New Labour Party's Social Exclusion Policies - Essay Example

Course Professor University City/State Date NEW LABOUR'S SOCIAL EXCLUSION POLICIES After the landslide victory of 1997, the labour party come to power with its main policy agenda of repairing the social fabric and improving social cohesion. At this time, the major problems affecting the United Kingdom of Britain were inequality and social exclusion. During this period more than one in four children lived in absolute poverty, compared to the one in eight that lived in poverty when this party left power in 1979 (DWP, 2004). There was high poverty among pensioners of around 21%, widened income inequality: in 1979, post-tax income of top tenth of income distribution was around five times that of the bottom tenth but by 1995 the ratio has doubled, (Hills, 2004). Among the key social exclusions problems resulted to lack of job opportunities, lack of means of acquiring education and skills, childhood deprivation, disrupted families, barriers to older people living active and enjoyable lifestyles, poor neighbourhoods, fear of crime and discrimination (DSS, 1999, p.2). When the new labour party came to power, it started implementing a wide range of social program policies to tackle the various social exclusion ills in the society. Among the targeted ills were child poverty, joblessness, neighbourhood and area deprivation, health and education inequalities. This essay looks at the various policies implemented by the labour party and their outcomes. Despite the success of the policies and programs implemented, they still had a wide range of failures. This essays also offers a critique of the policies and programs that were implemented. Social exclusion policies To eradicate the wide spread child poverty the party introduced three main policies. These are raising the direct support to families with children, reducing joblessness in families with children and policies ameliorating long-term consequences of child poverty, (Powell, 2008). The New Labour party increased the net transfers to the families and the low-income earners through the tax and benefit system. The child benefit fund budgetary allocation was increased by 27% for the eldest children. Other child benefits were increased to cope with inflation, (Powell, 2000). Child allowance thus became more generous. Families with children were given increased children’s tax credit to cope with their maintenance and upkeep. The labour party also introduced working families’ Tax Credit (WFTC), this was an evolutionary to in-work-benefit, that was enjoyed by families having children where any adult was working 16 hours a week or more. Childcare Tax Credit that is refundable was also introduced. This enabled parents to get up to 70% of the registered childcare costs. These four programmes enabled maximum generosity to parents and children thus reducing child poverty. The working parents and lone parents’ incomes were thus maintained at a higher level and thus were in a good condition to provide an improved childcare to their children. The second way of reducing child poverty was through reducing number of children living in workless household. This was done through the development of policies designed to improve financial returns to employment, reforming welfare administration and the improvement of childcare. The taxation and benefits structure was reformed to enable high financial returns or to make work pay. The maximum weekly earns that withdrawal started under the old Family Credit increased to £ 77.15 this enabled families to keep up to 100% of their earnings. Withdrawal rate was reduced from 70 percent to 55% of net of tax earnings; this meant that lesser amount is taken out of each additional pound earned above the starting points of withdrawals, (Powell, 2002). This two measures implied more support to full-time and part-time work. Lowly paid, part time lone parents received incentives mainly through increased childcare costs in Childcare Tax Credit. Introduction of New Deal for lone parents and New Deal for Parents were very fruitful in improving their welfare since they had been neglected for a long period. National childcare strategy introduction gave a chance for parents wishing to use it for provision of childcare. Out-of-work lone parents had identified lack of affordable childcare as a great barrier to increasing employment (Finlayson and Marsh, 1998). This strategy was aimed at stimulating and reducing the cost of provision of childcare. The other child-poverty reduction program was implementation of policies that reduce the incidence and severity of scarring factors from childhood and the early adulthood. Failure to have stable employment has been identified has the cause of higher unemployment and lower wages in adulthood (Gregg, 2001; Arulampalam, 2000). New means of eliminating such continuity was thus to be created through ensuring a sure start programs, improving and raising the education qualification on leaving school, introduction of education allowance to aid children from being excluded from schools, investments in provision of education to the ethnic minority pupils, reduction of teenage conceptions among other programs and policies. Blair top three priorities for the government were “education, education and education”. The government improved education spending and this realised the increase in students going to schools. There was a high positive impact at attainment of primary education, with poor performing schools improving fastest. These policies have achieved a lot in the reduction