Social Justice

'One Nation Conservatism'

Helping those least well off

The means tested benefit system set up by Gordon Brown is the Labour government's 'solution' to those who are struggling to survive on low incomes. Although Gordon Brown's approach is undoubtedly well intentioned, it is not only creating as many problems as it solves, but also trapping people - making it almost impossible for them to save, buy a house, or even get out of debt. Yet these are the very things that are most important if we are to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and enable people to be able to climb out of poverty themselves. Under the tax and means tested benefit system he has set up:

* The 20% of the working population on the lowest incomes pay an above average proportion of their income in tax - paying 38% of their income in tax compared to the national average of 35% (made up of a combination of income tax and 'stealth taxes' - such as VAT on their weekly shopping, house insurance premium tax, car insurance premium tax, petrol tax etc...).

* With one hand Labour makes low earners pay a higher than average percentage of their income in tax - and then with the other hand gives it back to them in means tested benefits. This wastes a colossal amount of money in bureaucracy - collecting tax, then giving it back to the same people! Why not simply reduce the amount of tax low earners have to pay!

* The sting in the tail of the tax and benefit system created by Gordon Brown is what happens when low earners try to help themselves...which is precisely what a good government should be encouraging people to do. For every extra £100 someone on a low income earns - the government takes £70 in tax and benefit reductions - that's the equivalent of a 70% tax rate on those least able to afford it. This means that it is almost impossible for low earners to save more than the tiniest amounts, and worse still almost impossible for many of them to get out of - even relatively small amounts of debt. For example, some one on the minimum wage who incurred a £400 debt - perhaps for a reason as simple as there being no dentist on a bus route taking NHS patients - would have to work an extra five hours a week for a whole year - just to pay off the capital on this debt - and then another 2 months to pay off the interest.

* Many people on low incomes do not claim the means tested benefits they are entitled to - and simply struggle on with inadequate resources. They don't claim either through ignorance of their entitlement; because they feel that the detailed personal financial questions on the application form are an invasion of their privacy that robs them of their personal dignity; or in the case of many thousands of people who are by no means unintelligent - they are simply daunted by having to fill in a detailed 20 page form. The system simply isn't working to help all of those whom it should.

The Conservative approach to tackling poverty is much simpler, doesn't trap people in debt, will cost hundreds of millions of pounds less to administer and gives people the essential dignity of allowing them to work hard and help themselves to improve their own circumstances.

* Tax cuts for low earners.

This had been a longstanding Conservative policy. The 2001 Conservative manifesto promised to raise the personal allowance tax threshold by £2,000. This would have meant a cut in income tax of around 50% for those on the lowest incomes - and would have ended the situation where those earning least pay a higher than average percentage of their income in tax. Labour's approach to helping low earners is to make them pay a higher than average percentage of their income in tax, then give it back to them in means tested benefits. The Conservative approach is to reduce significantly the amount of tax low earners pay. The Conservative approach significantly reduces the poverty trap that Labour's tax and benefit system has created - and gives people an incentive to work hard, improve their lives - and ultimately reduce the amount of benefits that they need. Giving people an incentive to work hard to improve their lives gives them dignity. I believe this is an infinitely better approach than a system that removes all incentive for people to help themselves by taking away 70% of all extra income that they earn in tax and benefit reductions.

* Encouraging Savings.

Savings provide an essential buffer that can cushion families against some of the financial impact of tragedies such as unemployment, sickness or an accident. Yet the tax and benefit system makes it almost impossible for those on low incomes to save more than tiny amounts of money, no matter how much overtime they do - because the government takes back 70% of all the extra money they earn - in tax and reduced benefits. The vulnerability of people with little or no savings was clearly seen in the recent fiasco when the government overpaid child tax credit payments to thousands of low income families and then stopped future payments that families relied on - resulting in some families having to receive Salvation Army food parcels because they had no savings to draw on and no other money to live on. The scandal was not simply that government incompetence put low income families in this position - but that the tax and benefit system Gordon Brown had set up had made it almost impossible for many families to save - because for every extra hour's work they did on the minimum wage - they took home less than £1-50 after tax and benefit reductions.

