Philippa Stroud, who was Iain Duncan Smith’s closest lieutenant through much of his time in government, has set up a commission of experts to develop new poverty measures to act as a counterweight to the cost-cutting orthodoxy of the Treasury.
Lady Stroud now runs the Centre for Social Justice – the charity she helped Duncan Smith to set up in 2004, when the Conservatives were in opposition. She has assembled an independent, cross-party group of academics and campaigners, who will be given 18 months to agree new poverty metrics.
Members include former Lib Dem schools minister David Laws; Paul Gregg, of Bath University, who advised Gordon Brown on welfare-to-work policy; and Helen Barnard, of anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Stroud, who previously worked in refuges for addicts and the homeless, hopes the work of this social metrics commission, which is being watched closely by her former colleagues in government, could provide a tool for ministers trying to argue against spending cuts that could hit the poor.
Throughout her time in government, she felt frustrated at the difficulty of providing a rigorous response to the Treasury’s calculations of the upfront savings that could be made from trimming the welfare budget, Stroud told the Guardian. “When you came up to the big fiscal events, all the decisions were made predominantly through an economic lens,” she said. “On economic decisions, if the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and independently the Institute for Fiscal Studies [IFS] took a rough economic position that was aligned, then there were very few challenges to it.” She added: “There was no such rigour of thinking on the social policy decisions.”
Eventually, she hopes the commission’s work could form the basis for a permanent institute to rival the powerful IFS, whose verdict on budgets and spending reviews is dreaded by ministers.
Measuring poverty has become a cause of intense political controversy in recent years. The government faced a backlash from campaigners, and a revolt in the House of Lords, when it sought to switch from income-based measurements of child poverty to other indicators of “life chances”, such as education levels, and whether a child lives in a workless household.
Stroud believes both income and other factors, such as family breakdown, should be included in the new metrics. She said that during her time in government “sensible people on the left were saying to me, it’s about incomes, but it’s also about other things: family breakdown, lack of skills, no education, addiction or mental health, personal indebtedness, worklessness, all of this. And people on the right would say, it’s also about these other things, but do you know what, it’s also about income.
“It cannot be beyond the wit of man to bring those two together and to actually come up with something that a government could actually use, that incentivised the right behaviours for government, incentivised the right behaviours for people in disadvantaged backgrounds, and genuinely tracked a group of vulnerable people, that we were concerned about, and who without any other form of external intervention, were not going to move.”
Gregg said he hoped the group, independent of government, could come up with an authoritative set of indicators. He said: “You’re never going to move George Osborne, but it could operate as something like the millennium development goals: these are the challenges, this is what policy should be focused on.”
Duncan Smith resigned from the government days after the March budget, which juxtaposed controversial cuts to personal income payments for disabled people – which the government quickly had to drop – with reductions in capital gains tax, which is predominantly levied on the wealthy.
In his resignation letter, he said there had been “too much emphasis on money-saving exercises and not enough awareness from the Treasury, in particular, that the government’s vision of a new welfare-to-work system could not be repeatedly salami-sliced”.