of child poverty, improvement of family welfare, improving the likely hood of improved lifestyle among the children among many other advantages. However, these policies have come with many other disadvantages. According to Piachaud & Sutherland (2012), these policies mainly helped in raising the poverty levels of mainly those near the poverty levels while not being of much help to those who are much lower in the poverty line. These policies do not deal with the more severe cases. Poverty rates in United Kingdom of England remained above the average poverty rates of EU after 10 years of governance of the Labour Party. The childcare policies mainly focused in aiding those in employment while not considering the grievances and needs of the unemployed families. Administration of the tax benefits was also challenging since mechanisms were not well designed to guide employees in the deduction of the side benefits. This made some workers in some companies especially small ones not to fully enjoy the benefits. Employment is a key sector of social and economic wellbeing of the society. Employment sector had created both inequality and social exclusion. The labour party was forced to come with reforms in the employment sector. Employment and joblessness was seen as the main cause of poverty and social exclusion (DSS, 1999: 7). They were forced to come up with multi-prolonged, welfare-to-work programmes, changing incentives to making work pay, policies to promote lifelong training to improve skills and action on health inequalities. Employment was to make financial sense to the employed workers. For this to be realized, they developed various financial policies to aid the working poor. One of such policies was the earlier mentioned Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC). This tax benefits scheme helped those with families and earning low wages not to be socially excluded from the rest of the society. Tax rates for the low income earners was reduced in general while taxation for high income earners increased. This was a form of redistribution policy implemented by the labour party to reduce both the high inequality in the economy while reducing social exclusion and poverty among the low-income earners. Impacts of tax-benefit reforms have been more progressive than alternative policy of earnings-linking all the benefits levels in case of absence of the reforms. The tax- benefit schemes have however left out some poor members of the society. For instance, the working –age adults have been left out and this has resulted to the increase in their poverty levels. This has made them to continue living poor lives despite the fall in the registered unemployment. Working-age adults in occasionally remain without income from their work and forced to be dependent on price-linked benefits. A commission to establish the national minimum wage was also established in their first weeks of their leadership. This was mandated to establishing the minimum wage levels at which the employers should compensated their workers either those working daily, weekly, monthly and those working in contracts. Being in training or employment was the main aim of the ruling party when it comes to employment strategies. Tony Blair the then Prime Minister was once quoted saying “The best defence against social exclusion is having a job, and the best way to get a job is to have a good education, with the right training and experience” (SEU, 1997). His party believed in the refusal to accept widespread unemployment and emphasised on provision of training and education as means of improving people’s chances. They developed policies to allow for payment of employers to offer training to the youths. Selected companies were appointed to offer training to the youth and in return be paid by the government. Many youths received training but this policy had many disadvantage since it made the companies to relay on payment from the government to train the youths instead of employing them after training and providing them with other human resource development programs. Many youths thus became trained but remaining jobless due to the unwillingness of the employers to observe them as their employees. The setting of national minimum wages at this time made harder for the employees to employee more workers. This was because with high wages payable to the workers they had to minimise their workforce as much as possible in order to maintain their profitability and competitiveness. To deal with social exclusion of the young people, Brown’s government started the New Deal for Young People. All major sources of additional fund available during his first two years in office were channelled into this program, (Blakemore& Edwin 2003). This program aided in bringing jobs to the jobless. The introduction of the New Deal for Lone Parents helped lone parents in securing funds in overcoming poverty difficulties thus improving their welfare, (Percy-Smith, 2000). However, in 1997, they had tried to reduce benefits to lone parents and this witnessed high resistance from both the society and politicians. The New Deal for the Young people saw the increase in provision of training, jobs and welfare of the young people in the society. Despite the advantages of the two Deals, the government did not allocate them sufficient funds to gather for the high number of socially excluded youths and lone parents. This hence made them not to cover and great solutions to the high youth and lone parents problems across the country. Opportunity for all (OFA) was another key strategy adopted by the