A society free from poverty: how do we get there and what would it look like?
59:56 Share

Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Hello, everybody, and welcome. Welcome to the LSE festival, which is happening all this week through many events worldwide.

lunch times, afternoons, evenings, and I hope that you will, as well as attending this event, have a look at the programme. You can pick one up on your way out or follow the link online to see the other events that are available to you under our theme, Visions for the Future.

But to keep things off, we want to envisage a society free from poverty. That's going to be our topic for today. My name is Tanya Burkhardt. I'm the chair for today. I'm an associate director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion here at LSE, and I'm also an associate professor in the Department of Social Policy.

I will introduce our speakers one by one when we come to them in the panel, but we have Abhijit Chandra here, Tom Stevens and Abigail McKnight. I'm delighted to welcome them to discuss this topic with us today. We have our audience here in the room. We are also online and the event is being recorded and All Being Well will be made available as a podcast. The hashtag, if you...

Engage in such things is #LSEFestival. Please make sure your phones are on silent so that we don't disrupt the event.

So to kick things off, you may have heard the adage, the poor will always be with us. But do we think that is the case? Or might they perhaps be possible to envisage a society free from poverty? What do you think? So if you've got a device, go to menti.com.

and then use the vote code there 2678 3246 and let us know what you think. Do you think a society free from poverty is possible in the short term? Only in the long term? It's not possible but it's a good goal to have anyway.

Or no, it's a policy that should concentrate more on achievable goals. Or perhaps you don't know and you hope the speakers are going to tell you whether society free from poverty is possible. So I'll give you just a little moment to pop online and get your responses in.

In case it's helpful for you for context for thinking about your answers there, the World Bank recently updated their estimates for global poverty, for extreme poverty, and concluded that on the new figures, one in ten of the world's population are in extreme poverty, so less than $3 a day in purchasing power parities. And here in the UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's poverty report

for 2022-23 revealed that one in five people were in poverty. That's 14.3 million people with children at the highest risk. So there's certainly quite some way to go. OK, great. I can see those answers coming in. Got a nice distribution building up there. I'll just give a few more seconds as people online have a chance to vote as well.

Okay, so it seems to be sort of stabilising around the idea that perhaps a society free from poverty might not be possible, but it's a good goal to have. That's the middle yellow bar there. But we've got a substantial proportion of us thinking that it is an achievable goal in the long term, or even the optimists amongst us think.

that it is achievable in the short term and a handful of people who are really going to take some persuading by our speakers today. Thank you for that. There will be another question for you after the three speakers have given their points of view as well. We're going to hear then from three speakers about different perspectives on this question of whether a society free from poverty is possible.

We're going to hear first about the intergenerational transmission of poverty and the way in which tackling that might help us to move towards a society free from poverty. Then we're going to hear about the role that work quality can play in reducing poverty and indeed improving other outcomes. And then finally about care and work policies from our three speakers.

For our online audience, if you can't wait to put your questions, you can already use the Q&A function. Please include your name and affiliation. For the online audience, I'm going to ask you to wait until we've had our three speakers present to you, and then it will be your turn to ask questions. So do have that ticking over in the back of your mind as we go through. Okay, so back to the...

slides. There we are. So our first speaker then is Abigail McKnight, who is Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, where she's worked since 1999. Abigail's research interests include inequality, poverty, wealth, social mobility, higher education and employment policy.

She's a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has held research grants from a wide range of organisations, including the ITLA Children's Foundation, the European Commission, Nuffield Foundation and so on. I'll hand over to you, Erica. Great. Thank you very much, Tanya. So what do I believe?

Well, to achieve a society free of poverty, I believe that we need to understand the dynamics of poverty. So understanding the relationship between your past experience of poverty and your future experience of poverty and the relationship between child poverty and adult poverty.

So I'm taking that longer view here, looking at the intergenerational transmission of poverty and importantly, what are the mechanisms that might be driving that intergenerational transmission of poverty. I'm going to be drawing on findings from a recent review of the evidence that Irene Buccelli, also at CASE, and I conducted for the Hitler Children's Foundation in Finland. That's published now and available online for anybody who wants to look at it.

And a starting point for that was that, if you like our thesis, was that to reduce poverty, you need to both reduce poverty now alongside reducing intergenerational transmission of poverty if you want a society free from poverty.

The starting point was, well, there's good empirical evidence of a relationship between childhood poverty risks and adult poverty risks. It's not to say it's deterministic. So it's not all children who grow up poor are poor as adults, or only the children who grow up poor are poor as adults. It's probabilistic. Your risks are much higher if you were poor as a child. Your risk of being poor as an adult are higher.

Moreover, there's evidence of a Great Gatsby Curve. This is the term famously coined by Alan Kruger, talking about Miles Korak's work on the relationship between income, intergenerational income mobility and inequality. So that's countries where there's high levels of inequality, there's lower intergenerational income mobility.

