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Jonathan Bradshaw, University of York
Jonathan Bradshaw is Professor of Social Policy at the University of York. He joined the University in 1967 and was the founding Director of the Social Policy Research Unit from 1973 to 1987. He served two terms as Head of Department from 1988-1994 and 2003-2007. He also served as Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences from 1994-1998. Jonathan was president of the Foundation for International studies in Social Security from 1999-2003 and has been on the research committee of the International Social Security Association since 1998. He was appointed Academician of the Learned Societies for the Social Sciences in 1996 and Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005 for services to child poverty.
Jonathan is one of the investigators on the ESRC Large Grant on Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK, which will start on 1st April 2010.
Speech
Peter had reconceptualised poverty as relative before he was 30.
He had rediscovered poverty (with Brian Abel Smith) before he was 40 (at the same time as he was doing his wonderful research on older people). He helped to create the Child Poverty Action Group and many people here sat on the executive in the Friday night murk of Macklin St while he chaired discussion of what to do about it. The glorious outcome was child benefit - which even the Tories have said is safe in the face of the deficit. His great work on poverty - Poverty in the United Kingdom was eventually published in 1979 when he was 50 after many vicissitudes and long after the research that underpinned it had been completed - and by then he was working on health inequalities.
He was a keen supporter of the Breadline Britain surveys that sought to deal with the major criticisms of his operationalisation of relative deprivation. Like many of us, after being initially sceptical, he came to terms with social exclusion or at least the (RED) Redistributive Egalitarian model. His work on poverty transformed our thinking. The government measured poverty for a time using his SB plus a %. We are now measuring child poverty using his deprivation indicator methods developed 40 years ago. So does the EU, so does the OECD. He achieved all this without ever receiving a grant from the ESRC or the Government. Poverty in the UK was supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – with extreme patience on their part. It was the best thing they have ever done.
I am very familiar with all that as many of you are. Kate Green will no doubt dwell on it with more detail. But I want to use my time to look forward - to turn to his very recent work which I think is very important, unfinished and deserves our attention. I have only just discovered much of it and have not yet read some of it because it has not yet been fully published. The day before he died he completed a paper on the need for (universal) child benefits in developing countries that is being published in a collection by ILO. Jean has told David Gordon that he was very pleased with the book. The week after he died he was coming to the annual FISS conference in Sigtuna Sweden to give the opening plenary on this theme.
I find that Peter typically was ahead of us all. I knew that Peter had been teaching a course on human rights at LSE and I knew of course that he was always engaged in poverty and development through the seminal book with David Gordon. At his 80th celebration at LSE I had mentioned my experience in Georgia producing an analysis of child poverty on behalf of UNICEF which the World Bank had invited them to contribute to their poverty assessment and then had refused to include because we had advocated child benefits. Peter had sent me a report he had written on Georgia soon after transition and also another paper that argued that the first world should fund social security in the third world.
The reason I want to talk about this work today is that I don’t think that not many of us British poverty researchers know about all this and I think it is important. For the last three years I have been working for UNICEF Regional office for the CEE/CIS countries - the former communist countries. I got into this through my comparative research on child well-being. I have been doing a series of assessments of child poverty and comparisons of the child poverty packages in the region. Basically the story goes like this. The communist/soviet institutions to protect families with children were destroyed in the transition. Despite economic growth inequalities grew and the growth did not trickle down. The World Bank came in devoting resources to national statistical agencies and funding household surveys. These used a commons framework and the Third World $ per day poverty threshold. The surveys found very few children living below these thresholds. World Bank consultants then came in to propose the appropriate response to these very low child poverty rates. Typically the model was targeted social assistance and conditional cash transfers. The benefits were too low and completely ineffective. No country in the CEE/CIS region is spending more than 1 per cent of GDP on benefits and services for families with children – the average percentage in the OECD countries is 2.3 per cent in 2005. In every country we have studied we find that pensions achieve more child poverty reduction than these transfer systems. The recession has hit these countries hard – harder than Africa. The social protection system has been shown to be totally ineffective.
The World Bank policies have been pure window dressing. Using their huge resources they have funded the production of the evidence as well as the response to the evidence. The Washington neo liberal consensus has been managed with extraordinary discipline. Struggling against this dominant ideology I have found UNICEF, the ILO, possibly OECD and Peter Townsend. In our analysis, really just to annoy the World Bank, we have modelled what a modest universal child benefit would achieve in these countries. In every country it is much, much more than the TSAs in existence.
Peter in his last written work before he died argued for child benefits in developing countries. He argued it on the basis of child rights. He believed that international institutions and transnational Corporations have an obligation to fund these benefits. He advocates that the sources of finance should include a Tobin tax on currency flows. There are models – the South African Child Support Grant is an inspiration for (as is Basic Income experiment being trialled in Namibia). In response to Peter’s advocacy Argentina has just implemented a child benefit system for those excluded from the existing system for formal employees. But that is basically it.
All of us here who honour Peter’s name need to be extremely active in defending universal child benefits in the UK. The Institute of Directors and the Tax Payers Alliance have already singled them out for abolition to reduce the deficit. But I hope that at least some of us can find the time and energy to focus on sustaining Peter’s last campaign. Child benefits for poor countries.
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