Pity the poor children left to Blair’s care

When people come to look back on the legacy of new Labour they will feel a deep indignation that, for some reason, is expressed at the moment only by very few. Labour has always prided itself on being the caring party, champion of the underprivileged and the vulnerable. Yet the people who have done worst out of new Labour are children, particularly the most deprived children.

Despite the posturing and promises, despite the thousands of initiatives and the billions of taxpayers’ money, Britain’s most vulnerable “kids”, as the prime minister calls them, are in many ways worse off than in 1997. In others they are no better off. What a legacy. What a disgrace.

Labour’s education policies have proved a very expensive failure, particularly for the least privileged children. In August the government admitted it had failed to reach its own targets for standards in primary schools. In September it had to acknowledge the same failure in secondary schools. Meanwhile it emerged that private school children are on average two years ahead of state school children. A study also found that private day schools cost less than state schools if true costings are compared like for like. The government has also presided over a decline in social mobility.

Equally bad is last week’s startling news of the failure of the Sure Start scheme for deprived children under five. Of all Labour’s projects this was one of the dearest and most vaunted. It was inspired by the American Head Start programme and since its launch here in 2001 the government has spent £3 billion on a range of pre-school programmes in targeted areas, such as childcare, parenting classes, training to help mothers into work, health advice and various other schemes. The idea was to lift the neediest children out of the cycle of poverty by helping them and their parents, all too often their lone mothers.

However, an independent academic research project by Birkbeck College found that Sure Start isn’t delivering anything. Researchers found no discernible difference in children’s development, language and behaviour between those living in Sure Start areas and those elsewhere. It also showed that some children of teenage mothers — those often most in need of effective help — did worse in Sure Start areas than elsewhere.

It simply defies belief. This was a serious government-sponsored evaluation involving 8,000 children under five and costing £20m. Both the National Audit Office and the Commons select committee on education have already been critical of Sure Start too.

The government’s response is simply to say that it is too early to evaluate the scheme, even though it was ministers who put pressure on researchers to get some results out quickly. Almost incredibly, they are pressing on with plan A, to increase the Sure Start centres from 500 to 2,500 over the next three years, and add 1,000 more by 2010. This is so preposterous it would be funny, if it weren’t so serious. American findings about Head Start are highly debatable and inconclusive too.

Yet Tony has faith, so Sure Start must continue. There’s even an element of loaves and fishes feeding the 5,000 about his faith, because although Sure Start centres are to increase more than fivefold, the government is only planning to double its spending. But then social engineering was always a matter of blind faith and wishful thinking.

The real problem for children in inner cities is family breakdown. Programmes such as Sure Start only tackle the symptoms, not the malady. They aggravate the disease too. Until recently politicians were afraid to say that broken families and lone parenthood are bad for children, particularly for the poor, even though there has for years been an incontrovertible mass of evidence. It was seen as judgmental and discriminatory, or at any rate bound to frighten the voters.

Even now the Conservative leadership contender David Davis is wary of making this obvious point. As he said last week:

“If a Conservative politician observes that children have a better chance of living fulfilled and gainful lives when brought up by two happily married parents, he is likely to be pilloried as narrow-minded.”

That is still true, although as a lone parented child he is well placed to speak out. It may be some time before other Conservative politicians drum up the conviction to talk seriously family-friendly. Meanwhile there are a few brave voices crying out in the wilderness — some of the right-of-centre independent think tanks such as Civitas and the Centre for Policy Studies, which have the luxury of indifference to popularity. They have been saying for some time that family breakdown, and the poverty and social breakdown that follows from it, is encouraged by government intervention. The tax and benefit system provides incentives for couples to split up. They are better off apart (or “off the books”, concealing their partners). It makes it just as desirable for a teenage girl to have a baby on her own as any other option she might have.

People on the left and even on the right have passionately resisted the truth for years. But now it is beginning to be impossible to ignore the evidence. Last week Civitas published a survey showing the perverse incentives of Labour’s tax and benefits system in comparison with family friendly provisions in France and Germany. Needless to say, they have far less family breakdown and lone parenthood. We have more lone parents and teenage pregnancies than anywhere else in western Europe.

Here when an unemployed unpartnered person becomes a lone parent their financial situation improves substantially, unlike in France or Germany. Here it is financially advantageous for couples with children, where both parents are on the minimum wage or unemployed, to part. The tax credit system favours children who live with a lone parent rather than with both. Fathers who work and stay married (or partnered) are penalised. They would be better off divorced.

The figures are on the websites. Civitas publishes them. So does the Centre for Policy Studies, which revealed equally startling evidence earlier this year. We have a government that is actively promoting family breakdown and the evils that follow from it, and then applying expensive sticking plaster to gaping social wounds. Odd how few people yet feel angry.