This is the first thing I would do to finally end poverty

Because I go on about it all the time, politicians and the public ask me, what would you need to do if you sincerely wanted to get rid of poverty? What would be the first thing?  

The first thing I would do is an audit of what is being delivered by government at the moment. What works and what doesn’t work. Where are the holes in the Swiss cheese of governmental delivery? I would make this audit as thorough as time would allow. It might take six months to complete. It would highlight sterling examples of poverty-busting activity. And it would highlight the things that governmental practices do which end up enshrining people in poverty. ‘Warts and all’,  it need not dress things up as workable when they are unworkable. 

What we do know is that circa 80% of the government response to poverty is spent in dealing with the emergency thrown up by poverty. That is, bringing relief to the poor. It’s poverty money that does not generate opportunity. It holds the hands of the poorest caught in poverty. The vast array of thinking around poverty focuses on the emergency of poverty. It’s about trying to give the poor more. Never about how we prevent poverty, or how we cure people of poverty. Because we are so obsessed with how painful poverty is, the big money goes on bringing ‘succour now!’. 

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The only problem with this is that you postpone turning off the tap of poverty. You don’t spend wisely to prevent significant amounts of poverty. So a social audit of what is being done at the moment by government would throw up the tawdry reality that they are maintaining people in poverty because we do not have the right thinking enshrined in government to go about dismantling poverty. It is staggering the amount of money that is spent on keeping people poor; because it is expensive keeping people poor.  

So let us carry out an audit and see if there are parts of the poverty programme that should be reduced; or duplicated because they work perfectly. And let’s jettison the rest. Following the audit we need to create something like an old-fashioned department store.

Nowadays department stores tend to concentrate on making you look beautiful in your hair and clothing, in your makeup, and possibly to provide you with beautiful furniture to loll on while you look more beautiful than ever before. But in the past, department stores would have everything from false eyelashes to shoelaces. They were emporia of great practicality. So let’s imitate the old department store and gather in it all the poverty-busting solutions that have worked in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. Converge examples and bring the energy of these solutions together as a precursor for what I have called MOPPAC: the ‘Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure’.  

Government ministries are paralysed in the face of poverty. They cannot do their job fully because they invest virtually all of their poverty money into coping with the emergency of poverty. So we never get to reduce poverty. Hence if you seriously wanted to get rid of the long waiting lists in the NHS then you would remove poverty from it. According to the British Medical Association, 50% of people who have cardiac illnesses are suffering from food poverty. Half our hospital beds are taken up with people who have nutrition-related illnesses.  

So what a brilliant idea it would be to lift poverty off of the NHS, as well as from our schools who have to respond to the malign influence it brings into the classroom. Imagine the impact on the Ministry of Justice and prisons if they were robbed of their deep intake of people coming from inherited poverty.  

Because at least eight ministries are responsible for having a finger in the poverty pie, you get the scattergun effect of insipid policy. Half-arsed, dishevelled, riddled with initiatives that are dropped after millions have been spent. Governments love little initiatives and clothe themselves in them to make them look good. As if they are actually using the searing intelligence provided by their education and training, but in fact they largely do what governments have done before. As my eldest son said to me recently, “You vote for who you want, but the government always gets in.”  

So as a precursor to creating a convergence ministry, you set in motion an audit of what works and doesn’t, followed by a department store-like accumulation of poverty-busting programmes and interventions. These two things would lay the foundation stones of a new ministry that would endeavour to stop other ministries from being smothered by poverty. And of course, we don’t train our doctors or policemen or teachers in poverty busting, but we expect them to do their work and wrestle with it full time. 

But the biggest hurdle to reducing poverty and preventing it and curing it is the conservatism of thinking that settles over governments once they are in power. They continue to operate with the time-worn tools of old. ‘More of the same’ bursts forth in great abundance.  

If government did actually get round to admitting that current thinking, in its scattergun response to poverty, is not actually working, then you would be witnessing an honesty rarely seen. But governments unfortunately think they still have to let dealing with poverty be shared out among diverse ministries as if it were some delicious cake. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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