Frank Field echoes Nick Clegg’s approach to tackling poverty

Labour MP Frank Field’s Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances, commissioned by the government and published last week has added to the debate over whether efforts should focus on increasing social mobility.

As a report on it says:

He proposes that the government switches focus from Labour’s anti-poverty measure, based on material income, to a set of life chance indicators.

He writes: “Poverty is a much more subtle enemy than purely lack of money,” adding that he does not believe poverty is the dominant reason why disadvantage is handed down from one generation to another.

Parenting is more important than income or schooling to a child’s life chances, he says. [The Guardian]

This chimes with Nick Clegg’s recent Hugo Young lecture, in which the Deputy Prime Minister said,

Of course it is better to have more money, even if it is only a little more. But poverty is also about the quality of the local school, access to good health services and fear of crime…

Can we really think that a society in which people are temporarily lifted above a statistical line by a few pounds is, in the long run, fairer than one in which opportunity is genuinely dispersed and people’s future life chances are fundamentally improved?

Inequalities become injustices when they are fixed; passed on, generation to generation. That’s when societies become closed, stratified and divided.

The review itself says,

We have found overwhelming evidence that children’s life chances are most heavily predicated on their development in the first five years of life. It is family background, parental education, good parenting and the opportunities for learning and development in those crucial years that together matter more to children than money, in determining whether their potential is realised in adult life…

There are two overarching recommendations.

• To prevent poor children from becoming poor adults the Review proposes establishing a set of Life Chances Indicators that measure how successful we are as a country in making more equal life’s outcomes for all children…
• To drive this policy the Review proposes establishing the ‘Foundation Years’ covering the period from the womb to five. The Foundation Years should become the first pillar of a new tripartite education system: the Foundation Years leading to school years leading to further, higher and continuing education.

The two details proposals which have caught the most media attention so far are the proposals for parenting classes and the suggestion that funds could be diverted from future child benefit increases into the Foundation Years work instead. Likely to be more significant than the specific detailed proposals (especially given the caveats put around the child benefit one), however, is the general approach recommended, which is one of emphasising factors other than how much money a family has in its pockets.