What we find for poverty is that in countries where poverty rates are higher, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is higher. There are some countries, particularly the Nordic countries, where poverty rates are lower and the intergenerational transmission of poverty is lower. That gives us hope that it's possible to achieve those two. And understanding those mechanisms is going to be important for breaking that cycle of disadvantage.

So turning to the evidence, what we looked at, we reviewed international evidence and found that there were three models, three mechanisms that really appeared most in public discourse and came up in the literature. The first one being the family investment model. That's going to be familiar to all of you, I'm sure, that families who are poor are

have fewer resources, crucially financial and parental time. They have fewer resources then to invest in their children and enrich their lives. And with these fewer resources, children are more likely to have lower educational outcomes. They're likely to have poor physical and mental health.

and during their working lives are more likely to experience unemployment, have lower earnings, and in turn these factors then increase their poverty risks in adult life. The second one, which is often you see in the media, is what we call a socio-cultural model, a culture of poverty or welfare dependency culture.

So children learn this from their parents, their parents are work shy, they expect the state to provide for them and this might be concentrated in certain areas. And generations of families who have never worked or experienced high rates of unemployment and benefit dependency. And this explains why poverty is observed across generations.

And then the third type, again, which is often talked about, is this idea of innate differences, of genetic explanations for why poverty risks are transmitted between generations. So inherited natural differences, underlying differences in genetic and biological traits, which are transmitted between generations.

Shaping children's life chances and their poverty risks. Think of intelligence or personality traits and so on, often talked about in this regard. What did the evidence show? Well, we found, at best, weak evidence for both the cultural poverty or dependency culture model or the genetic model.

Some new evidence emerging looking at epigenetics, and we cover that in the report for people who are interested in that. But there was good evidence and causal evidence of a family investment model. But in addition to the family investment model, we also found there were two further models where there was good evidence.

And they were the family's stress model. This is where poverty impacts the emotional home environment, causing stress both to children and to their parents.

This depletes the emotional resources needed for supportive and nurturing parenting behaviours. Family stress can lead to toxic stress in children, which has harmful effects on their social and emotional wellbeing, their cognitive development, their behaviour and educational attainment, and this can lead to elevated risks of poverty in adult life.

The final one was on aspirations traps. And again, in the socio-cultural model frame, where children's aspirations are shaped by the experience of poverty in childhood. Not just their experience at home, but their experience at school could be through bullying and so on, how society stigmatises poverty.

So they display lower self-esteem, confidence and aspirations, affecting their decision making, their cognitive processes. And this is often linked to a proximal mindset. That's where we're making decisions about the here and now rather than planning for the future.

It can affect low aspirations, which then go on and affect education and employment outcomes. This increases the risk of poverty in adult life. I'm giving you very shorthand descriptions of what these different models are. In the paper, you can see the much longer descriptions.

Now, why do I think there's reason to be optimistic that we can tackle the intergenerational transmission of poverty? And that's because we find good evidence on what policies are effective at reducing this intergenerational transmission of poverty. But if we don't tackle that, then actually just tackling poverty now means that it will be the long term. And I think people were hinting in the responses to the poll, yes, in the long term it's possible. And that's because we do need to break this cycle.

What did we find in terms of the evidence? Well, there was good evidence that, of course, increasing family resources, particularly when children are young, both in terms of financial and parental time, and putting in place interventions that reduce the impact of low investments on children's outcomes.

So social security adequacy, labour supply constraints in what poverty progression and tackling adult skills. Because of course it's not children who are poor, they suffer from poverty, it's the parents of the state who are providing for those children. So you need to tackle those aspects of it. We're not expecting children to go out to work and bring in income. So we need to find a way to reduce poverty in families with dependent children in particular.

Reducing family stress and the impact of family stress on parenting behaviours, particularly harsh parenting, which there's good evidence is linked to family stress, particularly for non-compliance parents.

And on children's social and emotional well-being. And there's evidence here that suggests this is best achieved by taking a whole family approach, so involving the children and the parents in interventions. And there's some good randomised controlled trial evidence on that, on what could be effective. We shouldn't shy away from giving good parenting advice to people because it's shown to be effective and it is important to break the cycle.

Improving children's self-esteem, their confidence and their aspirations. But this must be matched with real opportunities. Otherwise, it can get worse. So helping children and young adults with experience of child poverty make ambitious plans for the future and provide support to allow them to take risks.

So making sure there's a buffer in place, a fallback option. When I talk about risk, I don't mean going out and having risky behaviour. I mean being able to take risks in terms of the education choices they make, the employment choices they make, the entrepreneurial choices that they make.