* Affordable Housing.

Helping people buy their own home. The most valuable asset that most of us will ever own is the house we live in. Owning a home gives one a measure of financial security that cannot easily be gained in other ways. It is also one of the most important ways of avoiding poverty and reliance on means tested state handouts in old age. The last Conservative government helped millions of council house tenants who would not otherwise have been able to, to purchase their own home. Now, at a time when rising house prices are already making it difficult for many people to buy their own home, the Labour government has made it harder still by reducing from 35% to 25% the amount of previously paid rent that council tenants can offset against the price of their home. In a keynote speech in 2005 Gordon Brown said he wanted to create 'a home owning democracy' - adopting the phrase famously used by the last Conservative government. Yet the reality is that the tax and benefits Gordon Brown set up - with its 70% claw back in tax and benefit reductions makes it impossible for low earners to save for a deposit, together with the cutbacks in the right to buy for council tenants, have created a 'double whammy' - making it all but impossible for most low income families to ever own their own home.

Affordable housing for people in rural areas and coastal towns. This double whammy has hit people hardest in rural areas and coastal towns where house prices have been pushed up by outsiders buying second homes. In many areas this has pushed local house prices well out of the reach of young voters who have grown up in the area and work there. The Labour government often quite wrongly sees rural areas and coastal towns as relatively prosperous and so gives them significantly less funding than urban areas. However, house prices in coastal towns are rising at significantly above average rates, while homelessness in rural areas is growing three times as fast as in urban areas. In some areas this has reached crisis proportions, with nearly 90% of house purchases in areas such as Cornwall being to people from outside the area. This has led to many small coastal and rural communities slowly dying as they become deserted outside the tourist season, resulting in essential local services such as primary schools and post offices closing. I believe radical solutions are needed based on the Conservative values such as 'localism' and advocate allowing local authorities to impose a local stamp tax on the purchase of residential property that is not lived in as the owner's main residence for at least nine of the first twelve months of ownership (with proceeds going into building affordable local homes). I believe such radical measures are essential if we are to enable young local voters to own their own homes in the area where they grew up and where their family live i.e. achieving the Conservative ideal of a home owning democracy.

Access to Social Housing for local people who wait - not just for 'vulnerable priority groups'. The plight of many of those unable to afford to buy their own home has been made even worse by Labour government policy such as the Homelessness Act 2002. These have in effect forced local authorities to move vulnerable groups such as ex prisoners to the top of housing waiting lists. Consequently, many hard working honest citizens who have waited years for a council house have found themselves never getting anywhere near the top of the waiting list, because they are constantly being pushed down the waiting list by those considered 'priority groups'. Labour's housing policy may have been well intentioned, but its results are both unjust and socially dangerous. It was almost certainly one of the reasons many white working class voters in areas such as Barking and Dagenham voted for a white racist party in the May 2006 council elections, as they saw newcomers pushed to the top of council house waiting lists, while they lost out. Britain urgently needs a twin track approach to social housing. On the one hand we must be able to provide immediate housing to the most vulnerable groups in society such as 16-21 years olds leaving residential care and those fleeing genuine persecution and torture abroad. However, we also need to reserve a significant proportion of social housing for local people who don't fall into any of the government's 'especially vulnerable' categories, but have patiently waited their turn on the local housing list, often for many years.

Family and marriage

The government needs to support the uniqueness of marriage both as a the most fundamental building block of society and as the clearly proven best environment for children to be brought up in.

I firmly believe that society needs to understand and support those who go through the trauma of relationship breakdown and divorce. However, that doesn’t mean that the government shouldn’t promote marriage as an ‘ideal’ for society to aim at, even if it doesn’t work out for many, or others simply choose alternative lifestyles. Research very clearly shows that heterosexual marriage is unquestionably the best environment for children to be bought up in, both for their own emotional security and in terms of the benefits of stability for society as a whole – including lower youth crime rates.

