The way out of poverty is not to be found ‘holistically’

I attended a session the other day that was intended to discuss the Scottish Goverment’s current plans for tackling child poverty.  A word that was used repeatedly in that document, and so in the presentations, jarred with me.  The word is ‘holistic’.  The plan promises a ‘holistic’   response at many points, and in a range of different contexts – such as employability, support, income generation.  What could be wrong with that?

To my mind, there are three great flaws in this approach.   The first is the implicit assumption, in much of this, that the appropriate way to respond to poverty is ‘person-centred’, personal or individualised.  Here are some examples:

We will invest [in] Whole Family Wellbeing Funding … This will help transform services that support families to ensure that all families can access preventative,
holistic support which is wrapped around their needs, and provided when they need it and for as long as they need it.

Through direct efforts to get more cash in the
pockets of families now, alongside a genuinely holistic, person-centred package of family support, we can help to ensure families receive the right support at the right time, for as long as they need it, creating the  conditions for families to navigate their way out of poverty.

It takes all of us, across Scotland, working together – united in focus  and purpose – to deliver the change to  how public services are delivered, moving to a person-centred holistic approach to supporting families.

In the published document, there are more than thirty similar phrases to choose from.  It should be recognised, however, that the circumstances that lead people to be in poverty are not, for the most part, specific to the individual or of the family.  The central purpose of the strategy is not to deal with the individual circumstances of poor families, but to reduce overall the numbers of people who are falling into poverty.   To do that, the focus has to be, not just on those who are poor currently, but on the throughput – the very large numbers of people, actually most of the population, who will pass through poverty for an extended period.  That calls for a structural perspective, not an individualised one.

There are strong hints in the figures where the problems are likely to be concentrated.  Why, for example, are most children of young mothers likely to be poor?  The answer has little to do with personal or individual factors.  It’s because the capacity of women to earn is critical to household income,  the children of young mothers  are far more likely to be young, and young children have to be looked after.  The situation calls for higher income for people with responsibility for children, and extensive, affordable  child care – ours is almost the most expensive in the OECD.

The second problem about the claim to be providing ‘holistic’ services is that it’s not true.   It doesn’t happen, anywhere, ever.  The reason why we have medical practices delivering health care, schools providing education and social security providing money is that these are all things that matter, that need to be done, and require specific routes and channels to be delivered.  We often hear the complaint that Scottish services are based in ‘silos’.  Of course they are. The doctor doesn’t teach your children to read, the social security officer doesn’t allocate houses  and the social worker is not there to take your appendix out. It’s true that specific services can be transformative, changing every part of a person’s life. Decent housing can turn someone’s life around in days, but that doesn’t happen because of an holistic assessment; it happens because housing is so important for people’s lives. The most effective strategies for  dealing with poverty have generally worked by focusing on one of the elements that lead people to be deprived – elements such as health care, education, income support or housing – and removing part of the burden from poor people.

The third issue is about policy. Targeting resources on  poor families has a clear value here and now, but it is not the only  way to deal with the problems.  We could do much more. To safeguard people now and in the future, we need to change the conditions which underlie the experience of poverty.  I have already given the  example of  child care; that needs to be done as a universal basic service, not a process targeted on poor families.  Let me take another: the case for free school meals.  That contributes to poverty reduction precisely because it is universal and basic.  Neither  child care support, nor free school meals, are ‘holistic’ policies. The same arguments extend to a wide range of services – energy, communications, transport.  Public services can make a major contribution in improving the command over resources of people on low incomes.

Poverty in Scotland 2021: a report from the JRF

I was listening today to a seminar for Challenge Poverty Week, covering the latest report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Poverty in Scotland . The report identifies six main ‘priority groups’ which put children at a greater risk of poverty.  The groups are

  • families with children under 1
  • larger households
  • single parents
  • people in minority ethnic groups
  • families with a disabled person, and
  • workless families.

There are no great surprises in that.  I think, from memory, that this pretty much reflects the findings of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in the 1970s, with a substitution: pensioners don’t feature, leargely because this is about child poverty, but the position of minority ethnic groups has been recognised.