And so given the good evidence on policy and understanding the mechanisms and how we can intervene, and the fact that we have countries around the world where, for example, in Finland, child poverty rates are less than a third of the child poverty rates in the UK, we know that policy is effective. And that's going to be the answer. Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed, Abigail. I'd like to turn now to Tom Stevens, who is a teaching fellow here at LSE in the School of Public Policy and an associate fellow at the New Economics Foundation. Tom was recently awarded his PhD on work and well-being in modern Britain. Excellent. Right. Hello, everyone. So I want to make three key arguments in about, I think, seven minutes. So we'll see how quickly I can get through them. So

The first, I want to link job quality to the wider question of poverty, which is the topic of this week. And I want to ask the question around, well, you know, what effect has the government's focus on raising hourly wages over the past 10 years, the political consensus we've seen, what effect has that had actually on in-work poverty? The findings there are quite depressing, so apologies.

Secondly, and this particularly links my work with the New Economics Foundation, I want to issue a warning about welfare conditionality as a response to some of the labour market issues we're facing. So this idea of any job at all costs or else using Department of Work and Pensions as a kind of tool to push people into work and to accept any job first.

better job next and then onto a career. That doesn't really work and it could actually exacerbate poverty and hardship for the most disadvantaged in the labour market.

And then I actually want to end on a positive note, because we're supposed to be positive and talk about the policy solution on that. I should say these are interim findings. NEF is due to publish them later in this year, and it uses kind of three different data sets to come out with some of what you've said. So what's the first of these things? So what you see is that hourly wages have improved for the lowest paid workers over the past 10 years in the UK. Right.

So the proportion of people with wages below two-thirds of the median has actually gone down, and that's the case regardless of what median you set. So I look at median of all workers versus full-time workers. You still see quite a big fall there in proportions. Yet, in-work poverty has not fallen. At best, it's stagnated. At worst, it's risen.

And that's the case regardless of whether you use before or after housing costs. I'm using a relative measure. We can debate other measures if you want. And also, even if you filter just through families with everyone in work, so all adults in work, you get a similar picture. So why is that? What exactly has happened to explain that? And I would look at that from the perspective that it's widely used in job quality literature.

particularly in the OECD and the EU, less discussed in UK policy spheres. And I want to talk about this concept called earnings sufficiency.

Because a lot of job quality indices out there, they measure earnings across two dimensions. First of all, they look at your hourly wage. They look at how well you compare relative to other workers. How good is your rate compared to the rate that your colleagues have paid? And obviously, that's important for your job quality. It's important if you're a nurse in the NHS and you're paid a lower rate than maybe a bank manager or someone else like that in the city.

But they also look at earning sufficiency. And that's whether or not you earn a minimum agreed societal standard from work. So do you actually get enough from work to achieve what other people in society can achieve, what they're able to achieve from that?

And probably the best measure of that that I think we have in the absence of better ones is actually the JRF's minimum income standards. They sat that through a participatory approach. They asked people in society around what they would need to achieve a decent standard beyond just poverty. And that's a useful barometer because you compare what people get in terms of their net take home pay with those standards.

And I look here at just the minimum income standard for a single person living alone. So there are other standards. A lot of workers would need a much higher one than this if you've got family, if you've got kids. But just as a kind of proof of concept, I look at the MIS purely for a single person living alone. Do workers earn enough in their take-home pay from that?

And you see quite an interesting finding. So firstly, you see that we've actually seen a decline in the position of the self-employed over the past decade on this. So the proportion of self-employed that are earning above MIS and above the median wage has actually gone down over the course of the past decade.

We've seen a rise in the proportion where they're earning below mids but above the minimum wage. So they're paid a higher wage, but their take-home pay is actually not any better than it was before. And we've seen more mixed results for employees, but still quite a sharp rise in the proportion of employees that are earning below mids. So their earnings are insufficient, yet they're still paid a higher wage.

And I think that partly explains this in-work poverty finding that we've seen on that. And I think it's quite a foreboding state. Sorry, because it suggests that even though people's position in the wage distribution has improved, that hasn't led to more workers earning above the MIS. It hasn't led to workers earning enough from work in order to get out of poverty, which I think also speaks to some of Abigail's findings. So what could be holding these workers back?

And I'm going to look here at just a few non-pecuniary aspects and non-wage aspects of job quality in the same survey that I've got. So firstly, you see that in terms of hours worked, people that earn below the MIS, obviously they're way down there in terms of hours of work. They work far fewer hours.

Secondly, they also have far fewer flexible working opportunities than workers that earn above that amount. So actually, they don't have access to employee-oriented flexible work. They can't necessarily get that in the workplace. And that suggests that maybe one of the issues these people face is that they're not able to reconcile employment.

their job with their commitments. They maybe have other commitments in life which prevent them from actually increasing their hours and therefore they're forced to reconcile this by working fewer hours. And you definitely see this with self-employed workers in the UK. There's increased evidence that a lot of solo self-employed, they want to work more hours but they're underemployed. They're not able to actually achieve higher earnings. And a lot of those people are in the data set. They explain that rise that we've seen on that.

