The coalition’s commitment to children’s rights has proved an empty promise
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Version 0 of 1. In 2010, as the coalition pulled on the hairshirt of austerity, it promised to give “due consideration” to children’s human rights when making policy. These entail the right to an adequate standard of living, including food and housing, and the right to benefit from social security. Given the unhappy consequences of the massive cuts we have seen since, these may seem hollow words. By reaffirming its commitment to the UN convention on the rights of the child (UNCRC), the coalition was effectively agreeing that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration in all its policy decisions. It is hard not to conclude that over the past five years some ministers not only paid lip service to this aim but demonstrated open contempt for it. The UNCRC was not universally scorned by the coalition: a recent parliamentary joint committee report noted that a few government departments – such the Department for Education – took their duty of compliance with children’s rights obligations seriously when presenting policies such as the children and families bill. But elsewhere, the committee noted, the UNCRC was overlooked. The main offenders were the Home Office, and the departments of justice, and work and pensions (DWP). The latter, for example, introduced a bill in 2013 to restrict the uprating of benefits, cutting £3bn from the incomes of the poorest families. It did not bother to show that it had considered whether the bill was compatible with the UK’s obligations on human rights or the rights of children. In the drive to make financial savings in the welfare budget – a key plank of austerity – the committee suggests the disproportionate impact of cuts on poor children was too often simply ignored as inconvenient. It was not that departments such as the DWP were unaware of their UNCRC obligations it was simply that they lacked the political will to meet them: departmental practice, the committee heard, varied depending on whether its political leadership believed complying with children’s rights was a “worthwhile exercise”. It was no surprise then, that the supreme court found last month that the DWP’s draconian benefits cap, a maximum £500 limit on the benefits a jobless household can claim – which almost exclusively affects poor families with multiple children – was in breach of the UNCRC. The court said the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, had failed to “show how the cap was compatible with his obligation to treat the best interests of children as a primary consideration”. The cap was judged not to breach UK law (into which the UNCRC is not formally incorporated). But as the deputy president of the court, Lady Hale, pointed out in the ruling [pdf]: “It cannot possibly be in the best interests of the children affected by the cap to deprive them of the means to provide them with adequate food, clothing, warmth and housing, the basic necessities of life.” The court urged the government to review the cap accordingly. Some may legitimately (if unpersuasively) argue that the government could rightfully suspend its UNCRC obligations because austerity measures, from the benefits cap to Sure Start cuts, were a temporary necessity to tackle an economic crisis. But as the cap was never intended to make serious financial savings, and the economy is apparently booming, that argument becomes even flimsier. Nor is the cap a temporary measure. It clearly breaches children’s rights, and yet the two main parties seem intent, to varying degrees, on extending its punitive reach. The Tories will lower the cap to £23,000 if they win the election, and even a Labour government may introduce regional caps. A review, at this stage, seems unlikely. It is not just the benefits cap. The Tories would slash a further £12bn from the welfare budget, by means of a series of cuts that, the human rights law professor Aoife Nolan points out, seem “very likely to be regarded as [an] impermissible backward step” in terms of human rights obligations. All political parties should commit to enshrining the UNCRC in UK law, but this is not simply about enforcing bureaucratic compliance. It is about demonstrating the sixth wealthiest country in the world remains a fair and civilised one. |