Tragically, the present Labour government have sought to redefine both marriage and the traditional family in the interests of promoting ‘diversity’. When Labour first came to power they produced a consultation paper called Supporting Families – which described the family as the surest foundation for raising children. Tony Blair promised to scrutinise every area of policy for its impact on family life. When it first came to power, Labour emphasised the importance of marriage as the ideal basis for family life. Labour Home Office minister Paul Boateng, stated in 1998: We know that co-habitation is less likely to inculcate stability in a family than marriage. But that is not making a moral judgement. It is just a fact.

However, within 4 years Labour had abandoned these family values and proceeded to radically redefine both the traditional family and even marriage itself. A 2002 report on government thinking on marriage and relationships stated that now Labour believed that the adult couple is the cornerstone of the family, with Lord Irvine, the Labour Lord Chancellor stating that supporting adult couple relationships is a vital and growing part of the government’s agenda for supporting families.

However, at the same time the government withdrew funding for National Marriage Week’- hardly a gesture of support!

In fact, Lord Irvine’s statement suggests that Labour was more interested in promoting a diversity of different types of relationships – than in ‘supporting’ the traditional family. His statement about ‘adult couple relationships’ was in reality a mammoth redefinition of the traditional ‘family’. Although the word ‘couple’ implied that ideally children should be raised by 2 parents, no mention was made of ‘marriage’, or even of parents being of the opposite sex. This major piece of social engineering was completed by recent Labour legislation that gave adoption ‘rights’ to both unmarried and homosexual couples.

However, as Iain Duncan Smith observed in the adoption debate – co-habiting couples are much more likely to split up than married couples – and this is particularly so when they have children. The track record of relationship break up in the UK shows that only 8% of married couples break up before their child is 5 years old – while 52% of co-habiting couples have separated by then.

Labour’s redefinition of the traditional family has now reached the Office of National Statistics (ONS), a government agency reporting directly to Gordon Brown the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which has been heavily criticised in the press for changing the way it presents statistics to aid government public relations. Although the ONS collects a very wide range of highly detailed statistics on social trends, it now groups families into only 3 categories: ’lone mother’. ‘lone father’ and ‘married/cohabiting’. This not only disguises the existing high social cost of families not based on heterosexual marriage – but also makes it harder for future social researchers to highlight the damaging social and economic impact that this government’s redefinition of marriage and the family are having.

As a Conservative I believe in conserving the best of our traditional family values – including promoting marriage as an ideal for society to aim at. Diversity in society is about individuals freely choosing to adopt a variety of different lifestyles. However, government has a duty to promote as an ideal those aspects of life such as marriage that have clearly and unequivocally been demonstrated to be best for the development of a stable, peaceful and healthy society.

Drugs

Drugs are one of the biggest social problems that we face in Britain today. In the UK there are an estimated 4 million users of illegal drugs and 1 million users of class A drugs. Problem users of class A drugs cost society between £10 and £17 billion per year. This is not only a huge cost to the country, but also a colossal waste of human life both in terms of the loss to wider society of people who could be earning a living and contributing to society, rather than being dependent on it and the loss of personal human dignity for the addicts themselves.

The Labour government driven by its philosophy of 'Social Liberalism' has based UK drug policy on a ‘harm reduction’ approach – more concerned with reducing harmful side effects (esp. health and crime problems) rather than prevention. However, even IF (and its a big 'IF') this succeeds in its own terms – this still leaves the person as a drug addict, dependent on the state for the rest of their lives and with all the loss of personal human worth and dignity that addiction and dependency involves.

The failure of this approach is well illustrated by the experience of Lambeth where it was first tried as an 'experiment', with Police announcing that they would not prosecute anyone for possession of cannabis. It failed. Local Labour MP Kate Hoey told the House of Commons that since the experiment began there were

More drug dealers on the streets than ever before, many young children are going to school in the morning zonked out on a very hard kind of Cannabis and more and more residents are being harassed and almost attacked by drug dealers on their way home from work.

and concluded by asking whether:

the Prime Minister will do something about cleaning up these gangs of criminals and stick up for decent law abiding citizens and residents who are fed up being experimented on.

