Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy
Poverty is still a real issue within Britain today and this essential series provides evidence-based insights into how communities and families are dealing with it.
Published in conjunction with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics, this series draws together fresh research and sheds important light on the impact of anti-poverty policy, focusing on the individual and social factors that promote regeneration, recovery and renewal.
CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy
When New Labour came to power in 1997, its leaders asked for it to be judged after ten years on its success in making Britain ‘a more equal society’. This book asks whether Britain did indeed move in that direction by the time New Labour had achieved a third term in office. The earlier volume A more equal society? was described by Polly Toynbee as ‘the LSE’s mighty judgement on inequality’. This second volume by the same team of authors provides an independent assessment of the success or otherwise of New Labour’s policies over a longer period. It provides: a consideration by a range of expert authors of a broad set of indicators and policy areas affecting poverty, inequality, and social exclusion; analysis of developments up to the third term on areas including income inequality, education, employment, health inequalities, neighbourhoods, minority ethnic groups, children, and older people; an assessment of outcomes a decade on, asking whether policies stood up to the challenges, and whether successful strategies have been sustained or have run out of steam; and chapters on migration, social attitudes, the devolved administrations, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and future pressures.
This chapter examines the success of education policy – Labour’s top priority in every manifesto – in reducing inequalities in educational attainment in compulsory and post-compulsory education. It looks at what happened to educational inequality during this period of investment, growth, and reform. The chapter adopts a conventional approach used in education research, looking at the differences in attainment between different social groups rather than simply at the overall distribution of attainment, thus reflecting historic welfarist aspirations for universal state education as an equalising force in society. It focuses primarily on social-class inequalities in England.
This chapter discusses equalities and human rights reform since 1997, arguing that recent legislation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission may herald a new era in the battle against persistent horizontal inequalities across gender, ethnic background, disability, and sexuality. It evaluates the reform programme against two benchmarks: Labour’s 1997-election-manifesto commitments to ‘end unfair discrimination wherever it exists’ and to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic law; and more far-reaching reform models that view equality and human-rights standards as elements of a broader social-justice agenda.
This chapter examines New Labour’s strategies to reduce ethnic inequalities. It evaluates the impact of general policies and specifically targeted initiatives on longstanding inequalities between ethnic groups in education, employment and income, and policing. At the forefront was the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act, which places a statutory duty on all public authorities to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between different racial groups. Aside from New Labour’s legislative framework to produce racial equality, the prevention of social exclusion has been pivotal, with a focus on reducing multiple disadvantage for all groups.
This chapter is less optimistic about the future for income inequality. It discusses four key factors that may make progress towards greater income equality increasingly challenging: the intergenerational transmission of advantage; wealth and inheritance; demographic change; and environmental sustainability. The chapter specifically includes pressures on public finances and the need to reduce carbon emissions in the face of climate change.
This chapter examines health inequalities, an area subject to considerable prominence, a number of targets, and several government inquiries, but where policy action has been less clear. The long-term effects of the policies enacted by successive New Labour governments over the last 10 years remain uncertain, but the short- to medium-term impact of those policies has been disappointing. The government has been ambiguous and has lacked clarity of vision and transparency on at least two fronts: in assessing the implications of its choice of geographic inequalities as the top priority for government action; and in its persistent claims that overall health and lifestyle improvements would necessarily be accompanied by reductions in health inequalities.
This chapter explores the consequences of devolution for inequality. It discusses whether and why devolution might have been expected to have had an impact on inequality within and between the four UK nations, and then looks at the evidence, focusing on income and educational inequalities. The first section briefly reviews the degree of devolution that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have each enjoyed since 1997. The second section describes the policies pursued in practice in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland since devolution and explores the extent to which they represent a divergence from the past and/or a divergence from policy as it has evolved in England and the UK. The third section reports changes over the period 1998–99 to the present. The final section offers an assessment of whether devolution has so far produced more effective strategies for reducing inequality and poverty than would have occurred in its absence.
Soon after it was elected in 1997, Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government became embroiled in a row about the implementation of cuts in benefits for lone parents that had been set in train by the outgoing administration. In the late spring of 2008, another huge row broke out over the treatment of those with low incomes. Huge damage had been done to the government’s and particularly the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown’s, reputation for being on the side of the poor. These two events bracket the period covered in the book – one of sustained economic growth and low unemployment, which at the time of writing appears to have come to an end. This book brings together evidence on each of these domains with the aim of providing a balanced assessment of more than a decade of New Labour government.
This chapter discusses challenges for poverty and inequality arising from higher levels of immigration. It examines both how migrant communities are faring in terms of labour-market experiences and educational outcomes, and possible effects of immigration on the employment prospects and wages of non-migrants. The chapter also looks at who has migrated to the UK in the period 1997–2007 and analyses the changing socioeconomic profiles of migrant communities. It then examines the impact of migration on broader progress towards greater equality in the UK.
This chapter considers the impact of New Labour policies on inequalities in the labour market, focusing in particular on the experiences of previously disadvantaged groups: younger and older workers, the long-term unemployed, lone parents, disabled persons, and women. While New Labour did not set out to reduce inequality in the labour market as a main policy objective, it has tackled inequality in employment rates as the result of a number of major policy objectives and through setting a range of targets. The three main targets are: to achieve ‘full employment’ through the Employment Opportunity for All agenda; to eradicate child poverty by 2020; and to reach a 70% employment rate among lone parents by 2010. While policies designed to meet these targets have had an impact on the unequal distribution of work across individuals and households, they have not addressed labour-market inequality in terms of earnings inequality.