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The impact of the emergency budget on Newham

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Emergency Budget There has been so much macro-analysis of the emergency budget this week that we wanted to see how it will impact on local people in the London borough of Newham where we work. It’s difficult to analyse the changes as they are going to be introduced over the next few years, and we won’t see the detail until the 20th October when the Comprehensive Spending Review is published.

Newham has worked hard to get off the bottom of the league tables when it comes to multiple deprivation, but we have seen the consequences of the recession over the last two years as demand for our services has soared – those seeking debt advice have doubled, and those seeking employment support have tripled in last 18 months.

So here’s a snapshot of what these changes mean for local people in east London.

Benefits and Tax Credits

  • The three year freeze (should read ‘cut in real terms’) of Child Benefit will affect 41,035 families in Newham who receive Child Benefit (a total of 79,320 children), a powerful tool in the fight against child poverty. Newham has one of the youngest populations in the country so we will be affected disproportionately.
  • We welcome the increase of Child Tax Credit by an extra £150 per year. This will help the 38,600 Newham families who are currently in receipt of Child or Working Tax Credits (highest take-up in London) offset the cuts of their Child Benefit.
  • Even though the government cut the free schools initiative being trialled (very successfully) in Newham and other boroughs, we are heartened to hear of Newham Council’s commitment to continue with it anyway.
  • A total of 1,910 people (18.8% of those on JSA) have been claiming JSA for longer than 12 months in Newham, many of whom we help back into work through our very successful employment programmes. We recently submitted a paper to DWP proposing how the new Work Programme must be designed so that it doesn’t leave behind those who most need its support – read a copy here.
  • We are concerned about the Housing Benefit being withdrawn from people on Jobseekers Allowance after 12 months. Particularly if at this point they have to go on the compulsory Work Programme. It’s contradictory and may lead to a massive increase in homelessness, debt or cash-in-hand work.
  • Key out-of-work benefits are claimed by 30,440 residents   (18.3% of the local population). Through delivering an advice service to 9,000 people each year and our research and campaigning work we know that fundamental reform of the benefit system is an absolute imperative. So we were heartened to hear that changes are underway, including work incentives which we’ve been lobbying for. We look forward to working with DWP over the summer as it prepares a new Welfare Reform Bill.

Housing
Current LHA rates for Newham top out at £350 for a 5-bedroom house, so Newham residents won’t be affected by the cap.

Tax
We welcome the government following up on one of our policy recommendations to increase the personal tax allowance threshold. This latest increase to £7,475 will take about 10,500 local residents out of the tax system (15.8% of Newham’s working age population), putting more money into the pockets of those who need it most.

However the VAT increases will adversely affect those poorest in our society. The richest 10% spend £1 in every £25 of their income on VAT. The poorest 10% spend £1 in £7.

Jobs
Where are the jobs? The assumption in the budget is that the private sector will fill the deficit by providing more jobs. And that it will be easier for people on benefits to move into work. But again where are the jobs now?

  • In Newham there are 46 jobs for every 100 people of working age. Compared to 94 for London, and 83 nationally. In other words, people either don’t work, or have to travel outside the borough for work.
  • Nine JSA claimants are competing for each unfilled job vacancy in Newham, compared with a national average of 5:1. And there are 10,196 people are claiming JSA in Newham. That’s an awful lot of competition from just one of the 33 boroughs in London.
  • The types of work available to people in Newham are in the service sector (representing 89.9% of all jobs in the borough). Often insecure and temporary (32% are part time), low paid (21% get paid less than £7 an hour) and low skilled (24.2% fail to reach level 4 at Key Stage 2 – average of English and Maths).

Public Sector
Newham residents rely more heavily upon their public services than other more affluent areas. Some local services are already at bursting point as demand outstrips supply. When these are cut where will local people turn to?