The next question, however, is what to make of the information. Shona Robison, for the Scottish Government, clearly thought that a focus on these priority groups was the way to break the ‘cycle’ of poverty.  She suggested that the government would be offering ‘bespoke’ responses to families in this position and recommended better paid work as the way out.

There are problems with that.  The place to start, perhaps, is with the statement that these people are at greater risk.  Yes, the risk is higher, but that doesn’t mean either that all these people are poor (the highest proportions are those in minority groups, and people who are disabled) or that people are trapped in poverty.  Low-income poverty is a position that many people pass through.  Very young children are important, because women’s capacity to earn is impaired.  Worklessness is important, but work is no guarantee of coming out of low income.  Precarious work is widespread, and part of the problem.

The other main problem relates to the assumption that people and families can be targeted on an individual basis.  Poverty is a moving target, and most attempts to deal with it by targeting are doomed to failure: people’s incomes fluctuate, their household status changes, they do whatever they can to improve their situation.  What we need is not a set of individualised responses, but a reliable, predictable foundation of the benefits and services that make it possible for people to secure their position.

My new book is out: The poverty of nations

The print copies of my latest book, The Poverty of Nations, have just arrived.  I can’t physically lift the parcel at the moment, because yesterday I fell off a ladder and after a trip to A and E I’m currently shuffling around with an NHS-supplied walking stick.  Getting the books is nevertheless invigorating enough to merit a trip to the keyboard.

The book develops an argument I’ve been building over the last few years about the relational elements of poverty – understanding poverty, not as a lack of resources or income, but as a set of social relationships. The contents list looks like this:

  • Introduction: Representations of poverty
  • Part I ~ Poverty: economic and social relationships
    • Poverty
    • Poverty and the economy
    • Economic development
    • Inequality
    • Exclusion
    • Poverty and rights
    • Poverty and social policy
  • Part II ~ Rich and poor countries
    • Poverty in national perspective
    • Poverty and the state
    • Poverty in rich countries
    • Poor countries
    • Rich and poor countries
    • Responses to poverty
  • Conclusion: Poverty and social science

I’ve previously put out some explanation about my line of thought.  Here’s an earlier summary of the central argument:

Poverty is at root a relational concept, which can only be understood by locating the experience of poor people in the social and economic situation where they are found. This is not just saying that poverty is ‘relative’. Developments in policy and practice are increasingly focused on dynamic, relational and multi-dimensional understandings of poverty; our conceptual frameworks have failed to keep pace.

Much of the consideration of poverty in the course of the last hundred years, relative or absolute, has found it convenient to rely on three fallacies. The first is that poverty is a condition or state of being, which can be considered exclusively from the perspective of the individual who experiences it. The second is that can be understood solely in terms of resources, when resources themselves have to be understood in terms of social and economic relationships. The third is that there is a clear and decisive threshold below which people can be said to be poor, and above which they are not poor.

All of these positions are tenable – they are supported by many of the most eminent writers in the field – but they are not adequate, either as a way of describing the positions that people hold, or as a conceptual tool to analyse the issues. Discussions of exclusion, a concept which is self-evidently relational, come closer to the idea of poverty than much of the academic literature on poverty in itself, offering a way to escape from the limitations of conventional models of poverty.

I know that there are many people in the field in the UK who will disagree with me.  When I put put a short piece on the Social Policy Association website, one response looked like this:

Why is it so difficult for so many people to grasp that the concept of poverty itself is the serious lack of the necessary and adequate resources …? What Paul Spicker and thousands of others describe is the consequential deprivations, as if accumulating descriptions will clarify the conceptual point….. That suggests ideological bias.

I’m encouraged, however, by the reaction of people who work in the global South, whose reviews are on the Policy Press website.  Michael Noble, who I’ve not worked with, wrote this:

For those of us working in developing countries where minimalist monetary measures of poverty dominate, this book provides a welcome enjoinder to place social relationships centre stage in poverty discourses and when considering policy solutions.