Another thing you find is that actually the long-term occupational growth prospects of this group of workers, so the replacement rate, the replacement demand for the jobs they're in, is actually quite a lot lower than the other set of workers. So they tend to be in jobs which, if we're looking at the Department for Education data, looking at projections of the growth rate of those jobs over the next decade or so, it's actually towards the lower end of the distribution.

So they're not necessarily those careers of the future which they were supposed to be placed in in the past.

Yes, thank you. I think I've got less than two minutes actually, but anyway. I want to now end kind of with a slight warning about welfare conditionality. So this is some local labour markets data, because obviously we've had quite a depressing picture in the UK labour market since the pandemic. Our employment rate is lower than it was at its all-time high, our inactivity rate is higher. We've seen a massive rise in reported ill health in the workplace.

The temptation of successive governments in response to that, and I think Labour here is no different to the European public policy experience, is to respond to that by basically pushing for more conditionality. It's saying, right, OK, let's use the arms of government to get more people into work at all costs in any way to really drive up sanctions.

The evidence at a local level, and this is kind of preliminary, is that that's not quite right. That wouldn't necessarily achieve what we hope. So I've plotted here the proportion of jobs with low long-term prospects by local authority, and this one is the proportion of jobs with poor promotional training prospects over the next year.

And I've plotted that against job vacancies data on the left side there, which, well, Max Mosley in NEF has been very helpful in producing for and with me. And you see a really, really depressing picture here. So you've got a large concentration of labor markets right at the bottom here at the distribution. And these are places with low vacancies and also low job prospects.

Now, what is conditionality going to achieve for those workers? That's about one in four of people on universal credit live in those labor markets. So you're asking people in labor markets with low vacancies and with low quality work,

to be pushed into a job that may not work for them and may not lift them out of in-work poverty anyway. So that's the kind of foreboding story I want to leave you with. Apologies for the negativity. But now I want to say what to do about it. And I think there is a positive future, actually. I would say that we need to do more to address the deeper barriers keeping people trapped in work poverty. I think there's a link that the government needs to make

between social policy interventions and job quality. I think they've made good soundings on job quality, far more positive than in the previous 10 years. But you need to marry that with change, I think, in terms of the way that the DWP works, the way that conditionality works in labour markets.

You need to focus on improving job quality. You need to invest in demand-side interventions in those labour markets, not just supply-side. You've got to think about actually investing into good work. And then you need what I would probably tentatively call muscular jobs brokerage. There's probably a better term for it. But that would be a more activist approach, not just by DWP, but at a local level.

to actually support people and give them kind of employee-oriented, worker-oriented support to get them into good careers. So that's what I will end with. But yeah, very keen to take questions, and hopefully that ends on a slightly positive note. So yeah, excellent.

Thank you, Tom. That is great. So more ideas about the way forward. But before I let you have your turn, I'd like to introduce our third speaker, Abhija Chandra, Principal Policy Advisor at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the UK's leading anti-poverty charity. She leads a programme on care, family and relationship and has previously worked at both the Trussell Trust and the Citizens Advice Trust.

Brilliant. Thanks so much. And so brilliant to see such a full room to talk about poverty in the UK. It's yeah, it's really heartening. So I'm not an academic, so I'm trying to sort of offer some of the sort of real world analysis and thinking and some of the politics of this as well.

So I work at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Just briefly, we are a funder and a think tank and we do things like fund some of the work that Tom was actually talking about, which is great, as well as kind of anchor studies on kind of the nature of poverty today. And I focus on sort of care, work and family within that. I wanted to put this graph in this deck just to

just to kind of briefly think about kind of why an organisation that cares about a sort of, you know, a better future transitioning to a future free from poverty, you know, why do we care about care and work? I think we've heard a bit about why work is important and a little bit about care as well from Abigail. But I

thought that this was really helpful but there's actually a dual reason um so i'll talk about that in a second but um what you can see uh on this slide which is from our latest uk poverty report is that um actually for the last um 20 years uh sorry the the axis at the bottom has been taken off um but for the last 20 years children have been far and above the group that has been at

biggest risk of poverty in our society. And that is because children cost, well, it's a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that when you have children, it makes it much less likely that you'll be able to work. And also children cost money to raise. And those are kind of two broad reasons. But the other thing that I would like to just draw people's attention to is the green line. So what you'll see is that the number for pensioners, these relative measures,

the number for pensioners has really dramatically reduced. So to the question at the beginning, the Mentimeter question, you know, is it possible to end poverty? Well, if you look at the numbers for pensioners, actually, we have done an incredible job. The policy response...

to addressing pensioner poverty in this country has been incredible. And the main reason that that has happened is because cash transfers, so basically social insurance and welfare benefits to pensioners have kept up with the cost of living and have become more generous over time. At the same time that the kind of equivalent support for working age pensioners

adults and their children has not kept up with the pace of the cost of living and has reduced in generosity in different areas. So I thought that that is very helpful, even though I don't necessarily know if we can end poverty in the short term. I do think we can see really good examples of where policy has addressed it.