  • 36% of jobs in Newham are in the public sector (top 10% in the country). Newham Council has already had to cut £30million (c.7%) from this year’s budget. However if we are to see departmental cuts of 25% over the course of this parliament and a council tax freeze, how may of these jobs will go in Newham? Public sector funding also supports a diverse voluntary sector, delivering a wide range of services. The prospect of 25% cuts is not good for those who work in the sector, or for those they support.

It’s early days to see how this budget will actually impact on local people in east London. But we do know that as belts have tightened in the past it has often been those with least that suffer most. Let’s hope this coalition government’s rhetoric of fairness and support for the most vulnerable actually plays out into reality.

The consultation process for the Comprehensive Spending Review should be launched today (24th June) and the timetable runs through to the autumn – so get involved, we will be.

Note: Current data sources have been used where possible, and can be provided upon request.

Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, General, Housing, Informal Economy, Welfare, Working age poverty, debt, employment | 2 Comments »

First thoughts on Frank Field’s review on poverty and life chances

Monday, June 7th, 2010

http://comlinks.beepweb.co.uk/linksuk/wp-content/images/FrankFieldMP.jpgWe were  pleased to hear the PM announce plans for a new review on poverty and life chances, led by Frank Field, and considering, amongst other aims how to develop services that “nurture children”.

He will:

  • examine the case for reforms to poverty measures, in particular for the inclusion of non-financial elements
  • generate a broader debate about the nature and extent of poverty in the UK
  • explore the effect of a child’s home environment
  • recommend potential action by government and other institutions to reduce poverty and enhance life chances for the least advantaged.

We will be blogging on other aspects of the review in the weeks ahead but note now Fields specific commitments to consider how grass roots groups can transform children’s lives, to learn from others and to producing an action programme.  He told the BBC: “I hope we will have a programme of action, …which the government can actually act on. ……I don’t think we need lots of brilliant new ideas, lots of people have done work, we now need to bring that together and shape it in a way which leads to action.”

With the right community interventions at an early stage we could be doing much more to enable all children to fulfil their potential.   We know some of what works. We do it everyday at Community Links across a network of more than 60 projects in East London and it isn’t rocket science.  Its warm and friendly places where young people can be safe and free to play and learn and grow. Its committed and empathetic staff  that children can trust and respect and it’s the deep value relationships that grow from reliable and constant understanding between service user and provider.

When we were reviewing the Council on Social Action’s unfinished business  before the election we suggested to party leaders  that  a national community support strategy for children and young people, rooted in such approaches,  should be a priority for the new government.  We advised that an effective independent  contribution to developing such a strategy would learn from the successful working process of the Council  and would combine advice and recommendations to government with  concurrent, cross sector action on the ground.  Above all it would seek to understand and, where appropriate, support and develop existing good practice.

The brief for the Field review is not quite the same and as yet we don’t know exactly how it will work but there are clearly many connections. We particularly welcome  the positive commitment to learning from what works and to generating a practical action programme.

We look forward to contributing to the learning and, especially, to the action.

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Posted in Child Poverty, Council on Social Action, Welfare, Working age poverty, debt | 2 Comments »

Tackling Working Age Poverty

Friday, May 21st, 2010


by Gary Blake
Today is the end of my first week in post as Co-ordinator for the  Tackling Working Age Poverty project. Community Links, in partnership with Church Action on Poverty, are working on a national campaign to research and address working age poverty.

I hope over the coming months to listen to people’s views and hear your ideas on how we can make a difference for people experiencing working age poverty.

Yesterday DWP published the latest set of statistics revealing the extent of poverty in the UK.  Several commentators have analysed the figures including New Policy Institute co-founder Peter Kenway whose article in today’s Guardian reports that six in every 10 children in poverty now belong to a working household and in-work poverty has been a rising trend since the late 1970’s.

He says “Work that does not provide a sufficient income is now as much to blame for poverty than worklessness.”

We are taking a close look at working-age poverty over the coming year.  As part of this campaign we are organising listening events around the country. Now is an opportunity to see how serious the new government is about poverty reduction. If you want to get involved in our campaign, leave your comments below or send me an e-mail.

