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GoogleBack in the days of John Smith my boss, a long-standing Conservative, gave up on his party. He thought that the Labour Party had a young fresh politician who offered the country something new. Smith was a decent man, he believed. But the next generation would take the party forward to greater things.
The politician he had in mind was Gordon Brown - and there are times when you can imagine Brown shuffling around in his old age saying "I could have been a contender...". It is clear that if Brown could have beaten Blair he would have taken him on. But he couldn´t and didn´t, and got on with running the country while Blair tried to run the world.
But more than a decade after those conversations with my boss, we don´t know much more about Brown.
Brown spent his first years in the Treasury implementing one great Liberal democrat policy (independence for the MPC) and gaining a reputation for prudence. He inherited a pretty benign economic environment. But he has more or less buried the old line that Labour could not take power without a sterling crisis. Yet Brown has been much less of an "economic" Chancellor than most of his predecessors (and quite how much has he delegated to Ed Balls?) but more of a social policy chancellor than any other.
Public Finance has a long article reviewing the Brown record. It is a pretty impartial account, and worth reading.
The would-be prime minister has moved well beyond the confines of the traditional chancellor’s role. When he leaves the Treasury, his performance will doubtless be measured by the economic balance sheet. But he will leave a legacy of social welfare policy, too. Brown is heavily associated with the government’s pledges on child poverty: to reduce it by 25% by 2005, halve it by 2010 and eradicate it by 2020. And flagship government social policies such as tax credits, the Sure Start early years programme and child trust funds all emanated from the Treasury and bear his fingerprints.
The chancellor’s wider policy role has come with a dose of ideology too: measures such as tax credits and Sure Start are based on a philosophy of ‘progressive universalism’ – everyone benefits, but the poorest gain the most. Brown is also an advocate of ‘asset-based welfare’ – the idea that boosting assets as well as income helps reduce relative disadvantage.
So - aside from economic stability (which has been pretty widespread through most of the years since 1997) - the Brown legacy consists of three policies that have not been terribly popular or successful - and which involve the State getting intimately involved with the family.
They are all intended to do good though. And it is debatable how far any incoming Government is going to move away from them:
The Conservatives fully intend to retain tax credits ‘in one form or another’, says shadow paymaster-general Mark Francois.
‘We’ve come to the conclusion that tax credits need to be reformed and made simpler to administrate and operate so they can continue to provide assistance to those people who need it – but without driving them to distraction in the process.’
In practice they are not going to be scrapped without replacement- so reform rather than abolition seems likely.
And yet they are - increasingly - massively affected by fraud and error. This is from a separate report in Public Finance
Every household in Britain is losing around £180 per year because of fraud and error in the government’s benefit and tax credits systems, figures released by opposition MPs this week suggest.
A series of reports into Chancellor Gordon Brown’s flagship tax credits regime this week revealed that fraud and error in the system was as high as £1.28bn in 2003/04.
But Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman David Laws estimated that total losses through the welfare system had reached around £4.3bn annually - £180 per household.
Speaking to Public Finance on the eve of the Revenue and Customs department’s announcements on July 11, Laws said that tax credits losses had reached ‘abhorrent’ and ‘unjustifiable’ levels.
Sure Start has also had a pretty chequered history. An evaluation last year showed that it could not be shown to have had any positive impact. Public Finance reports that
The Sure Start scheme has won friends – and attracted criticism too. Aimed at bringing together health, education and support for parents to help young children in deprived areas, the programme has been rapidly expanded. But with the expansion, the partnership-run schemes will now become part of council-run children’s centres.
The latest pledge is to expand from around 850 schemes to 3,500 children’s centres by 2010. So it was something of a blow when the national evaluation of Sure Start, carried out by Birkbeck College’s Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, revealed last month that the most deprived children had actually been negatively affected by the scheme.
A damning conclusion one would have thought. But not clear-cut because
Sure Start’s supporters argue that early years support is a long-term means of tackling deprivation. Reports of its failure are ‘very premature and misguided’, says CPAG’s Kate Green. It is a ‘brilliant, very bold, important initiative’ that will prove to have been money well spent, she believes, adding: ‘That’s not to say we don’t think more is needed to get to the hardest to reach families.’
Nick Pearce agrees. ‘Sure Start needs time to mature. We should hold fast to its promise,’ he says. Pearce also suggests that with huge pressure on social services budgets and overstretched social work teams, local authorities ‘have started to roll up some of their most intensive work with families into it’. This reduction in traditional social work support might have contributed to the scheme being less effective, he says.
The team that produced the national evaluation is not rushing to give a final verdict on Sure Start either. Professor Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, begins by praising Sure Start as ‘an important and valuable effort’.
He confirms that the evaluation found ‘among the majority in Sure Start there were small positive effects detectable’, while for ‘a not insubstantial minority there were some adverse effects’. It was ‘apparently the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged who had the most adverse effects’.
But he adds an important caveat. ‘Mostly, there were no detectable effects.’ The projects were studied when they were semi-embedded, he points out. ‘People expect to change the course of mighty rivers overnight. In some ways, expectations have been unrealistically raised... certainly among the chattering classes.’
I tend to the old fashioned view that if you spend a lot of money, you expect something to show for it. But you will certainly find Liberal Democrats who support Sure Start. Personally I see worrying links with the Child Surveillance measures chronicled by Dave Hill.
On asset-based welfare I have more sympathy for the instrument (people should own things). But the policy amounts to Child Trust Funds - and this is a squib of a programme. The assets provided are pretty meaningless - and at their current scale the scheme is not justifiable. The argument Public Finance report is that Child Trust Funds are more of a contribution to a savings culture than to social policy. Which takes back to the economy, because one thing we certainly do not have in the UK at present is much of a savings culture. It seems we expect Brown to be prudent on our behalf.
I expect Labour to get a bounce when Brown takes over (I can´t see there being any other outcome). And I expect him to unveil a number of new policy initiatives (constitutional, international) to win favourable headlines. But we are not going to see a fresh face on which to pin our hopes. We will have been living in Brown´s Britain for the best part of a decade.
Conclusion?
He´ll cut and run.
