The phoney election campaign continued last week.  The media seems to have decided that the Tory “wobble” is over, after the launch of some pretty good posters and a warm media welcome for their policy announcement on cooperative public services.  With their whole campaign operation now transferred from Norman Shaw South into Milbank as of last week, the Tories are now all set for the vote.

It was a funny sort of “wobble” anyway, as none of the last 24 polls have shown the Conservatives more than 2 points in either direction from 40%.  Given that the statistical margin of error on these polls is plus or minus 3%, none of the them have shown a statistically meaningful shift.  But little things like that don’t affect the Westminster narrative.

One of the incidents in the “wobble” related to a screw-up by the Tories about a decimal point.  They released an otherwise excellent report on how inequality has grown under Labour.  The document shows how the gap between rich and poor has grown in not just in income, but in health, education, housing – you name it.  However, due to a cock up the document initially claimed that in poorer areas 54% of teenage girls in poor areas got pregnant, rather than the real figure of 5.4%.

This was a bad mistake and caused a big Westminster row.  But hang on a minute.  The real figure should give us serious pause for thought.  More than one in twenty teenagers getting pregnant is really, really high. A larger proportion of teenagers in Britain have children than any other EU county apart from Romania and Bulgaria.  The rate is more than double the European average and five times higher than countries like Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

And teenage pregnancy is very concentrated in poor areas. For example, in leafy Rutland the teen pregnancy rate is 1.4%, while in less leafy Lambeth it has averaged 8.9% in react years. Given the concentration of the problem in poverty hotspots, and the fact that 92% of teenagers who have children are not married, teen pregnancy often kicks off a cycle of intergenerational poverty which can last for many decades.  In the long term, this costs the state a fortune – quite apart from the mass misery involved.

Part of the problem is about poverty, and part of it is about culture.  Hence Cameron’s continuing criticisms of the premature sexualisation of children.  But the bully pulpit alone won’t solve these difficult problems.  I don’t believe that we have the policy answers to them yet – although they are soluble.  For this reason Policy Exchange’s work in this area will continue to grow.

Meanwhile, we are now seeing all the hoopla of an election campaign: student stunts, bizarre poster spoofs, weird viral web trends (e.g. “Dave Facts”) and – God help us - novelty records (cf.“There’s no-one as Irish as Dave Cameron”).

What we aren’t seeing yet is any discussion of the big issues.  It isn’t just the big missing discussion about deprivation and social breakdown. Britain’s media seems generally unable to grapple with the detail of big policy questions, so instead reports on easy-to-grasp personality clashes and Westminster spats.

With such an information-poor public debate, it is sad that James Purnell has decided to step down at the next election.  He was not only one of Labour’s better potential leaders, but also one of the few people on the left really able to step back and question their policies.  There is far too little thinking in British politics, and there will be even less in the Labour Party without Purnell.

Neil O’Brien is Director of Policy Exchange

An audience of around eighty or so gathered at the British Library to listen to Dr Anthony Seldon, biographer of Tony Blair and Master of Wellington College, and Toby Young, author and Swedish-style free school activist, discuss Bright Blue’s second theme of the year, “What are we educating for?”

Young began by bemoaning the rise in vocational qualifications and the dumbing down of traditional academic rigour, leading so it would seem, to a collapse in social mobility and the entrenchment of privilege for those still allowed access to a “proper liberal education”. He spoke of a culture of indoctrination, whereby knowledge is transmitted rather critically digested, and welcomed the prospect of schools being freed up to allow the value of subjects, subject knowledge and subject specialisation to return.

Characteristically, Seldon was controversial and to the point: the great experiment of state education had failed and in such a homogenised system, where teaching to the test was allowed to dominate, we were failing our children. It was time for a new national conversation on education, a freeing up of schools, a move away from central state control, greater choice, the empowerment of teachers as professionals not technicians, and ultimately the restoration of the pursuit of knowledge, and the love of learning, at the heart of what schools are about.

The audience were not completely converted, and there were those keen to point out the progress made in the education system since 1997 brought about by increased investment: renewed and rebuilt buildings, more diverse, more market-appropriate skills being examined and tested, and improved access to higher education.

Others focused on the role of discipline, the failure of the examinations system, the potential for a de-politicisation of the education field, and with it a strengthened role for universities and employers in policy. For some, divisions between state and independent education and the extent to which money drives choice was most important; for others the definition of “success” in education and whether that can be agreed upon. One audience member simply asked the panellists to define education in a single sentence.