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Posted in Child Poverty, Working age poverty, employment | 1 Comment »

Challenging the perception that poverty doesn’t exist in the UK

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Nigel Moores and Ian Mather are from Rhyl in North Wales. They will be posting throughout the week. Nigel works for the West Rhyl Community Company, and is one of the founder members of West Rhyl First. Ian is Chair of Anti-Poverty Network Cymru.

Having spent many years working in West Rhyl, the most deprived ward in Wales, I have come across poverty on a daily basis. From people sleeping on the streets to children begging for food. This is reality on a daily basis for a large number of people both young and old.

However, the general perception is that poverty does not exist in the UK. Poverty is in third world countries. Starving children in Africa, people living on rubbish tips in India and child labour in China. Perceptions we see in the media on a daily basis. The media do not show the people living in poverty in the UK. It wouldn’t look good, not on our own doorstep, best left hidden away. Is it not far better to read about celebrities and millionaire footballers.

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Posted in Attitudes, Child Poverty, Working age poverty | No Comments »

Building relationships is the key to tackling poverty, in London and elsewhere

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The Evening Standard is running a powerful series of reports on poverty in London this week. They rightly identify some of the failures in government policy, but they’ve missed one of the most important ingredients in achieving change – building respectful relationships between individuals and communities.

There are some poignant stories of individuals – 18 year old Vincent who has applied for 32 jobs, would love to go to university, but can’t afford the £19 for a UCAS application form. 21 year old Jaydine, who has had an incredibly difficult start to life, movingly describes how her 11-month old baby “has taught me not to give up.”

At Community Links we know a lot of people with similar experiences to Vincent and Jardine, and we’ve spent 30 years supporting them. And the key to our success? Building relationships – treating people as individuals not problems, as people not targets.

Take our employment project, which helps people like Vincent into work. Despite running out of two slightly shabby offices in Newham and Tower Hamlets, we get more of our people into work than any other provider in London. We invest in people before furniture – our advisors really get to know every person, finding out what jobs they want to do, and supporting them to overcome problems. And then we get to know all the local employers, finding the right job for the right person.

Or look at our Ofsted registered school, for young people excluded from mainstream education. Youth workers, many of them who had difficulties at school themselves, get to know every young person, finding out what each individual needs and doing their best to support them.

And the main thing we’ve had constantly reinforced over all these years is that people in Newham, as in London, are and always have been hopeful, resilient, ambitious, generous, and honest. London might be a city divided by wealth, but not by the qualities that people possess.

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Posted in Child Poverty, Council on Social Action | No Comments »

£16bn of benefits go unclaimed every year

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Community links is one of the 27 charities challenging government today over the £16bn in benefits that go unclaimed every year. The campaign, coordinated by Citizens Advice, wants government to set targets to improve the take-up of means-tested benefits, ensuring that money earmarked for some of the most vulnerable people actually reaches them.

It’s an issue we’ve been aware of for some time. About 12,000 people visit Community Links’ advice service every year for support with benefits, housing and debt. Last year we helped them claim over £1.3m in benefits they were entitled to but not receiving.

Last year’s Benefit Take-up Task Force, which we sat on, looked at the issue and some progress was made as a result. Targets for housing benefit take up have now been included in the Audit Commission’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) for local authorities, and there is support from the Treasury to push this.

However the difficulty lies in the fact that, as always government departments do not work together very well. As different departments issue different benefits – HMRC for Working Tax Credits, DWP for out of work benefits, local authorities for housing benefit – it makes it very difficult to create and impose targets for benefit take up as a whole. There is a concern that targets will deter agencies, acting as a barrier to encouraging them to do more. This complexity is also one reason why people don’t access them in the first place.

Nevertheless it is clear something must be done. Citizens Advice highlight that four out of five low paid workers without children (1.2bn households) miss out on tax credits worth at least £38 per week, a total of £1.9 billion, and as many as half of working households entitled to housing benefit do not claim it. There’s a similar story with council tax benefit, pension credit, and child tax credit.

