No more sticking plasters when it comes to ending poverty 

The government is going to create a new department to ensure that when it spends money it gets good value. A defence of the public purse is essential if you want to rid society of poverty. But in a sense the persistence of poverty is a clear indicator that government spend from the public purse is not being directed wisely. Or is being spent simply on ‘sticking plaster’.  

Sticking-plaster politics and its social spend is rotting government and stripping it of its ability to be useful. If all the money you spend on social need simply skims the surface, never changing the underlying circumstances, then it is wasteful. So much of the social fabric of the UK today demonstrates that we are allowing poverty to run our lives.  

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Our schools and police, our hospitals and surgeries are dominated by the misapplied investments of the past that never addressed the issue of why we continue to produce generation after generation of people in need. We maintain people in poverty, creating a culture of poverty. Crime and violence are the products, the fruits of poverty; if we want to get rid of the tragedy of street deaths through violence we must dismantle poverty. And not keep putting sticking plasters over it. 

If the government is going to create a new department to look carefully at value for money, then it should address how we spend money on those whose only inheritance is poverty. Who inherit poverty from their parents and will if, things are left as they are, pass poverty on to their own children.  

But the only loud sounds being made by those who express concern, the self-appointed defenders of the poor, seem to be their requests for more for the poor – and not the ending of the tyranny of poverty. Giving the poor more only means that you postpone the day that you declare war on the root causes of poverty. And that is why we have to underline the ineptness of most government spend around poverty: because it deals with the effects of poverty and never the cause.  

So a defence of the public purse, the government’s supposed plan, if held to would need to ask for instance how we can continue to lock people up for crime and then possibly, £100,000 later, put them back where they come from, unprepared and still with poverty in their lives. Unprepared because when they were locked up they were not given the support to change and be transformed into a useful member of society. A defence of the public purse should be a defence of common sense. It should ask how we can stop producing crime by the time the next generation comes along.   

I realise that I am a voice in the wilderness right now because we have a new government. And new governments renew all the sticking-plaster thinking they inherited, not just from the last government but from all previous governments. That, supposedly, is their job, because government is often simply sticking-plaster social philosophy. It is ‘holding the hands of the poor’ thinking. And that alas is not just government thinking, but the thinking of most members of the public.  

That is why this voice in the wilderness is asking the question of government: when are you going to coordinate attempts at ending poverty into one government department? And because government spend on poverty doesn’t get people out of it, when are you going to invest in prevention. Preventing poverty in the lives of people will cut the NHS costs in half, as half the people using the health service are people suffering from poverty. It means prisons will empty because people won’t fall into poverty-related crime. End poverty and you end the terrible waste of human life that causes obesity and all of the health problems that come with a poor, inherited diet.  

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So as the government gets its ducks in line it is haunted by the practices of the past, and the structures of the individual government departments. These structures and inherited thinking ensure – unintentionally – that poverty continues to be inherited by another generation. And the whirligig of poverty continues because the serious work of dismantling it never kicks off.  

Every government when it leaves office claims it has reduced child poverty. It has to because it is, apparently, a good measure of a government’s success. But they leave in place the mechanisms for a continuation of child poverty. Because they have not built the mind-enhancing, the body-enhancing programmes that will turn people who inherit poverty into the socially mobile who move away from it.  

If, as I have been recommending, the government set up a Ministry of Poverty Prevention, if nothing else it would collect together all of the wonderful things that have historically been achieved in getting people out of poverty. Through education and skill-enhancing work, through the power of music, the arts, the sciences, people can be lifted out of poverty.  

I know from my own life that the one thing that got me out of poverty was the desire to paint and draw; it changed me because it skilled me away from poverty by widening my appetite for self-improvement.  

The government has to create the wherewithal not just for some individuals to escape poverty, but for a whole class of people caught in the dungeon of poverty to do the same.  

An enormous ask and an enormous task. But it has to be achieved. There is no alternative. And the public purse will benefit no end.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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