Why it's time to end the cycle of sparsity-introducing the 'Stop the Squeeze' campaign
At 4in10, we are very much aware that our network members continue to fight every day to provide high quality, sustainable support to children and families who have been let down by services. Many families find that they are unable to secure a high enough income to meet their basic needs. Our network organisations are on the frontline trying to keep themselves afloat as they provide crucial intervention to children and their families impacted by poverty.
While we are advocates for the sector and exist to support our members, we also are in the fight to end child poverty in London. The response from our local, city-wide and national government to the cost-of-living crisis must be preventative as well as reactive. So, we wanted to raise awareness of a campaign that we believe is a call for the longer term, systemic change our members and their support users require.
Stop the Squeeze is a collaborative campaign working to create a coalition of civil society groups who ask for three clear demands that will benefit society as a whole and move the conversation away from a plaster approach to a robust social security system.
Supporters of Stop the Squeeze are calling on our leaders to provide an emergency package with the following three elements:
- Guarantee of affordable, clean energy for everyone
- Ensure everyone has access to a Living Income
- Reform the tax system with higher taxes on wealth
The aim is to change the conversation in Westminster and the media to get more ambitious policies on the agenda and make real change possible in the longer term. The campaign is led by a core steering group of three organisations: the Economic Change Unit, Tax Justice UK, and the New Economics Foundation. It is supported by a coalition of civil society organisations such as Save the Children and Oxfam, trade unions, and grassroots groups. See here for the current list of supporting organisations. We are encouraging our members to consider supporting or engaging with this initiative and its three demands in whatever way they feel is appropriate.
There are many ways of going about meeting these demands, but the principal is that we move from language of scarcity and overwhelmingly competitive charitable fundraising that pits brilliant charities against one another to a collective, coordinated support system where the gaps are few and far between and the community and voluntary sector in London does not have to continually be in crisis response mode.
We will be co-hosting an event with Children England on 13th December to encourage our members to learn more about why this could be a beneficial campaign to engage with. Crucially, this event will also highlight why we need a longer-term vision for economic change. We will offer some practical tools for members in the children and poverty sector who aren’t economists, but want to challenge short term, zero-sum approaches to government investment. Even if you’re not ready to join the Stop the Squeeze campaign, this event will provide resources to help you advocate for change, whether local or national.
4in10 believes that Stop the Squeeze is an impactful way of using the expertise of economists to hold government to account at all levels in London to make our city a fairer, child-friendly community.
Signing up doesn’t commit any organisations to any actions. But this is an opportunity to show support and engage in particular activities around the campaign’s aims, when it feels appropriate. The Government can and should deliver a response which addresses the long-term structural problems with the economy which underpin this cost-of-living crisis, rather than just offering sticking-plaster solutions.
We understand that you’re not economic experts, we’re not either. But we do believe that the economic system can be made to better support children and families. Child Poverty can be eradicated from London, but we need to work collectively to ensure we build a more equitable city that is inclusive with a security system that supports everyone, especially when they need it most.
For more details and information on how to sign up, go to Stop the Squeeze -A Real Plan for an Affordable Britain.
To book onto our upcoming event, jointly run with Children England, please follow this link.
Levelling Up White Paper: Why using London as a yardstick risks children everywhere
Levelling Up White Paper: Why using London as a yardstick risks children everywhere
In February, this year, the government released their long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper, a 300-page long publication covering everything from the history of the biggest cities in the world to twelve separate missions for the UK. By now, and a few months on from its publication, you may have read any number of analyses or opinion pieces on this unusual document.
At 4in10, London’s Child Poverty Network, amongst the myriad of missions and metrics, there were two key issues stand out as being of great concern:
- Child poverty in London is completely absent from the paper (the phrase ‘child poverty’ does not appear at all).
- London is used a yardstick for success for other regions, despite having the highest levels of inequality and poverty. The White Paper explicitly intends to replicate London’s economic model in other regions despite these facts. This risks the exacerbation of child poverty not just in London but in other areas identified as needing to be ‘Levelled Up’ (Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Newcastle, the Humber etc).
Child Poverty in London and Levelling Up
Although London is discussed in some sections of the Levelling Up White Paper, child poverty levels are not referenced. This is despite four in ten children in London currently living in poverty and nine of the ten local authorities with the highest levels of child poverty being located in London. If children in the capital, or elsewhere in the UK, are going hungry due to poverty – and the White Paper fails to mention – let alone address this – the phrase ‘Levelling-Up’ rings hollow. The White Paper does discuss the deprivation and lack of investment into many regions across the UK. However, it is possible for two truths to be present at once:
- Vast areas of the UK have experienced chronic underinvestment.
- London’s children are experiencing worsening poverty levels and increasingly deep levels of poverty.
