"Inevitably a lot of the talk this week will be about the economy and how we sort things out for the future.
Much of the attention is on the financial markets.
But we must not forget Britain’s social challenges.
The difficulties that many people are facing because of the current economic problems.
And the people who have been left behind over the past decade.
We already have millions of people trapped in a life of benefit dependency and worklessness, even though millions of migrant workers have come to Britain and found work. It just makes no sense.
Britain is a country where too many young people don’t experience the support of their family as they grow up and end up finding a perverse kind of security in the gangs on our streets.
It’s a country where many children start school barely able to string a sentence together, having never seen a book, never eaten a meal with a knife and fork and they end up trailing far behind right through their school years.
It’s a country where you can walk a few hundred yards from a thriving city centre and find entire streets where virtually no one is working.
All of this has to change.
There seems to be an assumption, particularly on the left, that this is just the way things are. Well I don’t think that’s good enough.
Over the next ninety minutes we’re going to take you through some of the challenges we face, with the help of people both inside and outside our Party who see the problems at first hand.
We’ll share with you our experience of some of the people and projects that are helping to make a difference.
And we’ll tell you how we’re going to start to fix things.
I’ve spent the past year visiting deprived areas around the country, and local community groups trying to tackle the problems they face.
I’ve talked to people struggling on benefits, others trying to break free of drug addiction, and teenagers playing truant from school.
And I’ve come away with one clear conclusion. No one belongs on a scrapheap. They are people who can and should be helped to make more of their lives.
Britain cannot afford another generation of social decline, of the waste of individual skills lost in the benefit trap, of young people caught up in a life of alienation, sometimes crime and violence.
For me, there are three particular social challenges that must be addressed. I’ve made speeches about each of them in the past few months – and it’s on those problems in particular that I want to focus our discussion in the next few minutes.
The first is about how we address the issue of disaffected and alienated young men in Britain today.
Lacking a sense of responsibility and involvement.
It’s not just about gangs on street corners.
It’s about young men growing older with no clear understanding of how they can carve themselves a positive role in life.
Becoming fathers in name but not fathers in action. Struggling to find worthwhile work, if indeed they are looking for work at all.
Getting sucked into crime and antisocial behaviour.
Developing mental health problems. Sometimes becoming homeless.
In too many places, in too many communities, we have what I dubbed a Jeremy Kyle generation of young men reaching adult life ill-equipped for it.
Lacking the right social skills.
Lacking a sense of purpose and responsibility.
Lacking self-confidence.
Lacking the ability to seize on an opportunity and make the most of it.
And as a result turning against the society in which they live.
That’s why we see so many young people being robbed and even murdered on the streets of our big cities today. That’s why drug crime and violent crime are rife on our estates.
But above all it’s why you find such a pronounced sense of sullen apathy among many young men.
During the course of this afternoon’s session, I’m also going to be introducing you to members of my front bench team – but not quite in the usual way. For this conference, the Shadow Work and
Pensions team has been out visiting people who are working to make a difference – and recording their experience on video. We’ll be showing you short snippets from the material they recorded over the course of this session. First a snapshot of a boxing club run by Simon Marcus in North London, working with young excluded men. Roger Skelmersdale, our Shadow Minister in the Lords, went to talk to one of the teachers.
Now we’ve talked a lot as a Party in the past few months about family breakdown and the problems it generates. There’s no doubt that it is one of our biggest social problems, and that’s why it’s right to put marriage and the family at the heart of our policy approach.
But we’ve also been careful to say that the problems many young people experience are not just about the breakdown of relationships.
Drink, drugs and general parental apathy all play their part in making life extremely difficult for many of our young people.
We all take it for granted that home is a place you can go when you’ve got problems - to find help and support.
But for many young people, home is where the problems are.
Take a look at this.
I think one of our biggest social challenges is that in many parts of our society people no longer know how to bring up children.
There are too many communities where children are largely left to their own devices as they grow up.
Where many young parents had a pretty lousy time in childhood themselves, and just don’t have any experience of good parenting to draw on with their own children.
