Last week my local paper, The Gazette, posted an article about the council's aims to tackle child poverty, which you can see here. In this article there were six aims set by the council to tackle the increasing problem of child poverty.
Their six aims are:
1. To remove barriers to children achieving their full potential through education and employment.
2. To provide appropriate support for vulnerable children.
3. To ensure children have a healthy start to life.
4. To build stable communities.
5. To improve the financial stability of families.
6. To embed tacking child poverty in all other areas of council work.
These aims are great and I completely agree with all of them, obviously. Blackpool's Labour council should be proud of these priorities, however, they should not fall short where the past Labour government did by focusing their efforts on the taxation and benefits system. The MPs for Blackpool, Gordon Marsden (Labour) and Paul Maynard (Conservative), should push for the creation of better and permanent employment in Blackpool if they are determined to tackle poverty. (Something I have written about before.)
Simon Blackburn, the council's leader, discusses in the article the Coalition's changes to housing benefit, universal credit and council tax benefit, and whilst this is hugely important to many families in Blackpool I can't help but feel that the constant repetition of this message distracts from the underlying problems that causes Blackpool's poverty problem. It's vile that the government insists on kicking people who are already on the breadline, but alongside bashing the government for their abhorrent anti-poor policies we need to be pushing for a better standard of life in the long-term.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has recently been discussing a Minimum Income Standard, which is pretty self-explanatory but I'll explain a bit anyway. Research with various focus groups has been conducted in order to find out the minimum income a person/family/couple needs to earn in order to have a socially acceptable living standard. What I like about this study is the use of social acceptance as a measure. Whilst I see this as perfectly acceptable, I think it would annoy a lot of the "poverty doesn't exist in this country" crowd, because if you can just about afford to feed your family and get to and from work then how are you classed as living in poverty? I think that group of people need to understand the difference between being alive and living. If all you can afford are the very basics then that's not really a life. No one should be working full-time and still living in poverty, not in 2012. A day's wage should be enough to live off.
Tackling the problem that is low pay is essential to tackling poverty. Blackpool is one of the poorest towns in the country with an average income of £17,400. That's two grand behind the North West average and about nine grand off the national income average. Wages are falling and if things aren't to get any worse in towns like Blackpool then tackling low pay needs to happen soon.
Finally, in order to tackle child poverty you have to have an anti-poverty policy that covers everyone. If you focus on anti-poverty rather than child poverty you can see the issues that lead to poverty in the first place, and these deeply-rooted issues are not ones that can be eliminated by benefits and tax cuts, they'll be eliminated by good and secure jobs and the provision of good services by a government that doesn't despise the less well-off.
For more information that's probably a bit more coherent and proper...
THE LOW-PAY, NO-PAY CYCLE: UNDERSTANDING RECURRENT POVERTY
SKILLS, EMPLOYMENT, INCOME INEQUALITY AND POVERTY
Working for nothing – the truth about low pay in the UK
Low Pay - The Numbers
Resolution Foundation - Low Pay Britain
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