Access to these extra benefits could take households above the point of desperate struggle, into a situation where they’re able to look forward and plan for the future. There are many reasons why people don’t claim everything they’re entitled to – we frequently meet people who just don’t know about them, people who think they could get them but are left baffled by the complexity of the system, and those who want to but don’t know how.

Targets will ensure that local authorities, job centres, and other offices make active efforts to ensure people access all their benefits – better advertising, more support, more accessible information. Therefore we fully support Citizens Advice on this benefits take-up campaign.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty | 1 Comment »

Politicians and the media can work hand-in-glove to demonise the poor

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Josh Fenton-Glynn has worked on UK poverty issues for Oxfam and the Child Poverty Action Group, and is writing in his personal capacity.

Now is an apt time for Community Links to run this much needed debate on media attitudes to poverty and the effect it has on the political discourse. Having worked in policy around UK poverty and social exclusion for the past two years, I have found that one of the biggest barriers to political change is the way people talk about poverty.

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Posted in Attitudes, Child Poverty | 1 Comment »

Does equality matter? New Tory think tank Bright Blue dives into the fairness debate

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Equality has been a thorny issue for both Labour and Conservatives. Tony Blair famously said he was ‘relaxed’ about people being fabulously wealthy when challenged on Newsnight about the ever widening gap between rich and poor under Labour. His view was in keeping with the approach of the Conservative party which has traditionally put its faith in ‘trickle down’ economics, and was also criticised for increasing the gap between rich and poor when in power.

So it was bold of Bright Blue, a new Tory think tank, to face the issue of fairness head on in their first debate entitled Does Equality Matter last night at Westminster (Jonty Oliff-Cooper, co-founder of Bright Blue, explains their position above).

Shadow Work and Pensions minister Theresa May, and left of centre commentator Polly Toynbee, the two speakers, both agreed that equality mattered, but disagreed about the importance of income as a key measure of equality. Both focused their comments on policies needed to help those on average or low incomes improve their situation, saying relatively little – and in May’s case nothing – about what to do about reducing the share of wealth that goes to the very rich.

Theresa May argued that income was only one factor in a complex matrix of problems that stopped people fulfilling their potential. She talked a lot about family breakdown, drug addiction, cycles of long term worklessness and other apparently non-income related factors that contributed to poverty, following the line Cameron had adopted the day before in his speech at DEMOS, to the annoyance of some. She insisted there was no one solution to reducing levels of inequality and said what was needed was flexibility and bespoke policies that met the needs of individuals.  She gave the example of autistic young people who have special needs for help into work that could never be met by an off the shelf approach. The voluntary and private sector would be called on to meet many of these needs.

Interestingly, May did not challenge the notion that inequality needed to be reduced or that more equal societies are happier and more successful, although she did not develop these points with any great enthusiasm.

Polly Toynbee, on the other hand, enthused about The Spirit Level, a recently published book by academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which shows that on a whole range of measure from health to teenage pregnancy and crime, the more equal a society is, the more successful it is. It was not so much how much money people had that mattered, she said, but the relative gap between the richest and poorest. A key issue was status, how people see themselves in relation to others. Where there are big gaps between rich and poor, those towards the bottom of the social hierarchy feel a lack of status, resulting in depression, crime and anti-social behaviour.

The obsession amongst some disenfranchised young people in the UK with ‘respect’ and their willingness to commit acts of violence to gain ‘respect’ was evidence, she claimed, that these status issues had a big impact on the happiness or otherwise of a society.

Toynbee said redistributive tax policies were needed to reduce the gap between rich and poor and praised tax credits as an effective redistributive measure. May said nothing about redistribution and did not stay long enough to be asked about the issue.

Questions from the audience focused on detailed policy issues such as where to focus priorities in allocating resources to the Sure Start programme, and how local authorities can work with central government.