Most people learn their parenting skills from their own parents.
Who else but from your own parents do you learn how to say no.
Or when to punish.
Or when love and affection is needed.
Or to do the things that help children develop well, like helping them learn their letters, or reading them a bedtime story.
So whey they get to school, they are already behind.
And as the years pass by, they just don’t get any support at home that would help them catch up.
Many children’s prospects are being blighted by the fact that their parents just don’t seem interested in helping them succeed at school.
I met one young man in Manchester who was playing truant. I asked him why – and he said: “My mum didn’t bother to get up to send me to school this morning, so I didn’t bother to go.”
Helping parents get it right while their children are very young is absolutely essential. Some of the most important work being done to help those families is being done by volunteers and voluntary groups like the Home Start charity. My colleague Nigel Waterson, the Shadow Minister for Older People, went to find out more.
The third thing that has really struck me over the past year, and which underlines the need for radical reform to our welfare state is the huge social divide in many of our Cities. In many ways the gulf is as wide as it has been since Victorian times.
You find it in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and here in Birmingham.
Just look round the City Centre. Bustling businesses. This hugely successful conference centre. New developments on all sides.
But if you walk out of here with me, and head a mile or two down the road, you’ll find entire streets where virtually no one is working, and where crime and antisocial behaviour are endemic.
But whilst it’s the violence that makes the headlines, the statistical divide goes much further than crime.
Did you know that the gap between the life expectancy of the rich and the poor in Britain today is wider than at any point since Victorian times.
There could be no clearer indicator of a society that is getting things wrong – where fairness is being missed out.
And it’s not just health inequalities that are so stark.
The financial gap between the richest and the poorest is at its widest for generations. In fact it is at its highest level since records began.
We have, in this country, one of the lowest levels of social mobility in the developed world.
There are areas of every major City in this country where you will find communities with no children being brought up in poverty sitting side by side with ones where literally every child is being brought up in poverty – according to the Government’s own figures.
And life in those areas can be a real struggle.
Have a look at this collection of views from both sides of that divide.
When you talk to people in some of our most deprived estates, it’s as if there is a glass wall around them – through which virtually no one passes.
It’s literally a world apart from the jobs, offices and activity just down the road.
A short distance away on the ground – light years apart in reality.
You find these divisions in Cities around the country. Mark Harper, the Shadow Minister for the Disabled, went to Newcastle to find out about the challenges there.
Of course the divisions in our cities can sometimes be mirrored on the estates themselves. One of the big divisions is between the generations, with mutual suspicion often existing between old and young that can undermine quality of life. One of the things that we’ve done as part of our work with Simon and his team was designed to try to bridge that gap.
I very much hope that all the work that we are doing on the Welsh House Farm estate will help Simon and his team make a difference. They are the real drivers of change there. Simon – thank you.
So the big message from all of this is that it is not politicians who really make the difference on a local level – it’s volunteers like Simon, Anthony, and Carol’s team, who are transforming the lives of individuals.
And I particularly want to pay tribute to some of the faith based groups. We are much too politically correct as a society, and as such it is often the faith based groups who find it the most difficult to get support for the work they are doing.
My colleague, the Shadow Work and Pensions Minister Andrew Selous, visited one such group in Watford.
But let’s be clear
It’s true that tackling Britain’s broken society is not a job that can be done by politicians alone.
But it can’t be done without a big change of direction in Government.
Now when I talk about welfare reform at a time of rising unemployment, people immediately think that it’s a contradiction in terms.
How can you introduce big new changes to the welfare to work process at a time when jobs are being lost?
It’s all very well talking about worklessness when times are good – not when things are getting more difficult.
But that’s not right.
When I went to New York in January to look at their welfare schemes I asked them how they coped in the dot com recession eight years ago.
They told me that their innovative employment programmes had helped to match people and their skills with the opportunities that were available.
Good quality, well delivered welfare reform helps countries cope with more difficult economic times.
To do all of this, though, we have to change the way our welfare state works so that it is geared up to help people who are helping themselves.
