Local Authorities (Social Equality Audits)

15:33:00

Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab)
I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require local authorities to collate and publish specified social, economic and other data on an annual basis; and for connected purposes.

The debate about social inequality is beset by stereotypes and simplification. Sometimes stereotypes give us an indication of the truth, but they frequently conceal more than they reveal. So, we hear a lot about the north-south divide, and unemployment and incapacity benefit figures are frequently portrayed exclusively in terms of decayed former industrial communities in the north or in the Welsh valleys. Sometimes Tower Hamlets is contrasted with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in what is frequently described as a tale of two cities, revealing the stark divide in average incomes, house prices and life expectancy.

Such attention is broadly welcome because it highlights the continuing extent—and in some ways the worsening or intensification—of the toxin of inequality. It is even more corrosive than poverty, in its own insidious way, as has been so well documented by academics such as Richard Wilkinson. Inequality damages health, undermines community cohesion and is now understood to be more closely correlated with crime than poverty itself.

Inequality is poorly understood. Last year’s report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation confirmed that people’s knowledge about inequality is limited, and attitudes are complex, ambiguous and apparently contradictory. In turn, policy makers know little about how the perceptions people have are formed, or changed. We could simply choose to ignore the ramifications of inequality, precisely because public attitudes are complex and contradictory. But by doing so, we would be turning our backs on a very real problem. Over the past 20 years a consistently large majority of people have considered the gap between rich and poor to be too large, and only a small minority of people feel that the Government are doing too much to address the problem.

My Bill is intended to make a small contribution to increasing awareness and understanding of social inequality. I seek broadly to mirror the important work done by primary care trusts in their annual public health reports, which have come into their own in recent years as an essential source of data about health inequalities. By requiring all local authorities to produce an annual audit, based on a core basket of indicators, I would hope to achieve three things. First, I would like to get beyond stereotypes, whether of the north-south divide kind, or the Tower Hamlets versus Kensington and Chelsea variety. The reality is far more complex than such stereotypes would have us believe and generalisations limit understanding, not deepen it.

Secondly, I hope that the process of producing and publishing annual audits would generate interest and debate among local policy makers, the media and others, precisely because the information would be local. Of course, there are no guarantees that such interest would sharpen the focus on deprivation and inequality, but it would certainly offer communities a set of tools to hold policy makers to account. That is certainly the experience of PCTs and public health reports in recent years.

Thirdly, requiring a core set of indicators that apply to all authorities would enable more specific comparisons between small areas across the country. It would also promote a wider and more interesting debate nationally about the causes of inequality and social deprivation.

I confess to a personal stake in this issue. The local councils that make up my constituency—Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea—consistently come near to the top of national league tables for wealth and income. The prosperity of Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea, where some councillors think that international bankers constitute a “hard to reach group”, masks the fact that, as recent reports have confirmed, the Mozart estate in Queen’s Park in my constituency is the most deprived neighbourhood in the whole country, and Westbourne ward has the country’s highest proportion of children in workless households. But I—and my colleagues in other areas with generally affluent average figures—struggle to get the implications of that understood locally and nationally, and families and pensioners living in poor neighbourhoods in such areas lose out in consequence.

Local authority social equality audits would be based on existing sources of data. I am not seeking to saddle councils with major new duties in collecting and analysing information, but to bring the vast array of data already buried in the vaults—locally and nationally—blinking into the light.

What would be included? Obviously, I would want short profiles of all neighbourhoods, which currently stay anonymously labelled as “super output areas” buried in the Office for National Statistics. Which are the most prosperous areas and which the poorest? We already have information on employment levels, and the number of children in workless households—that is, families surviving on less than £10 per day for fuel, food, clothing and treats. I would want to include data that exist but are unpublished, collected in school information profiles. League tables offer us information on key stage results and useful, though poorly understood, contextualised added value, but they should be complemented by the information that we hold on all schools about free school meal entitlements and other proxies for deprivation.

Harsh words about school performance miss the target when the breathtaking variations we see in school intake receive so little attention. It would also be useful to include information on benefits and services delivered by local authorities, including housing benefit and take-up of child care and out-of-school services. That would enable more informed discussions about local welfare-to-work policies, the impact of local authority charging policies and so on.

Audits would not be exclusively about ward or neighbourhood data, either, but would include local authority rankings on key deprivation indicators and proxies for deprivation, such as substandard housing, overcrowding and homelessness. Of course, as has proved to be the case with PCT public health reports, it would be good to see themes emerge and to see priorities set from year to year between different communities that reflect local circumstances so that audits become dynamic tools, complementing and informing local area agreements and council decision-making processes.

Information does not by itself make wrongs right. Information can be powerful and can do harm if abused or used partially or selectively, yet the alternative is far worse. We should no more be ignorant about poverty and inequality than we should be about climate change or any of the other great issues of our time. By offering local communities, policy makers and the media clearly presented and comparative data, we might not get all of the right answers but we might at least ensure that people are asking the right questions.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill ordered to be brought in by Ms Karen Buck, Mr. Iain Duncan Smith, Mr. David Blunkett, Mr. Frank Field, Simon Hughes, Fiona Mactaggart, Mr. Gary Streeter, Martin Salter, Mr. Terry Rooney, Clive Efford, Lyn Brown and John Battle.

Local Authorities (Social Equality Audits)

Ms Karen Buck accordingly presented a Bill to require local authorities to collate and publish specified social, economic and other data on an annual basis; and for connected purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 17 October, and to be printed [Bill 122].