Reducing Inequalities and Meeting the Needs of Vulnerable People

Speech by Cllr Chris Wise delivered to Oxfordshire County Council on Tue 11th Sep 2007

The Government and this Authority to a degree have neglected their duty to look after some of the most vulnerable people in our society. The Government and this Council ought remove the artificial distinction between a means-tested social care system operating alongside an NHS that is free at the point of need. Otherwise the care of the frail and elderly will continue to suffer. As a society, we have to decide whether we want to invest in improving services for older people. As our population ages, it would be a wise long-term investment to implement.

If we want to tackle these problems we need to focus on the basics that have been set out, but widely ignored. That's decent housing for the 1.5m families on council waiting lists across the country, investment in council services, a fairer tax system, and a proper focus on the education and rehabilitation of prisoners.

Social exclusion is a scourge in today's Britain and the Liberal Democrats shall continue to hold the Government to account for its failures.

Providing a radically better service to looked-after children is absolutely essential to tackling social exclusion.

Proposals to emphasise the importance of kinship care are a definite step in the right direction but key details such as how much kinship carers will be paid still remain unanswered.

Absolutely critical to the success of these policies will be recruitment, retention, and training of foster carers and social workers. Can the current situation be improved without diverting resources from other important areas of social work?

Britain faces a huge challenge in tackling poverty and social exclusion. The Government's policies influencing the County are bogged down in mass means-testing and bureaucracy, creating dependency not opportunity.

The Liberal Democrats are the only party that puts fairness and opportunity for all at the top of the agenda, and I look forward to pursuing these critically important issues.

The Partnership could try to engage with Government to look at benefits reform, non-means-tested child benefit, and second and further children, since doing so could provide a way to raise many hundreds of thousands of further children out of poverty.

We need to make sure that there are no financial incentives for people to move out of the household. We do not want to end up with children being financially penalised at the same time as they are being penalised in so many other ways by the break-up of their family unit.

The biggest single change that could and should be made concerns the 1.5 million children in poverty in households that nevertheless pay full council tax. As a party, we are committed to a move towards relating the amount that people pay to the council from their income. If we made the change to a local income tax, there would be an immediate impact on those 1.5 million children. It is hard to understand why any such household would pay full council tax, but that is the nature of the system.

I shall now move on to people of working age. The numbers with low or no qualifications still especially bad among ethnic minority groups, and they are appalling among people with disabilities or with mental health problems for whom poverty rates, at 30 per cent, are twice those for the non-disabled. This is a worse state of affairs than 10 years ago.

The evidence shows work alone is not the solution. Poverty among working-age adults has not been reduced; it remains unchanged. Some 6.2 million working-age adults are in poverty, exceeding the figure for pensioner poverty and child poverty combined. In-work poverty has become a major problem, with many people facing effective tax rates of 60, 70, 80 or even 90 per cent. The Partnership needs to consider what it can do to mitigate poverty within an unfair benefits system.

Another real issue is the social exclusion suffered by the growing number of elderly people who live alone, and who need comparatively little support. Councils all over the country have phased out the support extended to those whose needs are low or moderate, and no longer visit once a week or once a day to give them a wash or just to check that they are okay.

People whose needs are high get good support but the lack of adequate funding means local councils all over the country have reduced support for those whose needs are not so great. No council can afford to help elderly people whose difficulties, although real, are not as severe as others'. As a result those elderly people suffer even greater exclusion, and are forced to rely on family or friends -if they exist, or are in the neighbourhood. Sufficient resources must be allocated to social services so that the necessary support can be provided. An expression of concern by itself will not help anyone.

With fewer and fewer people using services such as the local bus service or post office, the obvious response, from operators or the Government, has been to close them. That has created a stratum of very poor people in rural areas who are increasingly isolated and excluded and whom the Government has simply ignored. The Partnership needs to do all it can to reduce rural poverty, inequalities and the needs of vulnerable people.