Downing Street Says » Prime Minister’s speech

The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) told journalists that this was the third lecture in the series (the first two were on criminal justice and public health). The next speech would be on science. The current speech, like the others, was a serious analysis of the issues regarding social exclusion, i.e. what was and was not being done, and what the next challenges were. As the Prime Minister would make clear, he was not talking about baby ASBOs, making the state raise children, or interfering with family life. Rather, where it was clear that at a young age, children were at risk of being brought up in a dysfunctional home where there were multiple problems, instead of waiting until the child went off the rails, we should act early, with the right help, support and discipline framework.

The Prime Minister would analyse the difference that measures such as the minimum wage and working tax credits had made, in that we were the fastest improving country on child poverty in Europe. The PMOS said that the number of children in absolute poverty in this country had halved. What the crux of the argument was that it was precisely because of the success we had had in addressing child poverty overall that the persistent exclusion of a small minority now stood out. The PMOS quoted that "we must not in any way let up on the action that we would take to deal directly with child poverty, but at the same time, we had to recognise that for some families, their problems were more multiple, more deep and more pervasive than simply low income. The barriers of opportunity were about their social, and human capital, as well as financial. Universal services were not reaching them. And thus it follows that prefabricated services could not answer to individual needs".

The Prime Minister would then analyse why that was the case, what the weaknesses were in the system as it existed – not predicting well, not targeting assertively, not employing best practice, and where there were boundary problems between services and perverse incentives in the system. The speech would go on to outline the five principles that would be in the social exclusion plan which would be published next week. Those would be: early intervention, identifying what worked, better co-ordination, personalised responsibilities and intolerance of poor performance.

The PMOS said that based on the Prime Minister’s experience from yesterday, he would say that having met children yesterday who were in care, two things struck him. The first was how varied their problems were and how individualised the response needed to be. The second was the children’s abilities, talents and the confidence that they had been given through being helped, which had allowed them to develop into the type of human beings they had the potential to be. This was the ultimate point. The PMOS said that the rest of the speech was in part a reflection on the issues, but also, it was an analysis of what now needed to happen to improve the situation in social exclusion. The key thing was how on the one hand, universal services continued, as they had seen real improvements in child poverty, but on the other hand, how those services could be individualised so that they met individual needs.

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» Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Prime Minister’s speech

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