Tribune column - February 2010

05/Feb/2010

Everybody has a stake. That was one of the founding ideas behind our welfare state.

Whether it's support for children or our national health service, universalism has always been a core principle. And I believe it's vital that those on modest and middle incomes - not just the poorest - are part of it.

In the last decade we have built on that universal support for all families: there have been significant increases in child benefit, the winter fuel allowance and the state pension too which will soon be linked again to earnings.

We have created a new pillar of our welfare state for the 21st century – Sure Start – which is open to all families with young children regardless of income. And the free nursery places we have introduced for three and four year olds are a universal entitlement too.

Alongside this our welfare state rightly gives extra support to those who need it most. Labour’s child and working tax credits support those on both low and middle incomes - with more for those who need it most while ensuring that moving into employment pays. The same is true of pension credit, which we designed to ensure it helps the poorest pensioners most but does not penalise those who have saved.

It’s only through this combination of universal support for all families and targeted support – what we call progressive universalism - that we have been able to lift half a million children and almost a million pensioners out of poverty.

We could not have raised child benefit for all by as much as we raised child tax credit, but nor could we ensure that every family or every pensioner who needed support got it unless we continued to invest in universal benefits too.

But over recent weeks and months, the idea of such a progressive universal welfare state has come under attack.

Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats have long had a policy of cutting tax credits for all but those on the lowest incomes and abolishing child trust funds altogether. But they’ve now been joined by the Tories too. Under the cover of their plan to cut the deficit deeper and faster, their ‘age of austerity’ agenda would see child trust funds, tax credits and Sure Start cut so that they are only available to those on the lowest incomes.

As George Osborne has set out, tax credits would be taken away from families where a working couple earn just £16,000 each. Child trust funds would be abolished for all but the poorest families – those on less than £16,000 per year.

And Sure Start would no longer be a universal service, but one to help the poorest families only. David Cameron says he wants to go back to the earliest days of Sure Start when it was only available to some families in some communities. He says this is to take Sure Start back to its “original purpose”.

But as one of those who was part of the Treasury team which created Sure Start, our intention was always to roll out Sure Start to be a universal service available to all families with young children in every community.

The Tory plans are a deeply retrograde step which hark back to the days when we ghettoised support for the poor.

And Tory outriders in right-wing think tanks – with their calls for universal child benefit to be abolished - give a flavour of where the debate in the Conservative Party is going.

But it is a debate we can and should be confident of winning. Since the launch of David Cameron’s airbrushed billboards at the start of the year, we have finally seen Conservative policies come under the scrutiny they deserve.

And as people begin to digest what the Conservatives are proposing, it’s not just the voters that are getting increasingly worried. The Tories too are concerned that under the daily pressure of an election campaign, as the media begin to ask the tough questions and in the forthcoming TV debates, David Cameron and George Osborne will be found wanting.

After all, in just a few short weeks we have seen incoherence and confusion on a range of flagship Tory policies – from marriage tax breaks to how quickly spending should be cut this year. 

That’s why Labour MPs in marginal seats echo what I’ve been hearing on the doorstep in my own constituency over recent weeks. People are starting to ask whether they want to gamble everything on David Cameron and George Osborne. Will they really be on the side of families like mine? What will happen to the economy under the Tories? And what about neighbourhood policing, local schools and children’s centres?

So in the coming weeks there is all to play for and there’s so much at stake – from economic recovery and expanding educational opportunity to the support millions of families rely on.

And yes the very principles of our progressive welfare state too. Because we’re all in this together – but not if David Cameron and George Osborne get their way.