Coalition's work and pensions secretary says his party seemed 'uncomfortable' discussing the issue and ceded ground to the left
The Conservatives made the mistake of ignoring the issue of child poverty, ceding the ground to the left with the result that the discussion became fixated by income levels alone, the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has said.
Giving the Sir Keith Joseph lecture, he said: "The Conservatives ignored the issue for far too long. We seem to have felt uncomfortable discussing poverty, certainly in the context of society at home."
He claimed: "The result of leaving the field undisputed is that the last 13 years has seen a narrow interpretation of what poverty is and how to solve it."
The left did not look at the underlying causes of poverty, with the result that it hailed false early victories involving lifting people above a relative poverty line simply through money transfers, he said.
He claimed these early successes came back to haunt Labour from 2004 onwards as progress on relative poverty stalled. As a result, the Institute for Fiscal Studies now estimates the target of abolishing child poverty by 2020 would require an extra �19bn of wealth transfers.
Duncan Smith argued that sometimes extra money may make things worse by failing to tackle the cause of the problem, such as damaging drug addiction.
The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, had been due to publish the coalition's alternative approach through a social mobility strategy this week, focusing on deep-rooted sources of worklessness, lack of aspirations and barriers to advancement. The paper has been deferred.
Duncan Smith's analysis in the lecture closely resembles the work of Clegg in saying the aim should be to tackle the reasons for worklessness rather than maintaining people on ever higher welfare payments.
He said too often welfare in the UK "instead of helping to support positive choices had become a mechanism to incentivise destructive attitudes and condition dysfunctional behaviour".
He said his welfare system would harness the best of human nature, using charities and social enterprises, to lift aspiration.
He claimed he was also heeding the warning of the welfare state's chief architect William Beveridge ? "the importance of not letting welfare payments become so freely available that they stifle incentive".
But Duncan Smith faces a hard battle to push his welfare reforms through parliament, with Labour planning to do all it can to use the Lords to force major changes.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/16/child-poverty-error-iain-duncan-smith
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