Priorities for John Hutton’s in-tray

With barely a moment to get his feet under his new desk at the Department of Work & Pensions, John Hutton faces a bulging in-tray that would daunt most Ministers.

The Green Paper on welfare reform had been expected any day now, a long-overdue overhaul of the shambolic Child Support Agency (CSA) has been promised by the end of the year and in the Spring we will know whether or not the Government has met its first key target on cutting child poverty by a quarter.

And that’s without even mentioning fundamental changes to pensions policy that could affect millions of people due to retire in the next few decades, but which I will leave to others to discuss.

In laying the ground for the welfare reform Green Paper, the Government is right to say that work is a good way out of poverty. But work must also pay. The minimum wage and tax credits, in cases where they have worked smoothly, have helped to end the extremes of poverty pay. Yet, even in households where one adult is working full time, 21 per cent of children are living in poverty.

Where work is not an option, the safety net of the welfare state is inadequate and must be raised. While the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) supports the Government’s attempts to provide ladders out of poverty, the inadequacy of the current safety net leaves people vulnerable to the snakes. For instance, for a couple with two children, the current gap between benefit levels and the poverty line is around £80 per week after housing costs.

Welfare to work must be based around helping and supporting, not threatening or forcing, people into work. Many people currently out of employment want to work so we need sustained increases in support, such as through the Pathways to Work programme, and measures to ensure that good quality jobs are available.

Simply increasing conditionality, which risks forcing people with real barriers to work into jobs they do not want and may not be able to keep, will not only be expensive but counterproductive. After all, research shows that the children who face the worst poverty are those in families that experience frequent transitions between work and benefits.

Hutton will also have to fight his corner to ensure that he has the resources to deliver. Cuts at Jobcentre Plus could undermine its ability to deliver existing schemes, let alone implementing a new programme of reform.

At the same time, Hutton has to ensure that the new CSA Chief Executive Stephen Geraghty delivers what Ministers have previously promised will be a ‘root and branch reform’ of the troubled agency. It has been nothing short of a shambles to date, so CPAG is insisting that the CSA strategy looks at past and current cases not just how future ones are dealt with.

Although Hutton cannot influence whether the first hurdle on the road to eradicating child poverty can be passed, his policies will be critical to meeting the much tougher 2010 target by when Labour says child poverty will be halved.

It can be done. But it will involve a welfare reform policy that really does take people out of poverty, an overhaul of the CSA that really does get money to the parents of the children that need it most, and a child poverty strategy that really does tackle the inequality, poverty and diminished life-chances that a rich country like ours should be ashamed of.

That’s the challenge John Hutton faces and, for the sake of the three and a half million UK children still living in poverty, it’s one that the Child Poverty Action Group will be pushing him hard to meet.

Kate Green is Chief Executive of the Child Poverty Action Group

Published in Tribune, November 2005.