Earlier this week the Prime Minister made a landmark speech on the Government’s approach to tackling poverty.

The CSJ joined poverty fighting charities, policy makers and other leaders in the social justice field to hear the Prime Minister outline his programme for the rest of the Parliament.

The CSJ live tweeted the event from @CSJThinkTank  where we covered the Prime Minister announcing his intention to deliver a “social approach” to fighting poverty. The Prime Minister outlined four key areas; family life, education, opportunity for all and addiction support as central to his Life Chances Agenda.

The speech saw the Prime Minister address a number of policy areas on which the CSJ has been calling for action. These included investment in relationship support, the promotion of the savings habit for low income families, utilising sport for social good and embedding ‘treatment not maintenance’ as the Government’s objective in tackling addiction.

The CSJ will be pressing the Government to use its Spring Budget to deliver ‘social renewal’ and echo the Prime Minister’s strong rhetoric with a call for investment to match the scale of the social challenge.

In the lead up to the speech, CSJ Director, Philippa Stroud wrote exclusively for the Sunday Times and appeared on Radio 5Live and Radio 4’s Today programme.

CSJ’s Policy Director, Alex Burghart, followed the Prime Minister's speech with his own instant reaction piece on ConservativeHome.com

Philippa Stroud in the Sunday Times and BBC Radio

In her Sunday Times article Philippa Stroud pressed the Prime Minister to define his legacy by turning lives around in our poorest areas.

Philippa used her slot on the Today programme to discuss ‘what works’ in tackling poverty. Here she outlined the rationale behind the CSJ’s ‘five pathways to poverty’ and explained how family breakdown, educational underachievement, serious personal debt, addiction and worklessness all drive poverty.

Alex Burghart writing on ConservativeHome.com

CSJ Director of Policy, Alex Burghart, provided leading political blog ConservativeHome.com with a personal response to the Prime Minister's speech, which he claimed might be “the most important social policy speech of the Parliament”.

Alex praised the Prime Minister’s “narrative” which endorsed CSJ calls to “invest in supporting and stabilising families, create opportunities for those who lack them [and] transform lives."

Read Philippa Stroud's Sunday Times article here

Read Alex Burghart's ConservativeHome.com article here

Listen to Philippa Stroud on Radio 4's Today Programme here

Listen to Philippa Stroud on Radio 5Live's Sunday Breakfast Programme here

Family Breakdown

Announcement: The Prime Minister announced an extra £35 million over the course of the Parliament for relationship support to combat Britain’s dangerously high levels of family breakdown.

CSJ Reaction: Lucy Atkinson responds to the Prime Minister’s big announcements on family breakdown. The Prime Minister used strong rhetoric around the family, describing family as the “best anti-poverty measure ever invented”. The CSJ welcomes additional funding, but encourages the Prime Minister to scale successful interventions.

Click here to read the CSJ’s response to this announcement:

Announcement: The Life Chances Strategy will include a plan for significantly expanding parenting provision. It will examine the possibility of introducing a voucher scheme for parenting classes and recommend the best way to incentivise parents to take them up.

Announcement: The Prime Minister promised to scale up the Troubled Families programme and ensure that parenting skills and child development become central to how it is both targeted and how it is delivered.

CSJ Reaction: The Prime Minister is absolutely right to emphasise the importance of strong parenting. CSJ research has pressed for investment in programmes that support couples and parents.

Lucy Atkinson provides a CSJ response to this announcement here

Education:

Announcement: The Government will provide over a billion pounds for National Citizen’s Service over the next 4 years, meaning that by 2021, NCS will be available to 60% of all 16 year olds.

CSJ Reaction: The CSJ’s Alex Burghart used his ConservativeHome.com article to express disappointment in the ‘disproportionate’ amount of new money found for a six week volunteer programme, which the CSJ argues could be better invested in other areas to turn lives around and improve life chances in our poorest areas.

To read the CSJ’s reaction click here

Announcement: The Government will introduce a new sports strategy that will extend Sport England’s remit to cover 5 year olds and upwards as part of the Prime Minister’s renewed focus on character building in education.

Announcement: The Government is committing £70 million to mentoring for 25,000 pupils who are falling behind in their GCSE years. The new campaign will be run principally by the Careers and Enterprise Company, working with business, charities and the public sector to build a new generation of high-quality mentors.

