Councillor Sirajul Islam sets out why ending child poverty must once again be Labour’s defining mission and why housing, fairness and political will matter now more than ever in Tower Hamlets.
It is now a quarter of a century since Tony Blair came to Toynbee Hall in Tower Hamlets to announce the Labour Government’s bold plan to end child poverty within a generation. Blair’s pledge came as a surprise to many, as most people who had lived through the Thatcher years thought it wasn’t possible. But in the decade that followed he and Gordon Brown delivered reforms, investment and sustained economic growth that nearly halved the number of children growing up in families on incomes below the poverty line.
I saw that happen in real-time for family, friends and neighbours in Bethnal Green. As immigrants to the UK, my own parents had suffered the financial struggles that afflicted many East End families in the 1970s and 1980s. My Mum and Dad worked hard, but in the days before the Minimum Wage, their labour was not properly paid for. The need for a bit of extra money was the reason I got a job myself at the age of 15 in the rag trade in Whitechapel. That is a common story for my generation. But with Gordon Brown’s groundbreaking Child Tax Credits, things were undeniably easier as we had children of our own.
In 2010, the incoming Tory / Lib Dem Coalition Government effectively scrapped that ambition and began a series of cuts to Social Security that has seen all that progress unwind. In fact, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith even began to question the very notion that poverty exists. As a consequence of their actions and those of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, child poverty is now at an even higher level than it was back in 1997. Nowhere has suffered more from this lost 15 years of cuts and austerity than Tower Hamlets, where half our children now live in poverty.
Experience shows that many children do well and succeed in life despite growing up in poverty, especially those living here in the East End. For generations, our young people have been overcoming the obstacles and making a success of themselves in business, the professions, the arts, sport and public life. However, the evidence also shows how much poverty can also hold children back so they aren’t able to seize life’s chances. In London, homelessness, overcrowding and poor quality housing play as big a part as family income in preventing children fulfilling their potential because they impact negatively on their health and educational attainment.
The Government’s new child poverty strategy is therefore a powerful restatement of Labour’s historic mission to ensure that every child has the best possible start in life. Against a backdrop of slow economic growth and the need to restore investment in our schools, the NHS and other public services, this is an enormous challenge. But Chancellor Rachel Reeves has made a decisive first step by scrapping the Tory Two Child Limit. This alone will lift the incomes of the families of 15,000 children in Tower Hamlets by up to £300 a month. Across the UK, half a million kids will be lifted out of poverty.
One thing that wasn’t sufficiently focussed on back in 1999 was the impact of homeless, overcrowding and bad housing on child poverty. There was an “after housing costs” indicator in the official statistics, but it wasn’t until 2004 that the Labour Government banned the use of unsuitable Bed and Breakfast accommodation for homeless families and began to significantly increase investment in new social homes. Under Mayor Lutfur Rahman the unlawful use of B&B spiralled out of control after 2010. I stopped that within a year of becoming Lead Member for Housing in 2015. But he has let it get out of control again over the past three years, so it is good to see the strategy insisting this law is upheld by councils to protect homeless families.
I know many people here in Tower Hamlets will want to Government to move more quickly. I share that aspiration, and I hope Ministers are also working on plans to scrap the pernicious Benefit Cap and unfreeze Local Housing Allowance as well. But I recognise that will cost money – scrapping the Two Child Limit alone costs £2.5 billion a year. It took Blair and Brown a decade to halve child poverty back in the 2000s and that was against a much rosier economic backdrop. Bridget Phillipson’s child poverty strategy now charts a course to make the same progress in tougher times and to embed that change so it can’t be reversed again by Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage.
While most of the changes needed are at a national level, local councils can play their part in ending child poverty too. The most obvious is in keeping taxes and fees and charges as low as possible and in building more genuinely affordable council-owned homes that mean families are not spending so much on rents to private landlords and housing associations. However, with the City of London and Canary Wharf on our doorstep, I believe we can break the generational cycle of child poverty. And if I am elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets next May, I will commit this authority to utilise every asset it holds to put weight behind a bold and ambitious local child poverty strategy even more quickly than elsewhere.
