Frank Field the "thinker of the unthinkable", by appointment to successive governments, was stirring up the pot this morning on the Today program with the idea of putting child benefit money into pre-5 development. As he said, it was a "hard bullet to bite" for many. Child poverty is another classic wicked issue with a plurality of views on the nature of the problem and the way to manage it. So, why on earth did the last government treat it as a straightforward technical issue by assuming everyone agrees what the problem is and that there is a straightforward technical solution; which, by their calculation would have cured it by 2020? They had a chap from UNICEF UK who shed some light on the thinking of the last government when he said that income was a driver of poverty (incidentally, I knew that the Catholic church considers the UK needs missionaries; but, surely there are more deserving places to spend our tax-payer contribution to the UN that here, you would have thought). His logic seemed to be: if income drives poverty and the measure of poverty that you use is income, then by raising income, you eliminate poverty QED. But, and I am sure someone has thought of this before, what if poverty of aspiration is a more significant driver of economic poverty? If this is the case, addressing poverty of aspiration is where to put your resources for the greatest leverage in the system. The problem for many people who think Mr Field is wrong is that going for poverty of aspiration rather than income, will meand a lot of change for areas of the State, Local Government and the Third Sector. A massive redistribution of resource into the upstream area of under 5 development, in the expectation that it will improve life chances and long term well being, means less resource for existing initiatives which exist to address existing downstream problems. Mr Field has reframed the problem, exposed the different perspectives on it and named it as a wicked issue. What he needs to do now is make sure that this government treats it as a wicked problem to be managed and does not make the mistake of treating it as a complex technical problem that can be fixed.PS, if I didn’t know better I thought Mr Field, the MP for Birkenhead was making a little private joke by saying his idea was a “hard bullet to bite”, a term used in Kipling’s poem about the troopship HMS Birkenhead that sank of Africa in the 1850’s when the men drowned as they stood in ranks while women and children escaped in the boats…To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,Is nothing so bad when you've cover to 'and, an' leave an' likin’ to shout;But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,An’ they done it, the Jollies - 'Er Majesty’s Jollies - soldier an' sailor too!Their work was done when it 'adn’t begun; they was younger nor me an' you;Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw,So they stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill, soldier an' sailor too!