Poverty is killing babies in England

An article in the British Medical Journal shows a clear and strong relationship between the increasing number of deaths of children under 1 and the distribution of poverty in England.  The authors write:

The sustained and unprecedented rise in infant mortality in England from 2014 to 2017 was not experienced evenly across the population. In the most deprived local authorities, the previously declining trend in infant mortality reversed and mortality rose, leading to an additional 24 infant deaths per 100 000 live births per year …  There was no significant change from the pre-existing trend in the most affluent local authorities.  …  Overall from 2014 to 2017, there were a total of 572 excess infant deaths …   The findings suggest that about a third of the increases in infant mortality between 2014 and 2017 can be attributed to rising child poverty.

This is a conservative estimate, because the figures are area-based, not individual; the association with poverty might be much stronger.

This is what the UN Special Rapporteur had to say about poverty in Britain:

14 million people live in poverty, and 1.5 million experienced destitution in 2017 …. Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated. … Following drastic changes in government economic policy beginning in 2010, the two preceding decades of progress in tackling child and pensioner poverty have begun to unravel and poverty is again on the rise. Relative child poverty rates are expected to increase by 7 per cent between 2015 and 2021 and overall child poverty rates to reach close to 40 per cent.  For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain would not just be a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster rolled into one.

The increase in poverty is the result of deliberate policy.  That policy is killing people.

The poverty of nations: a relational perspective

I’ve signed a contract to deliver my next book by the end of this month.  The working title is “The poverty of nations: a relational perspective”, and it develops an argument I’ve been building over the last few years about the relational elements of poverty – understanding poverty, not as a lack of resources or income, but as a set of social relationships.  I posted, two years ago, the abstract of a paper on this general theme. Here is that abstract again:

Poverty is at root a relational concept, which can only be understood by locating the experience of poor people in the social and economic situation where they are found. This is not just saying that poverty is ‘relative’. Developments in policy and practice are increasingly focused on dynamic, relational and multi-dimensional understandings of poverty; our conceptual frameworks have failed to keep pace.

Much of the consideration of poverty in the course of the last hundred years, relative or absolute, has found it convenient to rely on three fallacies. The first is that poverty is a condition or state of being, which can be considered exclusively from the perspective of the individual who experiences it. The second is that can be understood solely in terms of resources, when resources themselves have to be understood in terms of social and economic relationships. The third is that there is a clear and decisive threshold below which people can be said to be poor, and above which they are not poor.

All of these positions are tenable – they are supported by many of the most eminent writers in the field – but they are not adequate, either as a way of describing the positions that people hold, or as a conceptual tool to analyse the issues.  Discussions of exclusion, a concept which is self-evidently relational, come closer to the idea of poverty than much of the academic literature on poverty in itself, offering a way to escape from the limitations of conventional models of poverty.

The book will be out next year. It will be my twentieth, depending on how you count them, and the fourth since I left my post in 2015. People may be surprised at the short time between contract and delivery of the final copy.  It’s been my practice for many years to write a book before I submit it.  I started to do that early on, after working through the more conventional route of proposal and writing to order, only to find when I delivered the script at the end of two years the publisher thought that I should have written a different book.  This way, I can guarantee is that we all end up with what we’re expecting to get.

I wouldn’t, however, advise any young academic to follow in my footsteps.  The fact is that academic institutions don’t like books very much, or social policy, and don’t really rate either when it comes to counting the beans.  When I left my employment, I was making a choice; I wanted to do more on poverty, benefits and social theory, and going independent was the best way to do it.  I don’t regret it; in the last three years I’ve done four books, a few research contracts and a semester in Poland, which I loved. If anyone out there wants an academic career, however, you’ll all be better off writing bids for research funding.

The Special Rapporteur condemns the British government’s ideological destruction of the welfare state

The final report on the UK by the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights is damning: “much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos.”

