Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Unity has been having a go at me over my comments when I linked to them yesterday. I’d like to make a (slightly rushed) response.

The Stats

The first section of the post is taking me to task for my use of the word ‘exponential’, which I accept was inaccurate and unnecessary hyperbole (which should really be obvious since we would have had to have seen an exponential rise in population along with it – back to ‘human beings are a virus’). The stats, as was discussed in the comments under my now-corrected post, show a decline in teenage pregnancy rates over the last 2 decades, with a 3 year ‘bump’ in late 90’s.

At the same time, the amount of school-aged girls becoming pregnant has not significantly decreased – it came down by about 1% across the decade (’97-’07; 2.5% since ’98). What the Labour government has achieved with their investments and their schemes and their strategies is to just about keep the amount of girls getting pregnant steady, whilst population increases have brought the rates down.

This whole statistics debate is, of course, a simple way of sidelining the actual issue of the negative effects of teenage pregnancy. I did ask if anybody could point me to a study showing teenage pregnancies as being good for society, but so far nobody has come forward. Therefore I’m not going to change my position that a high teenage pregnancy rate is bad for a society and is worth tackling. Britain has a high pregnancy rate – the highest in Europe – and it hasn’t changed anywhere near significantly enough under Labour to absolve them of criticism nor justify the condescending rubbish of describing anyone who speaks out against them as a ‘bully’.

Blaming The Tories

Unity blames the ’96-’99 bump on John Major’s Conservative Party. I can’t help but wonder ‘so what?’ I’m perfectly willing to believe it is all John Major’s fault if that’s the way the evidence points. Unfortunately, seeing as I was 12 when New Labour came to power, such a historical argument bears no relevance whatsoever to the modern debate, as far as I can tell. The problem is not why have we got a high teenage pregnancy rate, it’s what are we doing to change it.

Quite frankly I don’t give a damn how bad John Major’s government was. In this debate it is ancient history, and it serves nobody to go on about it. I’m concerned about the fact that the current Government is failing to beat this issue. To have just about managed to return to the mid-nineties rate after 12 years is frankly rubbish – and the more recent trend is back upwards, with numbers and rates increasing in 2007.

Besides, if, as Unity argues, the huge reductions in teenage pregnancies from the early 1990’s are largely thanks to HIV scares, why, when according to ONS “diagnoses of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and infectious syphilis have more than doubled since 1995”, and HIV diagnoses have shot up in the past decade, have we not seen anything like such a precipitous fall under Labour as we did in the early 90’s? And why hasn’t the rate continued to plummet as the sexually transmitted diseased grow ever more widespread?

I’m just asking. Because, you know, Unity said it was all about the STDs.

Welfare Dependency

Apparently I’m “wrong, and fundamentally so, in [my] understanding of the psychological and sociological dynamics of teenage pregnancy and, more generally, of the role of the welfare state.”

In this, there are two myths that need to be challenged and overthrown, the first of which is the myth than suggests that people actively choose to live on welfare benefits – which the vast majority of them don’t. Living on the pitiful sums that we pay out to individuals and families in order to keep the wolf from the door is NOT an active choice, its something that people resort to when they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have no other viable choices open to them, or at least nothing by way of an alternative that would improve their lives sufficiently to make it worth their while.

Unity says that benefits culture is a myth, and that there’s no living to be made on the state – a hand up, not a hand out and so on. Apparently, the concept of welfare dependency is the symptom, not the cause. You’ll find no disagreement from me that that this is how it should be, but in my own experience1, under the current government that isn’t the reality.

I have a confession to make: I claimed Housing Benefit while I was at university. I was only a hair’s breadth from being included in the teenage pregnancy statistics – my daughter was born when I was 20 and my wife was 19 (and not my wife at the time, either). Who knows, we might even be on Unity’s graph in the ’05 column.

The thing is, I had a choice about whether to take the benefits – I can’t be entirely certain, but I’m pretty sure that if myself and my wife had held part time jobs like most students do (naturally, ensuring we were never working at the same time as each other), we could have afforded to house, clothe and feed our daughter and also pay for university. It wouldn’t really have been too hard. And yet, we took benefits from the state instead, and for a very good reason. Had we chosen to work, those benefits would have been reduced in line with our earnings. Working would have been leaving money on the table. There is precisely zero incentive to do so. By claiming benefits I could spend more time with my daughter.

