What child poverty campaigners in the UK could learn from New Zealand

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/08/child-poverty-campaigners-uk-learn-new-zealand

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Consider this scenario: a centre-right party, handed an unexpectedly large majority, sweeps into government – and promptly promises to make child poverty a key focus of its next term in power, before delivering the first rise in benefit rates in over 40 years. For British readers, this may sound like a distant fantasy. But it is exactly what has happened in New Zealand.

There, the National party – the country’s Tory counterpart – won its third term of government last year. Yet John Key used his first working day after being re-elected prime minister to announce that he had asked officials for “fresh ideas” on tackling child poverty.

Then, in a budget delivered in May, finance minister Bill English announced that benefits for families with children would rise by NZ$25 (£11) a week, or around 8%. Although experts such as professor Jonathan Boston, a co-author of Child Poverty in New Zealand, point out, this would have a “marginal” effect on poverty rates, since many beneficiary families are more than NZ$100 (£44) below internationally accepted poverty lines, the contrast with the UK could not be starker. Yet the political conditions in the two countries are broadly the same.

In New Zealand, 18% of children – some 200,000 – live in households unable to meet basic needs, such as keeping their house warm, replacing worn-out clothes or paying their electricity bill; in Britain, the figure is 16%. In both countries, benefits are low by international standards, and the public’s attitude towards their recipients is increasingly negative. Income inequality is strikingly similar, too: in both countries the top fifth get around 40% of all income, while the bottom fifth get just 8%. 

When it comes to solutions, both governments are focused on forcing people off benefits, with no real monitoring of what happens to them afterwards. They are also both cutting, or looking to cut, in-work benefits, sometimes by stealth: the New Zealand government has in the last three years cut more than NZ$1bn from those payments – by lowering the income level at which families start to lose them, increasing the rate at which they abate, and not properly indexing them for inflation – almost without anyone noticing. (One suspects George Osborne has been taking notes.)

New Zealand does, however, provide a slightly more fertile climate for anti-poverty campaigners: in a country of 4.5 million people, poverty is more visible than it is in Britain, and some lingering egalitarian sentiment – Key once claimed all New Zealanders have “a socialist streak” – does give campaigners something to work with.

Related: Government to scrap child poverty target before tax credits cut

But the campaigners themselves can take much of the credit. Focusing on child poverty as having both the most serious consequences and the greatest emotional pull, they have launched what amounts to a full-spectrum attack. New Zealand’s Child Poverty Action Group (Cpag) has publicly confronted governments of all stripes, taking them to court over the decision not to pay certain tax credits to beneficiary households. While the courts ultimately ruled that this decision was legal, they also found it was discriminatory. The court case kept the issue in the media for long spells and prompted many political parties to promise to end the discrimination. Meanwhile, Cpag also delivered a stream of carefully researched reports on the consequences of and solutions to child poverty.

Meanwhile the Every Child Counts coalition of charities, spearheaded by Deborah Morris-Travers, previously an MP for the centrist New Zealand First party, has lobbied ministers and made much of the economic cost of not tackling child poverty.

“The government knows that it spends NZ$6bn-8bn [a year] on poverty-related problems such as health needs, remedial education, justice and other social issues, yet it is reluctant to spend a fraction of that amount to fix the problem at source,” said Morris-Travers ahead of May’s budget.

The Children’s Commissioner, a statutory body, also weighed in with a major report on solutions. In the media, investigative reporter, Brian Bruce’s 2011 documentary Inside Child Poverty shocked many with its depictions of cold, damp houses causing outbreaks of respiratory diseases. Also influential was the crusading journalism of primetime current affairs host John Campbell, who made the plight of hungry schoolchildren – New Zealand has no official free school meals programme – into a major issue. And Boston’s book, which set out both a centre-left and a centre-right agenda for tackling child poverty, has helped get the message into unexpected quarters. Conservative commentator John Roughan, who authored a favourable biography of Key, used a column earlier this year to urge ministers to read Child Poverty in New Zealand, and backed its suggestion that benefits should increase in line with wages, not inflation – a move that would mark a major departure from current policy.