However, the labour government's response was to effectively extend the Lambeth experiment nationwide by downgrading Cannabis from a class B to class C drug and issuing Home Office guidelines that anyone carrying enough cannabis to make up to 500 joints should not be arrested – but assumed to have them for personal use.

Contrast this with the zero tolerance policy of policing in New York introduced by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani – which dramatically reduced crime rates by targeting minor anti social offences. On a visit to London Mayor Giuliani criticised the relaxed attitude to cannabis in Lambeth, saying:

Marijuana caused a lot of the violence we had. I would encourage the police to arrest as many of them (drug users) as possible.

And added that Cannabis

is not a victimless crime, it leads to other bigger, more violent crimes. Anyone should be arrested for the use of marijuana.

The government needs to concentrate on rehabilitating addicts - getting them completely off drugs and helping them make a useful contribution to society. Instead Labour has adopted a 'harm reduction' approach of helping addicts to 'manage' their addiction by strategies such as prescribing methadone – supposed to be a bridging measure until rehab places are available, but itself a highly addictive drug which itself leads to lifelong dependency.

One of the major reasons for a shortage of rehab places is the government’s ‘top down’ approach to funding drug rehab. The Labour government insist that drug rehab centres they provide funding to MUST follow their own politically correct guidelines on diversity – insisting that such rehab centres employ anyone regardless of their religion, sexual orientation etc. While such employment policies are understandable in government departments – they almost automatically exclude faith based rehabilitation centres. However, such centres frequently have a significantly higher than average ‘success’ rate e.g. 75% of former addicts rehabilitated at the Betel Centre, a Christian drug rehab centre in Birmingham are still off drugs 5 years later – compared to a national average of 25%. These ex-addicts are then able to earn their own living and make a useful contribution to society, instead of being dependent on society for the rest of their lives.

This problem is largely due to the government’s ‘top down’ approach which excludes centres with anything other than a secular basis. However, If instead of funding drug rehab centres, the government made the funding follow the addict - allowing any rehab centre meeting basic medical standards to claim funding from the government for each addict admitted – then addicts would be able to choose their own rehab centre – faith based or otherwise. This would significantly increase the amount of drug rehabilitation places available – and significantly increase the number of drug addicts staying off drugs and not merely no longer being financially and socially dependent on the rest of society, but actually back at work making a positive contribution not just to the economy, but also to society.

Debt

Student Debt

I believe that the question of student grants and tuition fees needs to be looked at in a much wider perspective than simply how we finance higher education.

When I was at university 20 years ago – most students got grants – although those with better off parents had to contribute towards theirs. The grants were small – mine was about £3,000 per year – BUT virtually all of us tried very hard to live within our grants – and we left university debt free.

Today the situation is very different. Students are encouraged by the government to take out loans to finance higher education. This significantly encourages a culture of debt – instead of trying hard to live within a grant – it can encourage an attitude of If I’m going to leave university with a large debt why not take the extra loan the bank keeps offering and have a few extras?’. The result is that the average student now graduates with a debt in excess of £10,000 – at the very time when they need to be starting out on life and trying to get on a housing market, that is itself racing rapidly out of their reach. However, perhaps more significantly, many have taken on board a culture of ‘buy now pay later’ that ends up crippling them for years to come – as can be seen by the average UK debt per person (excluding mortgages) now having a reached a record £18,000 per person. This level of personal debt is a social and economic time bomb.

The primary reason that students have to finance their own studies with loans is that higher education has been over expanded in a way that takes little account of either the type of graduates that the UK needs or educational standards.

I believe that a future Conservative government needs to set up a fundamental review of higher education similar to the Turner commission on pensions. Such a review would examine what we actually need out of our university system and the best ways to finance university research and teaching. (see reform of public services page).