertheless, money matters. With regard to child poverty, a Joseph Rowntree Foundation evidence review concluded:

“There is strong evidence that households’ financial resources are important for children’s outcomes, and that this relationship”,

is causal, and that even small income changes can have a large cumulative impact over a range of domains affecting children’s well-being and development, including education, which has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords.

Another JRF evidence review challenges the Government’s contention that addiction and debt are significant causes of poverty. It found that,

“the problem of addiction, while severe for those affected, is not common among those that are in poverty—only a small fraction are affected. … Overall … general patterns of drug use and alcohol consumption exhibit little correlation with poverty or social class”.

While there is more of a problem at the extremes, the evidence suggests that disadvantage and exclusion precede severe addiction problems.

Similarly, with regard to debt, the review found that persistently low income and,

“structural features—in particular insecure and low-paid jobs alongside low benefit levels—are important factors leading to indebtedness”.

It also challenges the assumption underlying much policy that so-called welfare dependency is a key causal driver.

An ethnographic study of a food bank that I helped to launch recently puts flesh on these abstract arguments. The author, Kayleigh Garthwaite, observed that,

“for most of the people I met, the reasons that kept them returning to the foodbank were long-term, embedded structural factors such as low income, insecure work or problems in accessing or sustaining their social security benefits”.

And she witnessed the shame and humiliation that they felt at having to go to a food bank to meet their most basic needs.

In emphasising structural causes, I am not denying the agency of people living in poverty, as exemplified by the hard work involved in getting by and/or trying to get out of poverty. I second what the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said about listening to people in poverty and acknowledging the expertise born of experience. However, an acclaimed cross-national analysis of the causes of poverty by the American sociologist David Brady concluded that, ultimately, poverty is the result of political choices. To quote his final words:

“As long as debates about poverty are more about the poor than about the state and society, poverty will continue to haunt the economic progress of affluent Western democracies”.

So, in taking note of the case for tackling the causes of poverty, we need to look not to the actions of the poor and the powerless—and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby talked about the importance of power—but to the actions of the powerful. Here I welcome very much what the new Prime Minister said yesterday on the doorstep of No. 10.