The other reason we care about care is looking at another dimension of care, so care for working age and elderly people. We know that for similar reasons, because you can't work and you're out of the labour force for a long time, doing unpaid care, so for a spouse or a

parent or in some cases a disabled child can really drive you into poverty. So this is just another graph from GRF research which shows that people looking after children and people looking after sort of working age or elderly people also see much higher rates of moving into poverty than the general population.

Actually, before I come to that. And so I would say I'm going to talk now about sort of care, childcare, other care systems that are trying to mitigate the impact of

primarily sort of being out of the labor market but really that there is another dimension which is really important maybe we can get in to in discussion which is around welfare benefits and and cash uh transfers to people i mean the best way to take someone out of poverty is to put money in their pockets um and uh that that is um yeah time and time again shown to be the thing that makes the most difference but today i'm going to be talking more about um a slightly kind of uh

indirect ways of getting people out of poverty, which is helping them into the labour market and supporting them while they are kind of in periods out of work. So I'll talk briefly about childcare first. So you might know that in the UK there has been a

a big injection of funding into the childcare system to basically offer it to more people. But there are some concerns there as well, which I won't go into here, but particularly around the impact on disadvantaged families, because a lot of the support is going to go primarily to the sort of upper tertials of kind of our kind of income distribution.

And that's because we think childcare has two key kind of reasons for being a sort of poverty-fighting system. The first is that it helps parents work, and the second is that it helps children learn and addresses some of the inequalities in the earliest years that Abigail was talking about and actually keeping the very poorest outside of that system, which the kind of expansion which the government does kind of has...

that doesn't help the poorest children because of that.

And at JRF, we think and I think that childcare is fundamentally a public service. As I said, it helps children learn in the earliest years. That has massive impacts in the future. There's been quite a few evaluations now of Sure Start, which was a really important programme in the last couple of decades, which included childcare, but also included other support services. And only now are we seeing the kind of incredible benefit that that did to children who were part

it so childcare is a public service and it should be run to serve the public good and that means um it should be accessible affordable it should be linked to other services it should be good quality these are all things that we should expect from a childcare system um and a childcare system which tackles disadvantage and we have some work on that um which uh

you can dig into more if you're interested, that there are other ways to close the disadvantage gap using sort of childcare and family policy. So higher standards in the childcare sector. So I've written about how currently the childcare system has elements of, you know, areas that are very extractive. So some of the business models of childcare providers care more about profit than they do about the education and quality of the childcare. So that's something that we need to tackle, I would say, through better sort of

higher standards and conditions on childcare providers. We should also think about whether we could change how we fund and pay for childcare to make it fairer. So currently we have a sort of block amount of hours which everyone who's in work can get and everyone who's not in work basically can't get. What would a means-tested system where basically you pay what you can afford, what would that look like? We have that system in Ireland, we have that system in other countries in Europe as well and yet childcare

We we focus on a different way of doing things. What is the impact that that could have? And research, which we're actually working on with Tom, is showing that that would really improve the number of parents which are looking for work and being in work.

And then finally, childcare is one really crucial node of this. But most care is actually done, as we know, in the home. And it's done sort of around work. So how can we make sort of work more caring? So we've been doing lots of work on paternity leave, particularly because that has a sort of twin benefit of obviously helping, you know, women go into the labour market, but also changing the balance of care.

in the earliest years so that we try and turn it into less of a gendered issue and there's some really good evidence that that is the case there and there's loads more there around how we can make work more caring so how do we have better leave policies for other kinds of caring as well

And then the second the second that I'd like to talk about is the kind of unpaid carer element. So we know that from research that we've done at the Joseph Ranchi Foundation, that a million more of us are going to be caring in the next 10 years. And our systems and our sort of expectations are not sort of set up for that.

because what unpaid caring means, as I've just talked about, is higher rates of poverty. It also has a massive impact on people's well-being. I speak to carers every week who have incredibly difficult experiences, very lonely experiences, caring, and that's not even including the sort of, you know, impact of being for years and years out of the labour market. So this is a slightly complicated situation

but this pulls together what we think needs to be done to address sort of poverty on the sort of unpaid caring side. So...

So there are four dimensions, the first being work. So how do we have flexible kind of work as standard with breaks and paid care leave, which I've just spoken about. Obviously, sort of benefits and social security. We need to make sure that it's preventing care poverty, but also meeting the additional cost of caring. And there's some really good work being done by an organization called Carers UK on how you can do that in the near term, how you can sort of build towards a settlement there.

And then paid care services. So talked a bit about childcare. I mean, social care is arguably like even more broken. And it's a system that people have tried and failed to fix time and time again. But if we had proper paid care services that you could rely on, then people would need much less to take on caring responsibilities themselves. And so there's a huge amount of work to be done there to actually create paid care services, which are affordable and available and good quality.

