Labour must not stop supporting family incomes

There’s much to welcome in Nick Pearce’s call on Comment is Free yesterday for a renewed child poverty strategy. A greater effort to increase childcare, boost parents’ employment, and look again at family leave will be essential parts of Labour’s approach to families.

But the suggestion that we can do this instead of, rather than as well as, supporting family incomes risks learning the wrong lessons from the last decade of policy. For a start, Labour’s approach in Government was never just about spending on tax credits and benefits. We established the first ever childcare strategy, set a target to have 70% of lone parents in employment by 2010, introduced paid paternity leave and flexible working, and as Nick sets out, invested heavily in children’s centres and neighbourhood programmes. Of course these measures didn’t go far enough – the cost of childcare remains a huge issue for many parents and too many parents still can’t find the working patterns they need.

But we need to recognize the progress that was made. There was a huge increase in lone parent employment over the last decade – not to 70%, but up 14 percentage points to 57%, a rise faster than that seen under the much talked about American welfare reforms of the 1990s.   Tax Credits played a vital part in this transformation, with researchers estimating that about half the increase in lone parent employment could be attributed to the improved financial support they provided. While it’s right to shift the balance of supporting low paid workers from the state to employers, as Ed Miliband has been advocating with his strong message on the living wage, we still need to recognize the vital role that tax credits were playing in supporting parents to work.

And, importantly, we can’t forget the difference that the improvements to family income that came through increases in child benefit and child tax credit made to families’ lives. The LSE academic Kitty Stewart has said that:

“the extra money low-income families received over this period led to increased spending on fruit and vegetables, children’s clothes and books (while spending on alcohol and cigarettes in these households fell). There are also indications that, for teenagers living with lone parents, employment and income changes resulted in better self-esteem and less unhappiness and risky behavior.”

UNICEF’s child wellbeing report card gained huge attention in 2007 when, using data from around 2000, it placed Britain at the bottom of the league. Their  followup this year looking at changes in the decade since then showed we’d jumped to 16^th place – significant progress towards the good childhood that Nick Pearce is right that we should focus on.

The figures published by the IFS this week estimating that the gains in tackling child poverty will be reversed by 2020 under coalition policy show that we’re in danger of throwing away these achievements. Our response to this can’t be simply to say we can no longer afford to support children. We need to learn the lessons not only of the last decade, but of the 1980s, when we saw huge rises in child poverty, fueled not just by increases in parental worklessness but by benefit freezes which saw the living standards of the poorest fall away from the rest.

We’ve been paying the social and economic costs of that waste of children’s potential ever since. Today, as parents struggling to make ends meet are forced to rely on foodbanks, or go into debt to pay the bills, Labour’s approach to tackling child poverty must ensure that we don’t let the 1980s happen all over again.

Kate Green is MP for Stretford and Urmston and Shadow Minister for Equalities