Were I a better man, I could have told Gordon Brown to sod off. On balance, with no incentive to work I was far happier to spend my time with my daughter, and I wouldn’t blame anyone else for doing exactly the same thing. In fact, I would expect them to.

What’s far scarier, though, was that after university finished, we were still entitled to most of that money. We could still claim a myriad of benefits – in fact, in our situation, one of us earning minimum wage in an unskilled job would have very nearly cost us money.

I’m a believer in the idea that most people want to achieve success. I know I do. And when I found a job which paid me just about enough money to support my family I took it immediately – as I’m sure the majority of people in my situation would. I can’t help but wonder, though: what if I didn’t have the degree I needed to get that reasonably well-paid job? What if Kayleigh had been born 18 months earlier and we’d not gone to university? What if I didn’t have the example of my successful and extremely supportive parents to live up to?

That possibility of earning as much by not working as I would in unskilled labour would seem awfully tempting, wouldn’t it? And that’s where the welfare dependency problem comes in. That’s where it becomes an issue. What was previously a perfectly good and reasonable ‘safety net’ for those who are suffering difficulties (a concept I certainly agree with) gradually becomes a powerful disincentive to being a productive member of society.

In the weeks and months and years it can take to find work which pays significantly better than the benefits, it grows increasingly easier to become disenfranchised, to become dependent on the hand outs, until it’s harder to return to work than it is to scrape by on the state. People don’t choose this path or decide to live the rest of their lives on benefits. The path is laid out in front of them and every step along it makes it harder to turn back.

And if children grow up in a house where the money comes from the state, where will their inspiration come from to break out of that mould and achieve something great for themselves? Particularly when they aren’t able to go to the best school in the area regardless of their abilities, because they live in the poorer part of town and there’s no selection system for entry. When their teachers are busy jumping through hoops put there by OFSTED instead of encouraging their children to excel.

Tom Harris wasn’t bullying young mothers at all – he was bullying the society which makes it so easy for young mothers to become young grandmothers without their sons and daughters ever hoping to grow up and achieve great things. Focusing on the 16 year old mother is forgetting the baby, and the baby is the important one.

Conclusions

All of this started because I linked to a post I fundamentally disagreed with. If you’re unfamiliar with my blog, most of my posts are simply links to other sites I have found interesting, with a comment or two from me saying what I agree or disagree with or why I think it’s worthwhile having a look at. In this case, I included one poorly considered sentence which has provoked 1,500 words of statistical analysis2. I offered no solutions, I gave no alternate plans, and I didn’t intend to say any more on the matter – although I’m delighted to have furthered the debate. If I were to start looking for ideas to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy, however, I would be tempted to begin by looking at the ‘Broken Britain’ report from Iain Duncan Smith.

In the report, IDS convincingly argued that it was the family which was the key to breaking the cycle of welfare dependency – not in the Victorian ‘values’ sense which I have little time for myself – but in the idea that parents with aspirations will have aspirational children. That the spiral could be made an upward one instead of a downward one, if the upside down organisation of the benefits system could be straightened out and made to encourage people to succeed, not tempt them to fail. That’s the kind of approach I can get behind.

I think schools can do more, too. I would return to selection by ability in schools, so that the best state schools are not the preserve of those who can afford to live near them. It shouldn’t necessarily have to take the form of ‘all the brightest kids in one school, all the least capable in the other’ of previous times, but a meritocratic approach is needed. The comprehensive education system, with its decks stacked against the poorer kids from the start, only encourages what Unity calls ‘Welfare Despondency’. Regardless of how bright my daughter is, the school she goes to will only be decided by the area I can afford to live in – and that’s a bitter pill to swallow3.

Reading Unity’s post back, I realise that we agree in several places – that a lack of options for many young people is the beginning of the problem, and that this cycle needs to be broken. Unity’s solution, however, seems to be ‘more of the same, but with more money’ where I think a fundamentally different slant is needed. Start from the acknowledgment that the current situation is unsustainable and not improving, and work on removing the bottlenecks which are encouraging the problem to worsen.

Children should be shown, not just told, that they can achieve whatever they want to achieve, and that’s an area in which Labour have utterly failed. To me, that’s the message that’s being missed amid the endless graphs and statistics.

  1. Being not a political researcher nor a welfare worker, personal experience mixed with logic is all I have to offer. I hope you don’t mind. [↩]
  2. and that’s just in the comments thread! [↩]
  3. It is, of course, also a convincing incentive to succeed – but I’d rather have children judged on merit than on the ambition of their parents. [↩]