The report is in Microsoft Word format, which may make it inaccessible to some, so here is a PDF version. Here is a taste of what he says:

The Government has made no secret of its determination to change the value system to focus more on individual responsibility, to place major limits on government support and to pursue a single-minded focus on getting people into employment. Many aspects of this programme are legitimate matters for political contestation, but it is the mentality informing many of the reforms that has brought the most misery and wrought the most harm to the fabric of British society. British compassion has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach apparently designed to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping, and elevate the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest economic levels of British society. It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality.

I suspect that those of us who live here have become hardened to it, so that it doesn’t seem quite so bad as it does to an external observer.  Certainly many of the underlying problems have gone on for decades – I remember findings in the 1980s, from the Policy Studies Institute, that half the families on benefit were running out of money most weeks.  The retrenchment of social security in the 1980s and 90s, and the ‘welfare reforms’ after 2000, have all added to the problems.  The sad truth is that we left behind the principles of the welfare state long ago.

The problems of people who beg

Shelter Scotland has published a noteworthy report profiling people begging in Edinburgh.  The report asked questions of 420 people; that’s unlikely to be everyone, but it’s a lot.

Addiction plays a large part, with nearly 90% misusing drugs or alcohol; more than 80% had mental health problems, mainly depression and anxiety, and more than 60% also had physical health problems.  It’s a population that overlaps with street homelessness – 43% said they slept rough – but the two things are not equivalent, and I was struck as much by the differences as by the similarities.  When I worked on the census of homeless people in Aberdeen, it was the support staff who tended to say that the problems were problems of life-style and personal issues; homeless people said that the main problems were that they were cold and they were hungry.  People begging in Edinburgh seem far more likely to say that it’s down to their personal issues.

I did wonder if people might have been steered in some directions by the shape of the questions asked.  One of the messages from the qualitative studies I’ve done with psychiatric patients in the past is that family matters; the people left without support to become homeless are mainly those whose relationships with the family have broken down.  This is hinted at, but overall it’s not a major factor here.  In fairness, though, it’s difficult to set up exploratory, discursive interviews with homeless people (been there, done that); the remarkable thing about the Shelter study is how much information they’ve been able to bring together.

Poverty and social security

I went today to a seminar for early career researchers, most of whom are working on issues related to social security.  That is, of course, a terrible idea; I spent most of my career trying to interest people in social security issues, and look what happened to me.

Adrian Sinfield, who reflected about the changing situation in Scotland, gave one of the presentations,  He was very kind about a book I wrote more than 25 years ago, Poverty and Social Security: concepts and principles.  However, as I’ve explained to Adrian, I’ve had some reason to think again about that book, and I wonder if I didn’t make a strategic error in writing it.   If we want a social security that treats people with respect and dignity, it’s important that people should see it as a part of everyday life, not as provision for the poor, or even a safety net for exceptional  circumstances.  It’s not necessarily a good idea either to focus a discussion of social security on its effects on poverty, or conversely to identify poverty with the receipt of social security benefits.   The discourse has shifted since, and discussions of social security tend to be hijacked by discussions of employment; that is even less appropriate.

Blaming the people who get left out

In Factfulness, Hans Rosling comments about the way that we underestimate the improvements in poor countries, and complain that their peoples are pathologically incapable of improving their situation, despite the evidence that they are doing just that. Here in Poland, I’ve been told several times, as I’ve gone to local agencies, that the reason why people are poor is that they come from poor, inadequate families.

When Keith Joseph set up the research on transmitted deprivation in the UK, the situation was admittedly complex;  the structures of the UK economy were long-established and it may well have seem that social services had been working with similar problems for a very long time.  But the research showed a very different picture.  In the first place, poverty was not continuous – people’s circumstances had probably changed within their own lifetimes.  Most people had a different experience from the previous generation: the determining factors were the economy, education, and – often forgotten -the impact of partnering.  People who were raised as poor might be disadvantaged, but most of them did not stay poor.  After the first generation, most people were already in different circumstances from their parents; there were continuities only for a minority. By the time we got to the third or fourth generation, any apparent continuities had disappeared.  When the researchers looked for families which had been consistently deprived over four generations, they couldn’t find any.

