Social Mobility Commission says Wales must up its game

Poverty A group of children laughing
ViewsDecember 18th, 2015

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s report damns the Welsh Government’s approach to child poverty with faint praise.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s latest report is out today. A GB wide body, it includes a chapter which assesses progress by the Welsh Government on child poverty in Wales. And its conclusions should be dynamite.

As well as the usual run through the many challenges Wales faces, in terms of the numbers in poverty, educational attainment, employment of parents and welfare reform, the Commission also appraises what the Welsh Government is doing to reduce poverty.

The Commission’s conclusions can best be summed up as ‘well-meaning but all over the place’.

They point out that resources are too thinly spread, that a focus on place-based policies excludes too many children, and that there are significant policy gaps, for example in respect of the Living Wage, housing and child health to name but a few.  This is precisely what the Bevan Foundation has been saying for some time.

The key recommendations are:

1: Take a more rigorous, evidence-based approach to poverty reduction.

The Commission says that there should be clarity about what it is trying to achieve and how it is to be achieved.  The Welsh Government should avoid duplication of effort, especially with non-governmental bodies, and should target its activities more effectively.

2: Improve the quality of the workforce in schools.

The Commission argues that teaching needs to be made more attractive to good quality teachers and that urgent action is needed to address poorly performing schools – the light touch adopted by Welsh Government is simply not effective.

3: Involve business in its drive to reduce child poverty and increase social mobility.

The Commission says that Welsh Government needs to engage with companies to improve employment including creating a business compact. Closer working with young people and adoption of the Living Wage are also key.

There is now a chorus of external voices – from the Assembly’s Communities, Equality and Local Government Committee to the Social Mobility Commission as well as the many third sector bodies – telling the Welsh Government that its approach to ‘tackling poverty’ is deeply flawed.

Nice words and good intentions are not enough.

The 700,000 people in Wales struggling to make ends meet need an effective, focused, robust strategy that actually DOES something rather than exist in a whirl of paper. It’s time that the ‘tackling poverty’ action plan was binned and something better put in its place in May 2016.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation.

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