It is true that some of London’s children do experience some advantages (but these tend to be limited to social mobility measures); a child on free school meals in London is twice as likely to attend university compared to those in the north of England. In London’s most deprived areas, nearly 90 per cent of secondary schools are either good or outstanding, compared with less than 50 per cent in deprived areas of the north. Transport spend per head has been higher in London for a decade (although this doesn’t always benefit poorer Londoners in outer boroughs); London transport spending per head was £864, compared with £379 in the north-west of England between 2009-2020. All of these facts are little compensation to the 12 children in a classroom of 30 who live in poverty in London. If one of the children in an East London classroom ends up going to Oxbridge, or gets a job at a top law firm, that is little compensation to the 11 others who still live in poverty. Similarly, the ability to get from Hackney (East London) to Thornton Heath (South West London), for as little as £1.65, means very little when the parent to the child pays (on average) £1,650 on rent per month in Hackney.
At 4in10, believe the Levelling Up agenda can, and should, address both regional underinvestment and child poverty rates in all areas of the country, including London. We should not pit children in one area against another (as the White Paper states itself; page xiv)– any child growing up in poverty in the United Kingdom is an avoidable tragedy.
There is a real risk that the high levels of poverty and child poverty, experienced in London and elsewhere, will be overlooked by national policy makers in light of the White Paper.
Replicating London’s Private Sector Productivity Model
“Typically, differences within UK regions or cities are larger than differences between regions on most performance metrics” (Levelling Up White Paper 2022: p27)
A significant part of the reason child poverty is overlooked by the Levelling Up White Paper is due to the fact the main objective of ‘Levelling Up’ is to reproduce the London’s levels of productivity in other regions of the UK, through processes of agglomeration. It is consistently implied, in the White Paper, that living standards will increase once the rest of the UK’s long standing productivity problems are resolved. In London, both as a whole unit and at local authority levels, productivity metrics are higher than other regions. Across the measures selected by the government as indicative of a productive area, Gross Value Added per hour, median gross weekly pay, and proportion of population with a Level 3+ qualification – London scores highly in comparison to other regions. This leaves London’s true picture of poverty somewhat obscured.
Using Gross Value Added (GVA), the favoured productivity measurement of the government, Tower Hamlets is the third most productive region in the country (ONS 2021). Therefore, Tower Hamlets has ‘Levelled Up’, right?
If you were to walk down in a street in Tower Hamlets, in the shadow of Canary Wharf, one in two families (55.8% – End Child Poverty Coalition: 2021) would be living in poverty; if you asked them how high GVA levels or the private sector productivity of the financial district has benefited them, they would struggle to give you an answer.
This gets to the heart of why we at 4in10 are alarmed that this model is being sought to be replicated elsewhere. Living standards, such as child poverty, in Tower Hamlets for example, would not be improved by a further increase in shiny new private sector buildings in the borough.
As a network organisation whose members have seen the impact of child poverty rising over the last decade, the use of London as a yardstick for success or model to be copied is highly concerning. It is not just concerning for children in London, but also for children in places like Leeds, Rotherham, and Middlesbrough, who are the primary focus of ‘Levelling Up’ narratives. Whilst ‘Levelling Up’ certainly means different things to different people, but we would all agree that an area has not levelled up whilst still having extremely high levels of child poverty.
The Equality Trust and New Economics Foundation have already flagged that the Levelling Up White Paper must focus on people, not just places. Research from the NPC (2022) shows that only 2% of the total levelling up funding is going on supporting social infrastructure so far, despite the public’s expectation that will Levelling Up tackle social issues. The public consider the most important aspects to an area being levelled up to be reduced homelessness (36%) and reduced poverty (36%).
However, the problems with the White Paper and child poverty levels in London run even deeper when contextualised against continuous unhelpful narratives:
How Can We Change The Narrative That London Doesn’t Need To Be Levelled Up?
After waiting a few months to see if these concerns would be addressed by policy makers, it is clear that we need an alternative narrative or frame to tell the true story of child poverty in London. Despite years of (sky) high child poverty rates in London, Westminster are simply not listening. No single statistic will provide a silver bullet to this problem, as:
- People outside of London either aren’t aware of the scale of child poverty in London, or they simply don’t believe the scale of inequality and poverty in London when presented with evidence.
- There is a sense of unfairness/grievance felt towards London from some parts of the UK; typically providing London with any public funding is unpopular.
- London is no longer a major political priority for either the national Conservative or national Labour parties
In light of these factors, we need urgently to find an alternative way to make the case for the 700,000 children living in poverty in the capital.
We want to work alongside our members, and anyone who shares our concerns about child poverty in London to help us tell the true story of its impact and challenge the prevailing narratives in the White Paper that prevent us from tackling it.