And finally, social networks. So this is kind of more emergent, but there's a lot of scholarship about how we could have, you know, better sort of care communities. So how neighbours could help with things like kind of emotional support, if not, you know, helping you kind of winch you out of bed. And people can definitely offer different kinds of support for kind of low intensity caring needs as well. So that's it. Thanks so much.

Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. Like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or, can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the event.

Okay, so another question for you now.

back on your menti meters if you if you wish to what's the highest priority having heard from our three speakers for moving a society towards a society free from poverty is it tackling intergenerational poverty is it improving work quality and work-life balance is it reducing care deficits child care unpaid care deficits and so on or is it something else that you're burning to tell us in

in the Q&A. Have a little think about that. In the room, there will be a roving mic, I think, coming round and on. Thank you. And do we have some questions online? Okay. So just whilst people are thinking about those different priorities...

interesting to see those coming in. Let's get a first round of questions from our online audience. I've got quite a few questions. I'll just read out three. Please.

The first one is from Jonathan. It's in developed countries, we are about to see a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth via inheritance. Can proper inheritance taxes be introduced to remove poverty as well as inequality? That's the first one. Thank you. And then from Yanis, we have can UBI be a policy solution and how feasible do you think it is as a solution?

And the third one from David Wood, who's chair of London Futurists. What impact do you expect on poverty from swift improvements in automation across multiple types of employment in the next five to ten years? If automation enables goods to be produced at much lower costs, could that significantly reduce poverty?

Lovely. Thank you very much indeed. So I'll come to our panel. I don't know, Abigail, whether you might want to possibly respond on inheritance, even though I know that's not what you were talking about directly. Well, I'd be very happy to talk about, well, a wealth tax and whether that could reduce poverty. Because one of the things I talked about was we need to provide a cushion so that young people can take risks.

And some people remember a child trust fund, which was originally going to be funded through a wealth tax, an inheritance tax. So it was a way of redistributing wealth from the wealthy who...

onto children so it would give them this cushion and we did some research where we found there was an asset effect in fact you only needed to have as a young adult have quite a small asset that would have a significant effect on your lives on your employment outcomes and your general well-being so I do think a wealth tax should be considered as a way of um um

opportunities from one generation to the next. Thanks. Tom, do you want to come in on automation perhaps? I don't know. Yeah. I could talk a bit about UBI as well. Please. Go ahead. So on automation, I think the evidence is

at the moment quite mixed. So, you know, I consistently read studies which say that you're going to see 30%, 50% of the labour market out of work in the next five to ten years. If you actually look at the data, employers which have adopted large language models have not seen, at the moment, a large rate of occupational change. So it seems to be a very different kind of revolution to the one that we've had before. And I'm not saying that won't happen, but I think that from a job quality perspective...

I'm quite interested in the question of if you're in a workplace with an LLM, how does that affect your job quality? How does that affect your well-being? How does that affect your outcomes? And I think there's dangers there in a lot of ways, especially if you see adoption at a more junior level and if people use it as a way to manage huge workloads.

suddenly that job becomes a less automate a less autonomous thing and it becomes a much more kind of um you know manual thing of less uh you're not able to actually think about your work you just become a copy and paste uh person who is taking an llm and then using that to exercise work and we've seen that in some cases cases recently here in the uk which i can talk about um and you're quite depressing so that's the automation point and on ubi i i kind of

There's a slight risk, I think, of subsidising low-quality work with a UBI. So that's the danger I'd kind of point to the question of. If you have a situation where there's an increasing amount of precarious work, where employers aren't paying people properly, where maybe people are in insecure contracts, variable wages...

I think there needs to be a solution to that that isn't just the state stepping in to absorb all that risk. I think that you need a bigger settlement between workers and the state and employers on that. I think there's also obviously a poverty risk with UBI that other panellists can talk a bit better about, which is that if you introduce a universal cash transfer, that's money that's not going to the poorest, and therefore it's money that won't reduce or eradicate poverty. So just a couple of thoughts on that. Thank you.

Yeah, that was one of the points I was going to make. Yeah, I think that there is a question about whether it is the best use of what we, I think, do need to, you know, address our finite sort of public resources. And I would say...

if what we want as the end goal is basically to reduce the risk that you were talking about, Abigail, I would say a comprehensive form of social insurance, so having out-of-work benefits and potentially in-work benefits, as we have with universal credit, that actually meet the basic cost of essentials, and then having leave policies, as I've suggested, which help sort of...

offer a buffer when you can't work for sort of short or potentially sort of longer periods I'd say that's that

That's the way to get the policy intention, which I think when people talk about UBI, they are talking about. My only other thought would be on wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, extremely, extremely unpopular. And I fear that we go around in circles when we talk about wealth taxes. I think, I mean, in my work on social care, I mean,

one of the only ways I think we are going to get a settlement on social care is if we solve the question of, you know, how do you tax people

assets to pay for care for the elderly and for a growing share of the population in an ageing society. And I think lots of work has shown that inheritance tax is, I think, not one that people would expect in the kind of simplistic way that we talk about it. Although there are other wealth taxes that would be much better contenders. So not to say that we shouldn't do it, but just let's remember that this is

a particular group of people with some thoughts and out there there's another debate going on. Well let's hear some more of those thoughts, thank you, in the room. Okay we can come down to the front here please and then here.

