The Dispossessed: Destitution in the heart of our city

12 April 2012

This week the Standard embarks on a unique piece of reporting on London: The Dispossessed, a survey of the capital's hidden poverty. It will shock readers — and it should do.

For in the midst of one of the world's richest cities persists grinding poverty. The disparity between great wealth and destitution can be summarised in our front-page picture of the grand new HSBC tower — and a woman nearby who is poor. The stories we tell are human and they are real, from the babies buried four together in paupers' graves in Islington to the single mother too poor to buy a cot on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark.

That woman had no idea who David Cameron is, nor that a general election is weeks away. That should shame politicians across the political spectrum. For while poverty has persisted during Labour's 13 years in power, it has largely fallen off the radar. Tackling it is something to which they all pay lip service — but to which they have no real answers. Yet as Lord Heseltine, a Tory politician shocked by the squalor of the 1980s inner cities, said, this is a subject on which Tories should take a lead. Poverty eats away at society: it should be on all our consciences.

Nevertheless, the principal failure lies with the Government. When the Standard last completed a similar week of reports in 1995, that was towards the end of a very different political era. The arrival of New Labour in office two years later was supposed to promise solutions, not least in the target Tony Blair set in 1999 of halving child poverty by this year, and to eradicate it by 2020.

Thirteen years on, the Government is far short of lifting 1.7 million children out of poverty, as that target implies. In London, 650,000 children live in poverty — two in five.

Politically, one failure has been structural: on welfare reform especially, ministers have avoided radical reform to tackle the welfare trap that makes it not worth many benefit claimants' while to work. Instead, ministers' anti-poverty strategy has been dominated by tax credits. These have helped families in poverty but they have done little for those who remain outside the tax system.

But the Government has failed on poverty too because it underestimated the difficulty of reaching the poorest people. It has proved very hard to engage them, even with large amounts of money. Schemes such as Sure Start, aimed at children in deprived areas, have reached only a fraction of intended recipients, and with doubtful gains. In school, the progress of the poorest children has been at best patchy.

The Conservatives are starting to take poverty far more seriously, notably by tackling family breakdown. But policy remains sketchy, and they have few proposals for welfare reform. Worse, tackling poverty will cost money, and whoever is in power after the election won't have much of that. Poverty demands long-term solutions to problems in housing, schools, employment — longer than the election-bound horizon of most politicians.

Tackling extreme deprivation in London will be no easy task. But in a rich city, we can do better. There will be a big role for the voluntary sector: organisations such as Camila Batmanghelidjh's Kids Company have arguably done more to help London's deprived children than many state agencies. Philanthropy is likely to become more important as a result: there is a real role for the City here.

As much as anything, though, it is we Londoners who need to open our eyes to poverty that is never more than a few streets away. Until we do, London will continue to be shamed by the plight of its poorest citizens.

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