Poland has changed rather more rapidly than the UK.  Two generations ago, in the Communist era, the main experience of poverty was for people in work; then came liberalisation, and the casualties of reform; and now things are changing again.  In Lodz, where I’m working, the economy has been growing, and unemployment has more than halved in the course of the last six years.  Very few people have a life similar to their grandparents’.

Now, it’s not impossible to argue that, in the scramble for improvement, the race is to the swift – that the people who get left behind, in any generation, are the least engaged, the least competent or least worthy.   To accept that, we’d need to accept both that the system does make such a selection, and that it should.  We need to question the assumption that if people are still poor when things are improving, it must be their fault.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation thinks it can solve poverty. It won’t do it this way.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has issued two reports under the headline, “We can solve poverty in the UK.”  They define poverty as being “to have resources that are well below minimum needs.”  Their objectives are to ensure that no-one should be destitute, that no-one should be poor for more than two years, and that there should be fewer than 10% of the population who have less than the standard at any time.  The first of the reports,  UK Poverty: causes, costs and solutions , has a lengthy account of research findings about people on low incomes.  The second report, We can solve poverty in the UK, is a manifesto with a long series of proposals.

The reports are lengthy; probably the best way to convey the focus of the approach is to reproduce the key measures they propose.  They write:

We could solve poverty by:
•  Supporting people to be good parents, helping parents share care and stay in work, minimising the adverse impacts of separation on children, and supporting children and parents’ mental health;
•  Giving access to high-quality, flexible and affordable childcare to parents on low incomes, allowing them to work and improving children’s pre-school development;
•  Ensuring all children from low-income backgrounds can succeed in school;
•  Ensuring all young people leave school with  the support, advice, skills and confidence  to move successfully into education, training  or the labour market and towards  independence; and
•  Raising and protecting family incomes so they an afford essentials, reduce stress and give children the opportunity to participate socially and educationally.

•  Supporting people to gain the skills and capabilities to find a job and progress once in work;
•  Creating more jobs offering at least a  Living Wage, with greater job security and opportunities for progression; and
•  A social security system that incentivises work and increasing hours, and supports people in and out of work to escape poverty.

•  Encouraging more older people to take up the financial support for which they  are eligible;
•  Ensuring more working-age people contribute to savings schemes and pension funds; and
•  Providing benefits for older disabled people that are tailored to meet additional costs of disability and care needs.

•  Ending the poverty premium through responsible business practices, better customer service, regulatory intervention and product innovation;
•  Enabling low-income and at-risk consumers  to get the best deals from providers;
•  Boosting the supply of genuinely affordable housing; and
•  Reducing energy demand through efficiency programmes.

•  Enabling young people leaving care to maximise their potential, with proper support around housing, employment and training;
•  Providing good quality holistic approaches to family support services, which address a  variety of issues, including material poverty and behaviour;
•  Providing homeless people with secure,  long-term homes; and
•  Significantly increasing access to and funding for mental health services.

•  Supporting communities to create and implement locally-led solutions and build pressure for bigger change;
•  National, regional and local leaders setting a clear vision and co-ordinating efforts across  sectors;
•  ‘Anchors’ – the big employers and in a place – using their purchasing power and networks to connect to land neighbourhoods; and big businesses and investors helping to rebalance the economy, driving growth up in ways that drive poverty down.

There are lots of measures here, some to agree with, some not, and a scattering (like leadership or responsible business practice) which seem frankly feeble.  What it isn’t doesn’t add up to is an anti-poverty strategy.  The  specific objectives which are identified are not linked to specific measures that could bring them about;  there is far too much emphasis on issues (such as parenting behaviour and work incentives) which have consistently failed to address the problems of poverty.

At root, the conceptualisation of poverty is weak.  Even if we accept the narrow focus on resources, the reports overemphasise pathological explanations for poverty – individual competence and family dysfunction – and say far too little about either the structure of the economy or social exclusion.  The resources that are identified are much too often concerned with cash and work, rather than assets and services.  There is very little consideration of entitlements and capabilities, basic security or empowerment.   The result is, I regret to say, a missed opportunity.