Can you just say your name and any affiliation? Thank you. I'm Nadina. So I'm just doing my Masters at London Business School. So thank you for the talk. They were really interesting. So one question I had is around a lot of policy proposals and kind of

things that we can do to kind of reduce poverty I see that a lot of them are long term in nature especially around like education improvement or intergenerational poverty and my question is really how can government really deal with making these long term decisions given that politics have become so reactive and it's so difficult to kind of

do things that may have a cost now but a massive benefit say 10 or 5 years down the line especially if their time in office is not even probably going to extend that far. Thank you very much. Just further along. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Ewan Grant, United Kingdom Defence Forum, but here in a personal capacity. Much of my radio and TV work has particularly been about the Ukraine war and connecting the apparently unconnected. The example I use, and have for many years, is without Idi Amin, there'd be no Benjamin Netanyahu.

So my question is, are there any apparently unconnected issues which impact on income and

essentially income inequality, but also asset inequality. The thing that I would particularly highlight, and I think Britain and the English-speaking countries generally have got very, very bad, is quite simply housing planning and that high cost of land, which makes it so expensive for everyone, including the provision of care facilities, because rents are...

basically almost a one-way way to make a lot of money for a small number of people. There was actually a Royal Commission on this in the fact few years which concluded we've got it all wrong. Thank you, thank you. Is there another question in the room before I return to the panel at the back there please? Just a flowery dress.

I'm from Chesca, just in a personal capacity. Hi, I'm Chesca, just in a personal capacity. I was wondering, particularly given the spending review last week, whether the increasing amount we're spending on health is actually having an impact on the resources we can allocate towards ending poverty, and whether you think there needs to be maybe a recalibration?

Okay, great. Thank you. So, Carol, three demanding questions. One on how do we make these long-term decisions in policy? Secondly, is spending on health detracting from spending on poverty relief? And thirdly, are there apparently unrelated policy areas, perhaps including housing and planning, that might turn out to be connected to poverty policy? Who'd like to...

kick off a response on any of those? I'm happy to. Go ahead, Abigail, thank you. Well, I mean, it is...

Of course, a problem that we always face, that early intervention really has the highest evidence, but it's very, very hard, isn't it, to have that early intervention because of the benefits come quite a long way down the line. Although I would say that actually tackling child poverty or parental poverty now has real benefits now. So you can think about what are the...

you know, the policy areas, you can identify the policy areas which are going to help you meet that long-term goal. We've got a government now thinking about the long-term, thinking about productivity, what investments do we need now? And I think some of this is how do you sell this? And again with inheritance tax, how do you sell this

to a public that might be reluctant. And so some of it is that. How do you make this case? And we did have a strong case made before, that children are innocent. So, you know, let's tackle child poverty. And I think there is a strong case that can be made about the long term, why it's important, but also thinking about what policies are going to have an earlier return, as it were, to help you get to the long term.

Well, health is critical and of course, you know, it's not really a trade-off, is it? I mean, health is a problem for children growing up in poverty. It's a problem for the parents who are poor and generally people suffering from poverty. So it's, you know, I wouldn't pick an either or. I'm not sure if...

Yeah, I mean, there are policy choices, always choices that need to be made about that. And I think related to what you're saying is about inequality versus poverty. So we did a big project...

Could be ten years ago now, led by John Hills, looking at the relationship between poverty and inequality. And it showed that the two were inextricably linked, exactly. Countries where there are high rates of poverty, high rates of inequality, you cannot tackle one without tackling the other. And we again looked at the mechanisms that might be driving that relationship between the two, funded by the James Rowntree Foundation.

So, yeah, we've got a report out on that. You can have a look at that. But, yeah, you cannot ignore inequality and just tackle poverty or the other way around. Abby? Yeah, second. Second to all of that. On health, I mean, I think there are some good sort of

pieces of discourse around trying to talk about the social determinants of health so I would really say it really isn't an either or obviously when it comes to the balance sheet it does end up being an either or and health has taken a much much bigger slice of the pie but I think that is more to do with

i'd say slightly short-sighted um like policy making because at the same time the government is uh pushing through sort of five billion pounds worth of um disability cuts which we know um will have a massive impact on the health of those people and also and for those people who need care of their carers as well whose benefits are also being cut so um it's not to say that you know the government doesn't have to make tough choices i think that's really important for for us to um you

to acknowledge, but you do get the sense that sometimes I think the politics and the policy are not in lockstep or are maybe too much in lockstep. And I'm sorry, my only other thought was to your question. This is slightly random, but just thought it's important, as you said, you know, the cost of land. Random thoughts are often the best ones. Exactly. Brilliant. I hope so. I thought...

