What’s happened to poverty?

Victoria Winckler urges the new Welsh Government to ensure reducing poverty has a central role in its programme.

Whatever happened to poverty?

In the last Welsh Government there were ministerial posts dedicated to “tackling poverty”. The First Minister talked about how it was his “number one priority” that would be tackled “relentlessly”. In the new Welsh Government, the poverty portfolio seems to have vanished. The Labour Manifesto included the poverty word just once. And while it talked about “spreading prosperity” and “wealth for all” it was pretty light on detail.

But poverty hasn’t gone away. One in four adults of working age and one in three children in Wales have household incomes below the poverty threshold. And all the forecasts indicate that poverty will increase in the next five years – both in the numbers affected and in its severity.

Poverty blights lives and costs the Welsh public purse millions. The Welsh Government cannot afford – morally, socially, economically or financially – to file “tackling poverty” into the folder labelled ‘past mistakes’.

So what should it so?

1. Reducing poverty must explicitly be the responsibility of a Cabinet Secretary or Minister in the new Welsh Government. It doesn’t need a dedicated post, but it should firmly rest in a portfolio, not least because this enables much more effective scrutiny. And of those announced, it should be Ken Skates who picks up lead responsibility because of the importance of work to cutting income poverty. The one place it shouldn’t be is in the Communities portfolio, as we need to get away from the place-based approach.
2. Tackling poverty should be an explicit objective of all other portfolios – especially education and health. The effects of low incomes and deprivation on learning and health are as great as those of austerity. There will be no major improvement in Wales to either unless poverty is reduced.
3. The Welsh Government needs to listen and learn. The work of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others is providing strong, evidence-based pointers to “what works” to reduce poverty. On some issues the Welsh Government is on the right track, with the challenge being to tweak and scale up what it does. On others, it needs to refresh it’s thinking and approach, ditching what isn’t effective and looking at what has been successful elsewhere.

It’s probably wise that the new Welsh Government doesn’t make its number one priority “tackling” something which it has limited control over. But dropping it like a hot potato is unwise – poverty is all around us and is a risk almost all of us face. We need the Welsh Government to take action on reducing poverty from the outset, and ensure it has a central role in its legislative programme.

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation. Prior to the election, the Bevan Foundation published its National Programme to Spread Prosperity and Improve Life Chances, which can be found here.