But overall, the tenor of the debate was positive, constructive and engaged, with broad agreement on the crucial role that schooling plays in creating opportunity and with that the potential for overcoming inherited inequality. “Would either of the front benches have the balls – forgiving the pun – to do something about improving education after the general election?” Yes, the speakers agreed, Michael Gove would.

James Marshall is part of Bright Blue, committed to promoting a fairer, more socially just Britain in the next Parliament and beyond.

You can also watch some of the discussion:

Anthony Seldon at Bright Blue

Toby Young at Bright Blue

Our friends at Bright Blue held their inaugural public meeting yesterday evening with Polly Toynbee and Theresa May discussing whether inequality matters.

Setting aside the significance of the presence of Polly Toynbee as the first speaker at a newly-launched Tory event, these snowballing events are hugely important for the party. They are not ‘Conservative’ events, they are events for people interested in Tony Benn’s famous isshooos. And that’s how you build my favourite theory of the cascade of trust.

One particularly interesting question concerned whether you should aim to support (heavily) the ‘bottom’ (that’s shorthand, before anyone decides to complain that I’m being insulting) few per cent at the expense of the next bottom 25 or so per cent. Her question was whether boosting the life chances of the worst-off, even if only by a small amount, is more effective and desirable than helping people who have fewer long-term problems and just need a bit of extra help at some things.

I doubt there’s an answer to this. I am horrified by the suggestion today from the government’s anti-social behaviour czar of taking entire families into care. And yet there are clearly some people who simply can’t cope.  I don’t think morally we can write off the very worst-off as being beyond hope. But equally, governments have a duty to maximise the effect of every penny they spend.

Something that was suggested but not really explored was an experiment discussed in a book called The Spirit Level (also mentioned in David Cameron’s speech on Monday).  Bear with me, it sounds a little unlikely but… A number of monkeys who regarded themselves as high-status were removed from their environments and placed in a new one where they became of low status. Nothing else changed, just their social standing. They became depressed, and listless, and more likely to die younger than expected. The conclusion the researchers drew was that it was the lack of control over their lives that caused at least a significant part of the damage.

This has huge implications. I don’t know how applicable it is to humans, or whether this group was a one-off. But it seems obvious to me as a Conservative that people who feel in control of their lives have a better time of it. I’m not saying that money isn’t important, but part of what money can give you IS control – you can choose where you get your public services from, for example.

Perhaps – just perhaps – there is a wider, slightly left-field by-product of social responsibility and devolving power: that by giving people control over their lives, we make them intrinsically healthier as well as socially stronger.

One of the aims of this website, when it was first created, was to be a forum to find conservative methods to reach progressive ends. Taxes should be cut from the bottom up and public expenditure reduced from the top down. Labour has failed to break the UK poverty trap.  It is the duty of a Conservative government not to let the same thing happen again and prove to the country that they are the real progressive force in British Politics.

Raising the personal allowance to £12,000 would take 7 million low-paid workers out of the income tax net altogether. People working full time or less on the minimum wage would pay no income tax at all. This tax cut would put at least £20bn per year back into people’s pockets (according to real life figures), allowing considerable additional spending and investment in the economy.

This is the key to overcoming recession and restoring economic growth. As well as stimulating the economy by giving people more disposable income to spend and invest, raising the personal allowance to £12,000 would strengthen incentives to work, help to eliminate the ‘poverty trap’ and make low-paid jobs more economic – greatly increasing opportunities for the unemployed, and a step towards enhanced social mobility.

Often people find that as they start working, they both pay tax and lose benefits, leaving them little better off than they were before. Indeed, the effective marginal tax rates for people moving from benefits to low-paid jobs can be close to 100 percent. These proposals would change that.

The cost in tax revenue to put in place this proposal into place would be between £20bn and £30bn.  Cuts must be avoided in areas that would otherwise adversely affect the poor in relation to the financial gains due to be made from the substantial increase of the Tax Free allowance, which are as follows:

• Scrap the Bus Service Operators’ Grant.
• Suspend further orders and upgrades for the Eurofighter.
• Reduce the government advertising and publicity budget by half
• Halve public sector spending on consultants.
• Slim down the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
• Rationalise the framework of regional business support.
• Cut 25 per cent from the budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
• Abolish the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

I believe that this proposal is genuinely progressive and genuinely Conservative.  It will do more for the poor in twelve months than the Labour Party has done in twelve years

A more detailed version of this article can be found on my personal blog. I was building on a previous article on this website.