All told, this focus on child poverty has helped make it one of the top issues in opinion polls. Boston says those poll results, combined with evidence about the damage caused by child poverty and “genuine concern” on the part of senior ministers, have spurred what he describes as the “modest policy changes” announced to date. Those measures will, he adds, “almost certainly help ‘defuse’ child poverty issues, at least for a year or two”.

I hope to keep the issue in the public eye for longer by learning how academics, thinktank researchers, campaigners and others are going about the same task in the UK where I am visiting on a Churchill Fellowship.

As the editor of Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, and a research associate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University, what has struck me is research done by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Resolution Foundation and others – showing that work is no longer a surefire route out of poverty. The findings seem to be getting through to the British public. In the UK, two-thirds of all poor children have a parent in some kind of work. (In New Zealand, that figure is 50%.) Suzanne Hall, research director at pollsters Ipsos Mori says that before the global financial crisis, the public tended to think of poor people as “those with substance abuse problems, or the homeless”. Now, she says, focus groups cite more everyday examples: people in unstable employment, working zero-hour contracts or on low pay. “In short, employment is no longer seen as a guarantee that you’ll be protected from poverty,” she says.

Riding on the back of those concerns, Britain’s Living Wage campaign has clearly been a success, not just in signing up so many employers – more than 1,500 to date – but also in achieving at least a modicum of cross-party support, with many government departments already on board and figures such as London mayor Boris Johnson among its most prominent advocates. New Zealand’s nascent Living Wage movement has already had some high-profile successes, but remains staunchly opposed by centre-right parties and business organisations.

Many of the people I have met on this trip believe that concerns about working poverty should be the focus of campaigning, given the widespread belief that no one in work should be poor. The danger, of course, is that this might do nothing to help families reliant on benefits, who are already the most stigmatised and the poorest.

As John Hills, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics argues in  Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us, most of us will be welfare recipients at different stages of our lives. 

As the growth of precarious work increasingly blurs the lines between work and welfare support, the opportunity may open up for a new settlement – based around easing the transitions between the two stages, and support for lifetime learning – that could help all those in poverty. The TUC’s Saving Our Safety Net campaign is just one example of an attempt to build alliances between workers and benefit recipients by pointing out their joint reliance on the safety net being there in times of trouble.

Related: On the edge: the working families who struggle to make ends meet | Dawn Foster

In all this, one of the main concerns that I and others have is how to make more visible the stories of people living in poverty, without portraying them as helpless victims of their situation. But there are some encouraging examples of people navigating that difficult issue well. Liverpool city council recently released a powerful report that simply sets out the stories – and household budgets – of poor working families. The Church Action on Poverty group has released a series of Real Benefits Street videos designed as a counterpoint to the controversial Channel 4 series, hijacking the programme’s hashtag on Twitter and training people in poverty to be articulate defenders of their own position. 

Britain is also fortunate to have a Child Poverty Act. Its clear and binding targets for reducing poverty, enshrined in law, create a focus for action and raises the issue’s profile. Even if the Conservatives plan to change the way child poverty is measured, having it in law raises the political stakes for doing so.

So there’s much that New Zealand can learn from Britain. In contrast, the lesson from New Zealand is that you need to get a lot of things right over a long period of time: with robust information about levels of poverty, but also powerful individual stories about its consequences. Television is crucial, because of its visual power, and because it can help explain the causes of poverty, as it has in New Zealand, rather than obscuring them, as Benefits Street arguably does.

A good division of labour helps, too: you need groups who are willing to take a hard line on the issue, but also people who will work across divides and set out strategies that can be taken up on either side of politics. Articulating viable solutions is important to counteract a belief many people have that there is nothing that can be done about poverty, which often keeps them from engaging with the issue. Finding unusual public figures to advocate for the issue also helps, as research shows that few things are more likely to change opinions than a message from an unexpected source.

New Zealand’s successes should not be overstated. We are a long way from making a real assault on poverty, but it shows that the debate can be shifted. And what I’ve seen in the UK suggests that other parts of the puzzle are falling into place. So, from the experiences of the two countries, I am confident that a coherent pushback against widespread poverty is starting to take shape.