A just society

Keir Starmer

Too many people in Britain today are struggling to make ends meet, held back by jobs that don’t pay enough; don’t provide enough hours, job security, or employment rights; and rising bills for rent, food and childcare. Britain’s families are working, but Britain isn’t working for those families. For years we have been told that work is the best route out of poverty but the truth for millions of households is that they cannot earn enough to reach a decent standard of living.

State support has been stripped away. Disabled people have been subjected to the most appalling indignity in a drive to rob them of the support to which they have a right. Our National Health Service does a fantastic job but it is starved of the resources it needs to meet the challenges of today, let alone meet the needs of tomorrow. It is a national scandal that in 2020, the year child poverty was meant to have ended, a child born in Glasgow is likely to die nearly a decade earlier than a child born in Kensington, and that gap is growing not diminishing. And rather than our schools focussing on preparing the next generation to thrive in a world of opportunity, teachers and parents are finding their classrooms bare of the basic equipment.

Our communities are strong, but they are being let down by a government that doesn’t believe in a society where we all have mutual responsibilities to each other, knowing that ill health, ageing, disability and hard times can – and mostly will – affect us all at some point in our lives. Our public services and social security system, largely built by successive Labour Governments, have been torn apart by successive Tory governments which still hark back to a model where competition is valued over co-operation and the market is supposed to sort everything out. The result? Sure Start Centres have been decimated since 2010, the number of rough sleepers has increased by more than 165%, food bank use has multiplied and local services have been run dry. Knife crime has increased year on year since 2015. An estimated 77 vulnerable older people a day die waiting for support they’ve requested from a social care system which is in permanent crisis.  Our depleted police services and emergency departments are picking up the pieces of a broken system. Anyone trying to access mental health or social care services faces an agonising process causing human suffering.

The organisations that gave our people and communities a voice have been held back, powers to represent workers have been taken away from trade unions, and funding abandoned for our places. Since 2010, 500 libraries have closed, 600 youth centres, 1000 children’s centres. People see and feel the loss of their local pub and shop closing down, and step-by-step, the place they belong to feels neglected.

This is why we need to devolve power, wealth and opportunity out of Westminster and into the hands of local communities. The best way to ensure we get the services that we need is if they are locally accountable with investment going into public services and community organisations with protections against privatisation.

Not only do we believe there is such a thing as society, but we believe it is the glue that binds us together. As human beings we are given purpose by the work we do, nurtured by the family and relationships we care about the most, rooted in the places we live and the communities we belong to. We need a government that recognises and respects this, and we need a strong, just and equal society to sustain it.

My vision

There is a long way to go until the next general election. But in this leadership campaign I want set out the direction of policy that I believe we will need by 2024, for a radical Labour government that can deliver a just society well into the 2030s.

Make the nation’s wellbeing as important as economic growth

• Set a national goal for wellbeing to make health as important as GDP. We can learn from examples around the world including in New Zealand. The idea that economic growth alone will solve society’s ills and make us all prosper is wrong and outdated. We need to create a healthy society where everyone can thrive, with government, employers and citizens all playing our part together.

• Invest in early years services and radically shift resources to a preventative approach. As well as boosting the NHS, we need to invest in non-health services which impact on physical and mental health and life chances, including a new generation of social housing so everyone can live in a decent, affordable home. Too many children grow up facing trauma that has a dramatic impact on their future lives as it affects their emotional and cognitive development. This includes children witnessing or being subject to violence in the home, being brought up by parents with mental ill health or drug and alcohol dependency without adequate support.  There is ample evidence that tackling adverse childhood experiences dramatically reduces inequality by improving a child’s future life chances including in education, employment, health and life expectancy.  This approach must be central to our wellbeing agenda.

• Devolve powers and resources to harness the vibrancy in local communities so that public services can best meet people’s needs, and give people a say in the kind of support they want. For example, the Co-op Councils model is a network of over 30 Labour councils piloting models of service-user or community control, demonstrating dramatic improvements in services and outcomes. There are other examples too: Barking and Dagenham’s ‘Everyone Every Day’ model of community empowerment and Preston’s community wealth building. Plymouth has over 30 community energy co-ops. The Greater Manchester Model, pools funding and investment so individuals access all the public services they need such as through GPs; people who are unemployed or have a disability or mental health condition can access specialist services such as talking therapies, skills training, employment support.

• Increase the ability of communities and citizens to participate in healthy, vibrant places by investing in community-led organisations and give them real powers such as introducing a Public Right to Control unused buildings or community assets, and encourage the creation of new cooperative platforms for the digital age. For example, Digital Partnership Agreements allow community led organisations to access public digital platforms and enable the creation of platform cooperatives.

Make good jobs the goal of government policy

• Government can and should set the rules for businesses. We should incentivise good quality jobs by driving out the bad employers – for example day one employment rights – and reward the good – for example using business grants to incentivise good employment practice in targeted growth sectors; insist that companies winning big public contracts provide jobs and training for unemployed local people; and incentivise job security through taxation.

• Make sure everyone has the basic reading, writing, maths and digital skills they need for work and life. For example, a second chance career fund and boosting union learning.

• Make sure that work always pays via social security – for example, increase work allowances to stop benefits being withdrawn so quickly once someone earns, as well as honouring 2019 manifesto commitment to mitigate worst features of Universal Credit whilst its replacement is developed.

Create a social security system with dignity, justice and compassion at its heart

• Scrap the inhuman Work Capability Assessments and private provision of disability assessments, pledge to scrap punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.

• End destitution and the rise of foodbanks by ensuring that benefit gaps, sanctions and debt recovery do not push people into destitution, and people in need have access to local services.

• Scrap Universal Credit and create a social security system fit for the 21^st century with compassion and justice as its founding principles, giving people a say over the kind of support they receive, instead of forcing them onto programmes that don’t meet their needs or trapping them in poverty. For example, Oldham has piloted a model of tailored welfare support that allowed benefits recipients to take decisions about how funding available to support them would be used, and they took radically different decisions as a result.