Everybody has a stake. That was one of the founding ideas behind our welfare state. Whether it’s support for children or our National Health Service, universalism has always been a core principle. And I believe it’s vital that those on modest and middle incomes – not just the poorest – are part of it.
Over the past decade, we have built on that universal support for all families: there have been significant increases in child benefit, the winter fuel allowance and the state pension, which will soon be linked again to earnings.
We have created a new pillar of our welfare state for the 21st century – Sure Start – which is open to all families with young children regardless of income. And the free nursery places we have introduced for three and four-year-olds are another universal entitlement.
Alongside this, our welfare state rightly gives extra support to those who need it most. Labour’s child and working tax credits support those on both low and middle incomes – with more for those who need it most while ensuring that moving into employment pays. The same is true of pension credit, which we designed to ensure it helps the poorest pensioners most but does not penalise those who have saved.
It’s only through this combination of universal support for all families and targeted support – what we call progressive universalism – that we have been able to lift half a million children and almost a million pensioners out of poverty.
We could not have raised child benefit for all by as much as we raised child tax credit, but nor could we ensure that every family or every pensioner who needed support got it unless we continued to invest in universal benefits, too.
But over recent weeks and months, the idea of such a progressive universal welfare state has come under attack.
Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats have long had a policy of cutting tax credits for all but those on the lowest incomes and abolishing child trust funds altogether. Now they’ve been joined by the Tories. Under the cover of their plan to cut the deficit deeper and faster, their “age of austerity” agenda would see child trust funds, tax credits and Sure Start cut so that they are only available to those on the lowest incomes.
As George Osborne has set out, tax credits would be taken away from families where a working couple earn just £16,000 each. Child trust funds would be abolished for all but the poorest families – those on less than £16,000 a year.
And Sure Start would no longer be a universal service, but one to help the poorest families only. David Cameron says he wants to go back to the earliest days of Sure Start when it was only available to some families in some communities. He says this is to take Sure Start back to its “original purpose”.
However, as one of those who was part of the Treasury team which created Sure Start, our intention was always to roll out Sure Start to be a universal service available to all families with young children in every community.
The Tory plans are a deeply retrograde step which hark back to the days when we ghettoised support for the poor.
Tory outriders in right-wing think tanks – with their calls for universal child benefit to be abolished – give a flavour of where the debate in the Conservative Party is going.
But it is a debate we can and should be confident of winning. Since the launch of David Cameron’s airbrushed billboards at the start of the year, we have finally seen Conservative policies come under the scrutiny they deserve.
And as people begin to digest what the Conservatives are proposing, it’s not just the voters that are getting increasingly worried. The Tories are also concerned that under the daily pressure of an election campaign, as the media begin to ask the tough questions and in the forthcoming television debates, David Cameron and George Osborne will be found wanting.
After all, in just a few short weeks we have seen incoherence and confusion on a range of flagship Tory policies – from marriage tax breaks to how quickly spending should be cut this year.
That’s why Labour MPs in marginal seats echo what I’ve been hearing on the doorsteps in my own constituency over recent weeks. People are starting to ask whether they want to gamble everything on Cameron and Osborne. Will they really be on the side of families like mine? What will happen to the economy under the Tories? And what about neighbourhood policing, local schools and children’s centres?
So, in the coming weeks, there is all to play for and there’s so much at stake – from economic recovery and expanding educational opportunity to the support millions of families rely on. And yes, the very principles of our progressive welfare state, too – because we’re all in this together – although not if David Cameron and George Osborne get their way.
Ed Balls is a Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour and Co-operative MP for Normanton
About The Author
Mr Balls paints a beautiful picture; except the picture is a fake. We are 1.5 trillion pounds in debt. Under his administration we are now a society which consumes that which we do not make and prints money to pay those who do. And a society where those in invented state jobs are funded by taxes on the productive. How can this be sustained Mr Balls? Borrow more money until the economy is debauched to a level unknown since Denis Healy approached the IMF in 1976? Or maybe like Mr Micawber you are waiting for something to turn up?
Under your government half the manufacturing sector has been destroyed; down from 20% of the economy to 12.4%. You have become fixated on neo-liberal economic theory and seem to believe that spending taxes on the public sector is investment. You have bloated the public sector at the expense of private industry; the very people who in the end pay the bills and of course your wages. Your government has debauched the economy like a drunken sailor on shore leave and you have nothing to show for it but a nasty disease.
Sorry to spoil the party but you need to realise that it’s not your money to dispose of but ours. Time to come back down to earth Mr Balls; trying to feed us Motherhood and Apple Pie is patronising and downright insulting. A housewife would be ashamed of accounts like yours.