Comprehensive spending review 2007
What it needs to deliver on child poverty

Work towards better jobs, not just more jobs

CPAG is supportive of the Government's moves to help more people into work - if this is what people want and if this results in improvements in their and their families' quality of life. However, policy which over-focuses on paid work may conflict with enabling parents to have sufficient time to parent and, as Lisa Harker puts it in her commissioned report for the DWP, 'The 2010 and 2020 targets cannot be met by increases in employment alone.'35

Underlying an aspiration to increasing the employment rate is that decent jobs are available. The existence of jobs in the economy does not prove that jobs are open equally to all. Barriers to work, including costs associated with work, the quality of jobs, spatial concentrations of employment and non-employment, skill demands and discrimination mean that not all have equal access to jobs, and certainly not all have equal access to good-quality jobs.

In CPAG's submission to the Work and Pension's Select Committee's Inquiry into the Government's 80 per cent employment rate aspiration, we recommended that the Inquiry used its report to examine the extent to which policy is currently succeeding in overcoming barriers to work, and what else is required to meet the needs of those specific groups, lone parents and disabled adults, recently targeted by policy. The evidence also clearly shows that employers have a greater role to play in opening up opportunities to decent, flexible work and overcoming the discrimination that currently reduces access to employment for many groups.

CPAG welcomes the thinking in Lisa Harker's report36 that greater effort should be put into looking beyond the work-first approach and towards measures that tackle in-work poverty, improve job sustainability, and prevent cycling in and out of employment. Policy has moved in this direction, supporting people in work through mechanisms like the lone parent in-work credit being piloted under the New Deal for lone parents plus,37 but needs to go further in improving the quality of employment (including pay, sustainability and progression). Learning the lessons from the Employment Retention and Advancement pilots and the Ambition pilots between the DWP and the National Employment Panel38 could assist the framing of policy more focused on progression within work. An increased employment rate brought about by increased cycling in and out of work amongst lower income families will not reduce poverty and may increase hardship.

In particular, more needs to be done to ensure that employment pays more for low-paid workers. The UK already has a high employment rate, hand-in-hand with a high child poverty rate - half of poverty currently occurs in households with some work.39 A higher employment rate does not necessarily mean a low poverty rate. The DWP has shown significant interest in encouraging second earners in couples into work, which could have a significant impact on reducing poverty in those couple households where one parent is working and the other is not (of the 57 per cent of children defined as poor who live in couple households, only a tiny minority - 2 per cent - have both parents working full time).40 Such a strategy has the potential to reduce poverty levels, but can do nothing for children in lone-parent households and, again, it restricts the time that parents will have to parent. Moreover, it presents Jobcentre Plus with the challenge of delivering a service to a group with which it has had little previous contact - the key to engaging with this group is to offer a high-quality service to support people's own ambitions of entering decent family-friendly work.

There is also a need to improve skill levels in order to open up greater employment access for the (currently) lowest skilled. The first element to this is for educational policies to deliver better and more equal educational attainment. Policies to improve staying-on rates at school, such as the education maintenance allowance are welcome, but the poorest children remain least likely to do well at school, to stay on post- 16 and to pursue further study post-18. By way of example: in England in 2005 58.9 per cent of children without free school meal entitlement obtained five or more GCSEs at grades A-C, a small enough percentage but double that of those entitled to free school meals.41

More is being expected of Jobcentre Plus from many fronts - a new form of service delivery and welfare reform. Moving towards an 80 per cent employment rate means engaging with groups, such as second adults within couple, of which it has little knowledge. At the same time, our experience shows that Jobcentre Plus is failing to deliver its current service adequately (see p26). Even if an employment rate of 80 per cent is attained, this infers that one in five working adults will remain outside the labour market and, since many of these adults (perhaps as disabled adults or lone parents) are likely to live in households without any other adult being in work, the target implies that many adults and children will remain in households where no adult is in work. Alongside consideration of the employment rate, therefore, we ought to have a more detailed examination of the safety net - currently three-quarters of children in households in which no adults work are poor.42

Notes

35 L Harker, Delivering on Child Poverty: what would it take?, A report for the Department for Work and Pensions, The Stationery Office, 2006
36 See note 35
37 A £40 top-up to wages, targeted at those lone parents moving from benefits into work (over 16 hours) and available for 12 months. At the moment this is available only in parts of the country.
38 These have sought to invest time supporting and training people in specific areas of work to encourage longer-term sustainable employment.
39 See note 2
40 See note 2
41 Department for Education and Skills, National Curriculum Assessment, GCSE and Equivalent Attainment and Post-16 Attainment by Pupil Characteristics in England 2005, 2006, Table 44
42 See note 2

Comprehensive spending review 2007
What it needs to deliver on child poverty

Contents page
Introduction
The Government’s record
What should the spending review deliver?
Provide most for those children at greatest risk of poverty
Work towards better jobs, not just more jobs
Ensure the safety net protects families against poverty
Maximise the contribution of child benefit within family support
Introduce free at the point of delivery good-quality childcare
Make the reduction of child poverty central to the new child support policies
Make education truly free at the point of delivery
Provide benefit entitlement to all UK residents equally, irrespective of immigration status
Reduce the disproportionate burden of taxation on poorer families
Improve the quality of delivery and gear it to the needs of the poorest families
Notes

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