CSJ Reaction: CSJ Campaign Director, Frank Young responds on behalf of the CSJ to sport and character building being placed at the heart of the Prime Minister’s education agenda for the next Parliament. The CSJ broadly welcomes this policy direction, having published a ground breaking report on Sport for Social Good last year, but argues that both policy focus and investment needs to be targeted at closing the education attainment gap.

To read the CSJ’s reaction click here

Serious Personal Debt

Announcement: The Government is going to expand the Church of England LifeSavers project which helps primary schoolchildren to manage money and learn how to save.

Announcement: The Government intends to bring forward a ‘help to save’ scheme to encourage those on low incomes to build up a rainy day fund. Full details of this scheme will be announced at the Budget.

CSJ Response: The CSJ believes the issue of serious personal debt is central to any co-ordinated strategy to tackle poverty. We welcome the measures announced by the Prime Minister and a recognition that serious personal debt keeps people poor. Frank Young responds to the two major debt announcements in Monday's speech.

To read the CSJ’s reaction click here

Addiction

Announcement: The Government is introducing a new £30 million social investment outcomes fund, to encourage the development of new treatment options for alcoholism and drug addiction, delivered by expert charities and social enterprises. The Prime Minister will use this investment to leverage up to £120 million of funding from local commissioners, and up to £60 million of new social investment, to expand residential rehabilitation places.

CSJ Response: CSJ Researcher, Saskia Greenhalgh responds to the Prime Ministers announcement that extra funding for recovery is a priority for the Government. She welcomes new measures to increase funding for residential rehabilitation and a renewed commitment to the CSJ mantra of ‘recovery, not maintenance’.

To read the CSJ’s reaction click here

Housing

Announcement: The Government will invest £140 million to regenerate 100 of the country’s most deprived “sink estates”, working in partnership with residents, housing associations, and local authorities to sweep away the barriers that prevent redevelopment.

CSJ Response: CSJ Researcher, Mark Winterburn responds to the high profile announcements on so called ‘sink estates’ ahead of the publication of a major CSJ report into Housing next month. Mark highlights the importance of consultation in estate regeneration and widening any consultation to include a positive vision for transforming lives and achieving social justice ends.

To read the CSJ’s reaction click here

The Prime Minister’s Life Chances speech this week set out his programme for “social renewal”. One major area of social reform not touched on by the Prime Minister was the life chances of those in prison, an area where Justice Secretary Michael Gove is making considerable progress.

The issue of so called ‘legal highs’ hit the headlines this week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published a report into the use of New Psychoactive Substances within Prisons.

The report drew attention to prison inspections where Inspectors observed inmates under the influence of Psychoactive Substances and the easy availability of ‘legal highs’.

This is a worrying trend. The CSJ has long called for a shift from maintaining addicts on methadone to helping people overcome their addiction and lead drug free lives, an approach endorsed by the Prime Minister this week. This approach should be reflected in efforts to improve the Life Chances of prisoners.

Justice Secretary Michael Gove has made rehabilitation his latest social reform mission, a move welcomed by the CSJ as our recent reports  show almost 38% of prisoners arrive  with an addiction problem.

The CSJ is calling on the Justice Secretary to renew efforts to ensure all Prisoners are drug free, by extending efforts and investment in recovery programmes into Prisons.

Alex Burghart: Poor, white, boys (again)...

Director of Policy, Alex Burghart responds to a feature length article in the Sunday Times on the “problem with boys”, looking at CSJ research and policy proposals to address the under achievement of this group.

Read Alex’s blog here

The CSJ is unique amongst think tanks in having an alliance of over 350 grassroots charities that are working to tackle social issues in the most disadvantaged parts of Britain.

This week we feature one of our CSJ Award winners, Drive Forward, a charity successfully reducing high levels of unemployment amongst care leavers aged 16 - 26.

Drive Forward provides innovative practical and emotional support that is tailored to meet the complex needs of each young person.
The charity focuses on finding sustainable employment and has built relationships with employers across London who provide work placements, internships, apprenticeships and employment opportunities specifically for care leavers.

Their work has helped over 300 young people, many in care or on the edge of care, get into employment or higher education.
To find out more about the work Drive Forward are doing or if you would like to get involved please visit their website: 

www.driveforwardfoundation.com