I think local government finance is really important here. So the face of the state that we tend to think about is not actually the national government, it's local government. And when we talk about the decline of trust in state institutions, it's often because of potholes or because your local council helpline or something doesn't pick up or hasn't for many years. And one of the reasons that is is because of systematic decline

government underfunding of local governments and also the inability of local governments to raise their own kind of revenue because council tax is such a broken tax and I think this seems to come around every few years this debate but I

That's obviously intrinsically linked to the value of houses as well. One of the reasons that council tax hasn't been reformed is because it would screw over a bunch of people whose houses have massively increased in value. Anyway, and so it's also becoming many things I think always seem to come back to social care. But social care is one of the reasons why social care also hasn't been tackled is because of the sort of broken local government funding settlement. And actually what we're already seeing and what we're going to see

over the next few years, unless government has a solid answer to solve that problem, is the decline of those local government institutions and further decline in trust as well, as more councils go bankrupt, as more services are cut to the bone, libraries get closed, etc. That's what really loses trust, I think, in the sort of public sphere.

I'm going to ask you to hold on to your thoughts, Tom, if I may. So we'll just try and fit in one last round. We've got one in the room and I think there are a couple online. Yes. Hello, I am Jane. I am an LSE alumni. I think a lot of what you have spoken kind of coincides with the situation in Mauritius. We have a lot of child poverty. We have low level of pensioners' poverty because we have a universal basic pension. But for me, the question relates to how do we intervene the most effectively to reduce poverty?

Sometimes we place a lot of burden on the government and the state for social intervention, for cash transfers, but this is not sustainable in the long run with pressures like ageing population and also whatever priorities the government have. I think there is a kind of intervention that we need

especially for people who are vulnerable to poverty, to kind of break the gap of this intergenerational transmission, this empowerment of people, which is often done at NGOs level or civil society level with people who are working directly with the people. I think you also mentioned that you meet carers.

I think we need, maybe what are your thoughts about this need to come with an empowerment of people living in poverty so as to focus on them rather than just focusing on states or, you know, like a top-down level? Thank you. Okay, and a couple online, were there? Okay.

A question from Neil. Are marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities adequately included in government policy plans to reduce poverty? And from Jonathan, should we address the massive costs of care for pensioners as well as care for children? Both are unaffordable and so causing poverty and suffering for millions.

Thank you very much. OK, panel, you're going to need to be really concise in your responses because we're nearly up against time. But we've got questions about whether there needs to be an empowerment agenda for people in poverty, whether policies are sufficiently taking account of marginalised groups, for example, some ethnic minorities.

tackling the cost of care for pensioners as well as for children. Tom? Yeah, so just briefly, I think the empowerment point is really crucial when you look at people's relationship with the welfare system when they're out of work or when they're trying to negotiate better work arrangements. Surely that is what policy does need and when I talk about conditionality that's partly what I'm saying really, I strongly agree with you, is there is a potential for a kind of

a different way in which active market policy works, which is more empowering for workers. And there's signs that the government here at least recognise that. I mean, they do want to shift away from DWP-led jobs brokerage to more local-led jobs brokerage. And there are signs that they recognise that what's happened over the past 15 years hasn't worked. So I think there's potential there for something if it's acted upon. Yeah, I think I'll probably leave it up there because I'm really conscious of time. Thank you, Tom. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, on fixing high care costs. That's definitely a massive driver of economic insecurity that we've found. And on...

ethnic minorities, there's a much broader bit of work which JRF did and we published last year which looks at kind of ethnic minorities and poverty and it definitely shows that in the labour market and when it comes to sort of at the family level, there are very deep systemic effects there that definitely require more thinking and yeah, we'd really urge government to do that thinking. And on empowerment really briefly, we currently have a cabinet which is I think

one of the most diverse cabinets in terms of class. And so you would hope that we do have some recognition of some of the...

quite a large recognition of some of the issues we're talking about and yet still we aren't seeing um potentially the change we want so that that does point to you know broader questions around um the kind of fiscal situation we have um the political opposition which abigail mentioned as well to some of the changes we need so i think this really is about a kind of different movement um maybe that comes from empowerment maybe it comes from something else i i don't know

Thank you very much. Thank you, online audience. Thank you, audience in the room. I'm sorry that we didn't get around quite all of the questions, but this is really just the beginning of a debate this week. I hope you'll participate in many other during the next few days. Thank my panel again, Abhi Duchenne, Abigail McKnight, Tom Stevens, and thank you all very much for coming. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE Events soon.