Gordon Brown has called for a rescue plan for “austerity’s children” – a generation of more than 3 million UK young people born after 2010 from low-income families who “have never known what it is like to be free of poverty”.
The former Labour prime minister urged the government to create a multibillion pound programme of support for a “blighted generation” that has grown up under Tory rule amid huge public spending cuts, Covid, the cost of living crisis and the Ukraine conflict.
He drew parallels with “Thatcher’s children” – a cohort of young working-class people who grew up amid mass unemployment, societal upheaval and social security cuts of Britain in the 1980s.
Austerity’s children – who account for 3.4 million of the UK’s 4.3 million children living below the poverty line – would face extra health, educational and employment challenges as a legacy of the “decade-long experiment” of fiscal austerity, he said.
At the centre of Brown’s proposed programme of support for children is a relaunch of the Sure Start early-years scheme, in part funded by a £1bn social impact fund. Sure Start was a flagship New Labour government policy launched in 1998, but at least 1,000 centres have been closed since 2010.
Brown has made several interventions on welfare policy in recent months, describing Britain’s worsening levels of destitution as “obscene”, and calling for root-and-branch reform of its “systematically shredded” benefits system in a series of pamphlets and lectures.
Although he has been careful to direct his proposals at the current government – he called on the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to use his planned September mini-budget to help families in severe hardship – it is clear he sees the UK’s deepening poverty “epidemic” as a problem for a future Labour administration.
Brown’s latest pamphlet, Partnership to End Poverty, published on Tuesday, calls for “a clear vision and deliverable timetable from our government to end destitution now, and poverty in 10 years”, bringing together the state, charities and businesses with the aim of eradicating material hardship within a generation.
Writing in the Guardian, Brown said: “Most [of austerity’s children] have never known what it is like to be free of poverty. And yet in almost every single year of the last decade, even as their need has been mounting, the government’s support for children has been spiralling downwards, each year more difficult than the year before as, with almost surgical precision, the government has made the already poor even poorer.”
He adds: “Commentators now write about Britain’s endemic problem of underinvestment, highlighting the state of our railways, roads, utilities and physical infrastructure; but there has been less focus on the decade-long experiment – the greatest and most damaging underinvestment of all inflicted on austerity’s children, who will, soon enough, come of age. The damage to them runs deep.”
Brown said children born in the 2020s were likely to be even poorer than those born a decade earlier, with the number of UK children in poverty – 4.3 million – likely to rise in the immediate future to a record 4.5m.
His £3bn proposals for protecting the poorest families, funded in part by a bank reserve funds levy, include a revitalised Sure Start programme, support for unemployed people and those on low wages to get better-paid jobs, and an extension to the household support fund, due to end in October.
In his pamphlet, Brown called for a cross-government poverty taskforce to be created: “The sprawling nature of the poverty crisis – which has tentacles reaching into health, education, work, community, energy, transport and more – should banish any illusion that this is a challenge that can be safely led from any one department,” he wrote.
Brown’s intervention reflects wider concerns about the health and life chances of a generation hit by Covid and austerity. Earlier this year, children’s services leaders called for a national “plan for childhood” to address the needs of a generation of young people scarred by austerity and the pandemic.
A government spokesperson said: “We will continue to make every effort to tackle child poverty, which is down since 2010. Our £108bn cost of living package also prevented 1.3 million people, including 300,000 children, falling into absolute poverty with the heightened cost of living pressures driven by the war in Ukraine and impact of Covid.
“Children are less likely to be in poverty where all adults work, and our £2.5bn back to work plan will help over a million people break down barriers to work while we also cut taxes, boost the national living wage and drive down inflation to support hard-working families.”
