For the past 11 years the Centre for Social Justice has provided solutions to effectively address poverty in Britain.

In this special edition of the Leader Column we review our poverty-fighting policy and look at the CSJ recommendations the Government have implemented.

Next week we will look ahead to the future and provide recommendations for how the Government can build on their efforts to address poverty and achieve the Prime Minister’s mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone.

Our Breakthrough Britain research showed there are five essential root causes of poverty: economic dependency, family breakdown, educational failure, addiction and serious personal debt.

The Government recently announced that it will incorporate these pathways to poverty in their ‘life chances’ strategy as they continue to tackle poverty in Britain and ensure all children receive the best start in life.

We know that work is the most powerful anti-poverty force. Employment changes lives, prospects and communities. Its personal benefits reach far beyond the income a particular job provides – work inspires children and fuels aspiration in people’s lives.

The CSJ’s Breakthrough Britain report provided an unprecedented diagnosis of deprivation in Britain and offered an alternative to the complex and often counter-productive welfare system that had entrenched so many people in poverty. The system was failing to make work more profitable than claiming benefits and failing to support people into sustainable, meaningful and suitable employment.

From the outset the CSJ has championed a support system that ensures people are unquestionably better off for making that important choice to enter work, or to progress in work.

In Dynamic Benefits: Towards welfare that works, we recommended simplifying the benefits system through Universal Credit. This was introduced by the Government in 2013 and has successfully alleviated barriers to work. Now more people are employed than ever before and less people are claiming benefits with unemployment at a record low of 4.9%.

Building on this work we recommended the Government introduce a National Living Wage in our report, Tackling Low Pay. The Government subsequently introduced a National Living Wage of £7.20 in April last year.  We welcome the Prime Minister's firm stance on increasing this to an expected £9 by 2020.

CSJ Report: Breakthrough Britain
CSJ Report: Dynamic Benefits: Towards welfare that works
CSJ Report: Tackling Low Pay

A strong, secure and loving family base enables us to learn important life skills and is crucial for our physical, emotional and psychological health. 

Unfortunately too many families are fractured or fatherless resulting in devastating consequences.  Children who experience family breakdown are more likely to underperform in school, both adults and children are more likely to suffer mental health problems and lone parent households are two and a half times more likely to be in poverty than couple households.  Added to this, family breakdown costs the country an estimated £48 billion each year. 

The CSJ strongly believes that high levels of family breakdown are not inevitable and has sought to provide solutions to achieve its sustained reduction.

In 2014 the Government adopted the 'Family Test' requiring policy makers to consider the impact of proposed policy on families. This strongly echos CSJ recommendations from the Breakthrough Britain: Family Breakdown report.

Earlier this year the Government announced that it would double funding for relationship support to £70 million, extend the Troubled Families programme to another 400,000 families and expand the number of health visitors. Many of these ideas are outlined in our report, Fully Committed: How a Government could reverse family breakdown.

Despite the cost of family breakdown, Government has historically made no sustained commitment to reverse it so the implementation of these recommendations has been hugely welcome, although there is still further to go.

CSJ Report: Fully Committed: How a Government could reverse family breakdown
CSJ Report: Breakthrough Britain: Family Breakdown

Education should be the gateway to social mobility and a core tool in breaking the poverty cycle.

Schools should help children and young people where there are difficulties with family life, a lack of aspiration and an absence of life skills. Yet for too many pupils in the most deprived areas, our education system continues to fall far short of this.

Nursery classes attached to primary schools produce strong outcomes for the most disadvantaged children. To expand access, the CSJ called for all Good and Outstanding primary schools to be given the support to offer nursery provision, starting with those schools serving disadvantaged communities. Last year the government gave schools £5 million to do this.

The CSJ has championed the creation of Free Schools and Academies to ensure that schools have greater flexibility and autonomy and bring new providers to disadvantaged areas. These proposals have been central to the Government’s education policy. 

The Government has also taken up our recommendation to bring Further Education into the Department for Education, which helps simplify funding streams.

We want to see every child have the opportunity for the best possible educational outcomes and we are pleased the Government has taken on board a number of our recommendations to achieve this.

CSJ Report: Closing the Divide: Tackling educational inequality in England

We are facing a drugs crisis with 300,000 people in England addicted to heroin and/or crack cocaine. With 335,000 children living in households where a parent battles opiate or crack addiction, decisive action is desperately needed.

Addiction shreds the fabric of our society. It wrecks families, ruins childhood, causes mental illness, encourages welfare dependency and fuels crime.

Our report, Ambitious for Recovery: Tackling drug and alcohol addiction in the UK, found that ‘legal highs’, which mimic drugs such as cocaine, LSD and heroin, caused serious health problems, increased hospital admissions and almost 100 deaths in 2012 alone.

With such serious risks, we campaigned strongly to see ‘legal highs’ banned.

In May this year the Government implemented a wholesale ban on the trade of ‘legal highs’, echoing the CSJ’s position on these dangerous and addictive substances.

The Government's approach reflects the CSJ’s desire to tackle the root causes of addiction, such as family breakdown, as well as the need to take preventative action at school. In recent years, government policy has been built on the logic of helping addicts to achieve full recovery, a position advocated by the CSJ.

However there is still a lot of work to be done. It is crucial that the government continue to build on this work to support recovery for addicts and reduce the risk of addiction in the first place.

CSJ Report: Ambitious for Recovery: Tackling drug and alcohol addiction in the UK
CSJ Report: No Quick Fix: Exposing the depth of Britain's drug and alcohol problem

 

Serious personal debt can be hugely destructive to individuals and families. Ease of access to credit, an aggressive consumer lending market, the absence of a savings culture and basic levels of financial capability and the excessive materialism of modern society has seen an increase in personal debt.

The CSJ’s recommendations to tackle personal debt seek to enable access to credit without incurring unmanageable debt, allow debtors the right type of advice and the skills to manage their money and encourage Britain to develop a savings culture.

The Government has implemented recommendations found in our report, Maxed Out: Serious personal debt in Britain, including the introduction of financial literacy guidelines in schools and securing agreements from banks to remove charges if a direct debit or standing order fails.

Recommendations from our Future Finance: A new approach to financial capability report have been taken up with the Financial Services Authority regulator developing a national strategy for Financial Capability and a new high-level debt advice steering group has been established to improve engagement levels with debt advice.

In an effort to build a nation of savers, the Department for Work and Pensions are consulting on implementing the Help to Save scheme, which would target working families on Universal Credit to help them build up their savings by matching their savings to a point. Our recent report, Help to Save, outlines these recommendation.

The Department also set up the Credit Union Expansion Programme which helps meet the growing demand for modern banking products for people on low incomes. These implementations reflect recommendations in our report, Restoring the Balance: Tackling problem debt.

It is encouraging to see the Government recognise the seriousness of addressing personal debt and look to provide support, especially for low income and vulnerable people through a number of our recommendations.

CSJ Report: Help to Save
CSJ Report: Maxed Out: Serious personal debt in Britain
CSJ Report: Future Finance: A new approach to financial capability
CSJ Report: Restoring the Balance: Tackling problem debt