One questioner asked whether cuts needed to bring down the budget deficit would be an opportunity or a threat to the next government. Toynbee said it would be an opportunity for the Conservatives to cut back on state provision. Teresa May dodged the question somewhat by saying it would be a challenge, but said it would be an opportunity to spend money better and acknowledged that cutting without increasing inequality would not be easy. When challenged on the Conservative’s record on tackling inequality under Thatcher, she said the gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) was higher now than it has ever been.

Anyone hoping to map future Tory policy on equality issues needed to read between the lines. But the focus by Theresa May on individual and family issues as the key factors in inequality, and the absence of any mention by her of redistribution or greater regulation to crack down on mega pay levels in both either the private or public sectors, suggests the new Tory approach to inequality may not be so different from the old one.

When we eventually come out of recession, will the Tories, if they are in power, allow the gap between rich and poor to grow even wider? Will they continue with the laissez-faire economics of both previous Labour and Conservative governments which have allowed the city to let rip and top earners to increase their pay to levels which would have been unimaginable just two decades ago?

That might be a good subject for the next Bright Blue debate.

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Posted in Child Poverty, General | No Comments »

A Year of Social Change

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

As we reach the end of 2009 the national team at Community Links have been reflecting on the last year … and begining to plan for 2010.

In 2009 Community Links has seen more and more people come through our doors, as people struggle and demand for our services increased. In Newham Community Links  carried on running much needed local services -  youth clubs, the New Deal, our own school, provided advice and support to families struggling with debt and welfare, and much more. And we’ve continued to share our learning nationally, achieving considerable success.

Projects that our national team have worked on this year include
The Parliamentary launch of our Need NOT Greed Campaign in February, to the National Talent Bank in June, Chain Reaction in November,  including the launch of three more Council on Social Action reports and much else besides.

We have produced a short report on our activities: you can read it here.

To all those with whom we’ve worked, a warm thank you. To those with whom we haven’t, how about next year? The election, unprecedented regeneration, the European Year Against Poverty all provide us with enormous opportunities for social change. We look forward to seizing that moment with you.

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a joyful New Year
The Community Links national team.

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Posted in Benefits, Child Poverty, Communication, Council on Social Action, Informal Economy, Innovation | No Comments »

Ensuring families receive everything they’re entitled to

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Last week I ran a seminar at 4Children’s conference ‘Child Poverty 10 years on’. The theme of the event was joining things up – providing advice and support in an integrated way. I was asked to focus on how we can ensure that people get the financial support they need to flourish.

As Community Links’ Family Support worker, I’m very familiar with the problems faced by many people in Newham. As I pointed out (you can download my slides here), in one Newham ward, 78% of children live in low income households.

I know just how important financial support can be for a family struggling to get by. For example, someone moving off benefits into low paid work needs the extra support provided by tax credits to ensure work pays. It is estimated that 400,000 children live in poverty because their families are not claiming all the benefits and tax credits they’re entitled to.

It’s in the interests of the Council, other local residents, and the individuals themselves if they know about and access the support they’re entitled to. Communities will be less deprived, with more local investment and more prosperous citizens. Councils will not have to deal with bigger problems further down the line, and families will be able to move on and flourish on the back of a secure financial situation.

That’s why benefit checks and employment advice should be incorporated into other processes. For example, when a family living in poverty is struggling to make the rent, that should trigger an automatic benefits assessment to ensure they’re getting everything they’re entitled to. The alternative, eviction, ends up costing the council and their community more, as well as having a huge impact on the family involved.

There are some excellent examples where this approach to benefits already happens: in Newham the Mayor’s Employment Project combines back-to-work support with benefit advice, ensuring jobseekers are claiming everything they’re entitled to as they’re looking and after they’ve moved into work. There are also examples in other London boroughs and in other local authorities – people from Islington, Haringey & Newcastle all gave examples of work in their areas.

The discussion after the presentation concentrated on the challenge we practitioners face giving the best possible services to families in our communities, working within the current system but thinking creatively about how we reach people.

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Posted in Child Poverty, News | No Comments »

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