This year’s British American Project (BAP) conference in Edinburgh focused on Sustainability and Development. At a time when the world is facing a crisis in terms of global warming and depleting natural resources, this conference could not have come at a better time. As some of the leaders of tomorrow it is imperative that we instigate debate and pool ideas as to what we as individuals and collectively should and could be doing.

I organised a panel debate for this year’s conference, simply because I didn’t want the conference theme to be solely about the planet (climate change and the green agenda). In my world of Social Firms it is also about people. I’m forever talking about the need to create sustainable, paid jobs for people who are too far removed from the open labour market to compete in the mainstream. These are mainly people with mental health problems, learning disabilities, other disabilities, ex-offenders (90% of whom have one mental health problem and 70% apparently have two), homeless people and ex-drug and substance abusers.

Alan Baker & Paul Miller, Brighter Future Workshop

Mental illness is the common denominator within the latter groups. Add this to their situation and they don’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job with the average employer (according to a recent survey, 60% of employers admitted they wouldn’t consider employing someone who’d had a mental health problem²). The jobs aren’t there for individuals facing such significant barriers to employment – especially now other job seekers have risen in numbers and ability. It is surely wrong to consign more than a million people who grapple with these disadvantages on a daily basis – yet who want to work – to the scrapheap of unemployment for the rest of their lives. It is simply not a sustainable route forward.

This is where the ‘development’ bit comes in – Social Firms are market-led businesses that compete in the open market but which are set up specifically to create paid, sustainable employment for people with severe disadvantages. These are businesses which re-invest their profits back into achieving their social mission of creating jobs for people who would otherwise struggle to get work. A quarter of the workforce needs to be employed from this group if they are going to be regarded as a Social Firm. We have printers, website design companies, guest houses, travel agencies, recycling companies, contract gardeners and caterers….market opportunities are seized for social good.

It works too! We’ve grown the number of Social Firms from 5 in 1996 to more than 170 today and all without any central Government intervention. My message is: imagine what more we could do to help our economy save money and sustain our communities if we managed to co-ordinate some support from Government in order to grow the number of Social Firm businesses.

For someone to be really empowered economically and socially they need to have a paid job. There’s no point creating short term, unsustainable jobs to help people with multiple disadvantages move into employment; the groups we’re talking about need ongoing support to enable them to maximise their own potential within the workplace. But one thing’s clear – this support is still cheaper than that person being unemployed for the rest of their lives. The tangible benefits that this has for both the individual and society far outweigh the investment in this model as a sustainable option.

The guesthouse in Edinburgh, for example, alone saves the NHS approximately £21k per year for every person with a mental health problem that they employ within the business. Collectively, all the Social Firms and emerging Social Firms in the UK save the Government approximately £30m in benefits alone because of who they create employment for. Let’s remember that otherwise, these individuals are more likely to be unemployed than in an open labour market job because of the complexity of their support needs.

Nathan Dobie & Mick Parker, CREATE Liverpool

Social Firms are one type of social enterprise and the simplest definition for social enterprise is ‘any business that trades for a social and/or environmental purpose’. They reinvest their profits back into meeting this purpose and whilst the specific purpose of Social Firms is to create paid jobs for severely disadvantaged people, other types of social enterprises have a very broad variety of missions. So the Eden Project is a social enterprise, for example, as is Café Direct and Coin Street Community Builders on London’s South Bank…all with their own particular mission. What links them, however, is a drive to tackle social or environmental issues through enterprise and beyond a doubt this has got to be the most sustainable route to improving the world in which we all live.

I am passionate about the value of social enterprise (and of course Social Firms in particular) to this country and indeed the world. It was a privilege to be able to bring this passion to the BAP conference in Edinburgh via my panellists talking about the question of sustainability and development – it certainly sparked debate throughout the few days that we were all together.

So find out more about social enterprise – you can’t help but be inspired. Here are just some websites to whet your appetite and help your learning – or you could just pick up the phone and talk to me!

Social Enterprise Coalition: www.socialenterprise.org.uk

Social Firms UK: www.socialfirmsuk.co.uk

National Visit Programme: www.visitsocialenterprise.co.uk

Posted by Administrator on behalf of Sally Reynolds, CEO, Social Firms UK. If you would like to talk to Sally, she is happy for us to share her phone number so please email us at info @ platform10.org