party to tackle the problems of poverty and social exclusion, (McNeil, 2010). Opportunity for all was aimed at protecting the citizens from the effects of advancing globalisation, technological change and the emergence deindustrialisation. For instance, the pensioners who were languishing in poverty due to poor payments resulting from many high taxes benefitted from it. OFA highlighted the increase to benefit income and actions to eradicate fuel poverty; it also witnessed actions on health, housing, transport and crime. In the housing sector, their formulated policies that allowing tax allowance to the pensioners. This was aimed at improving opportunities for current pensioners and making them to live fulfilling, secure and active lifestyles. Relative Poverty levels among the pensioners dropped and many of them started enjoying comfortable lives. OPA had a chapter that dealt with area based solutions to social exclusion, (Levitas, 2000). It identifies the increased polarisation between thriving communities and deprived ones. It promised area based programs to deal with the improvement of quality of life by improving the job prospects, tackling the increased crime rates, improving the provision of education and its achievement and reducing poor health problems. The main thrust policies in the health sector saw the increase in overall budgetary allocation to the health sector and the National Health and Social fund (NHS). Aggregate level progress was made in the neighbourhoods but was not faster enough to meet the set targets. There were also high substantial differences in positions between the low income neighbourhoods. The policies implemented did not realise all the poor neighbourhoods improving and some improvements were too low than it was anticipated. Conclusion The New Labour Party that took power in 1997 took social exclusion and poverty seriously in its strategy and administration; this made them to be different than previous administrations. They recognised the wide range of problems facing Britain in the mid-1990s as being multi-faceted and inter-linked nature, (John Hills and Kitty Stewart, 2005). Poverty has been in the agenda of government high-profile targets. Reduction of child poverty has been in top of the government agenda. This has necessitated the formulation and implementation of various government policies aimed at creating solutions to the problems resulting from poverty and social exclusion. The New Labour party to tackle the problems created many policies touching on different sectors. To reduce the child poverty in the country the party introduced policies that aided the direct support to families with children, reducing joblessness in families with children and policies ameliorating long-term consequences of child poverty. These policies achieved a lot in the poverty reduction and general improvement of children welfare. These policies had some challenges like not tackling problems of families that are too lower in the poverty line, and those in unemployed families. The policies also had difficulties in their implementation. The party introduced policies in the employment sector and tax reforms to cope with the challenges experience by the society. The new deal for young people, new deal for lone parents, tax reforms, improved and supporting training and education for the children, youth, teenagers and the elderly are among some changes introduced. The many policies brought a wide range of positive effects to the society though not large as anticipated or targeted. They however had some challenges and shortcomings that critics have noted. For instance, the tax system did not gather for all the members earning less incomes, lack of creation of lusting solutions to the poor neighbourhoods among very many shortcomings. Despite a wide range of shortcomings, the New labour party made a wide step forward in bringing social inclusion among parts of the society that had been excluded. Improved and increase in employment positions, reduction in child poverty, improved training and education, good lifestyles among the elderly and pensioners and the reduction of poor neighbourhoods are among the wide steps made by the party’s social exclusion policies. The policies have not totally succeeded in the elimination of social exclusion. There is still a long way to go attain an ambiguous picture of success in the society. More policies needs to be implemented in order to ensure the remaining socially excluded members are reached and high rates of equality attained in the country. References Arulampalam, W. Is unemployment really scarring? Effects of unemployment experiences on wages. The Economic Journal 111.475 (2001): 585-606. Blakemore, K. & Edwin, G. Social policy: an introduction. Berkshire, Open University Press. 2003. Print. Department for Social Security. Opportunity For All: Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion, First Annual Report 1999, London: Department for Social Security. 1999. Print. DWP Households Below AverageIncome 1994/5 - 2002/03, Leeds: Corporate Document Services. 2004. Finlayson, L. & marsh, A. Lone Parents on the Margins of Work. Department of Social Security Research Report 80, London, UK: Corporate Document Services. 1998. Print. Gregg, Paul. The impact of youth unemployment on adult unemployment in the NCDS. The economic journal 111.475 (2001): 626-653. Hills, J. 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Lankelly Chase Foundation. Social exclusion unit. Social Exclusion Unit: Purpose, work priorities and working methods. London: HMSO. 1997. Read More