I want to put an end to the situation where welfare is an entitlement
Instead I want our welfare state to become a two-way contract.
Our job is to help people when they are down – their job is to do everything they can to get themselves and their families back on their feet again.
That principle will underlie our whole approach to welfare and the benefit system in Britain today.
To keep our side of the contract, we will transform the return to work process in this country.
We will deliver higher quality support to people when they first become unemployed.
There’ll be a network of back to work centres around the country, providing specialist support for job seekers and people on incapacity benefit.
Our plans for much better back to work support will help people to see that their skills can be transferable to other jobs.
We’ll contract private and voluntary sector organisations to do the work, and pay them only when they are successful. That way the work they do will be the best possible for the people we are trying to help.
But, this is a two way contract.
Everyone who could work will be expected to take up the support on offer. They will be expected to get out of the house and to do something every day.
If they won’t, then they will automatically lose their benefits until they do.
There’ll be mandatory independent medical assessments for people claiming incapacity benefit to see who can and cannot work.
Anyone claiming the benefit on a false premise will lose it immediately.
Those with the potential to return to work will be provided with specialist support to do so.
But if they refuse that support, they will also lose their benefits.
When people get a reasonable job offer, they will be expected to take it. It’s much better to be in a job, and looking to move on to something else, than sitting at home hoping the right thing will come along.
If people refuse reasonable job offers they’ll lose their benefits, and if they refuse an offer three times, then they’ll be excluded from the benefits system for three years.
And for those who don’t manage to find work, and claim jobseekers allowance for more than two years, there’ll be a year long community work programme to get them back into the work habit.
No one benefits from sitting at home on benefits.
We understand that times have changed. That Britain is facing a tougher economic climate. If anything this makes the case stronger for a fairer, more active welfare system.
It’s what people want to see happen – which is why the Government is starting to pinch some of our ideas.
And it’s what we will do in Government.
Radical change is the right thing for claimants as well as for society as a whole.
But tackling Britain’s social challenges, tackling the problem of our broken society, will be about much more than welfare reform.
There will be changes that have to be made right across Government.
We need measures to tackle family breakdown.
That’s why it’s right to support marriage in the tax system.
That’s why we will end the absurd couple penalty in the tax credits system that can make it financially attractive for couples to live apart not together. Absolute madness.
We need measures to tackle the problems faced by those children being left behind because of the poor start in life they are getting. That’s why Michael Gove’s plans for more support in school for children from deprived backgrounds and a real focus on reading are so important.
We need improved measures to re-engage young people who do go off the rails into our society. That’s why Nick Herbert’s plans for improved rehabilitation of offenders are vital – and why Dominic Grieve’s plans for improved drug treatment are equally essential.
And we need to remove the bureaucratic barriers that make the work of many voluntary groups so much more difficult. Oliver Letwin and Greg Clark have done valuable work in setting out how we will do that.
Today we launched our plan for social reform, which brings together all of the ideas I’ve talked about today.
But the thing that will make the biggest difference is that fundamental change to the philosophy underlying our welfare state. Balancing entitlement with responsibility. Putting an end to the something for nothing culture that has served this country so badly.
A modern welfare state is an essential part of a modern society.
But it should be an engine of social mobility and not a root cause of immobility in society.
It should be designed to help people up the ladder and not to live at the bottom of it.
It should be designed to help people be more of a part of society, not outside and hostile to it.
It needs to deliver a fairer approach for all.
Where we help you – and you help yourself.
These are the kind of real changes that Britain now needs if we are to tackle the problem of social breakdown in our country.
Radical welfare reform.
Tackling educational failure.
Rehabilitating people who have fallen out of the system or become trapped by addiction.
And supporting the voluntary sector groups who can make so much difference in local communities.
Not to mention much better policing of the streets in our cities so we can restore some stability to the communities that are worst affected by violence and antisocial behaviour.
Eleven years ago Gordon Brown and Tony Blair promised that things would only get better.
They were wrong.
In many communities the past decade has been a constant downward spiral.
Labour failed.
Britain needs change.
It will be our job to make the difference.”