Cabinet Office Social Exclusion Taskforce

Context for social exclusion work

What do we mean by social exclusion?

Social exclusion is about more than income poverty. It is a short–hand term for what can happen when people or areas have a combination of linked problems, such as unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime and family breakdown. These problems are linked and mutually reinforcing. Social exclusion is an extreme consequence of what happens when people don't get a fair deal throughout their lives, often because of disadvantage they face at birth, and this disadvantage can be transmitted from one generation to the next.

Our aim

The aim of the Social Exclusion Task Force is to extend opportunity to the least advantaged so that they enjoy more of the choices, chances and power that the rest of society takes for granted. Social exclusion has its roots in poor early years, is compounded by the absence of basics such as a job and a home, and is often left unsolved by public services working in silos. The Social Exclusion Task Force aims to correct this. We work with the rest of government to identify priorities, test solutions, and facilitate collaboration across government.

What has been achieved?

Social justice has been a major priority since 1997. 

• To tackle income poverty, the focus has been on helping people into work, including through the New Deals, welfare to work and tax credits to make work pay. As a result, employment has increased by 2.5 million, and tax and benefit changes mean that the poorest families are £3450 better off per year than they were ten years ago. 
• To tackle poor services, funding has increased and performance management improved. As a result, schools in the poorest areas have been improving at a faster rate than the rest, and better early years services have enabled many women to return to work, reducing child poverty and delivering a firm foundation for future learning and development for nearly all three and four year olds. 
• And to tackle powerlessness, community engagement has been placed at the heart of regeneration, through programmes like the New Deal for Communities and Neighbourhood Renewal; and greater choice has been introduced for vulnerable people, such as in individual budgets for social care.

What remains to be done?

Partly because of improvements over the last ten years, the key challenges of social exclusion are now different. 

• Parenting and the early years have a new importance, thanks to research showing their life-long impact on education, emotional well-being, and resilience. Parenting throughout childhood is important, especially during pregnancy and the first three years of life. We also know much more about the critical role of fathers.  
• The links between problems have a new importance. After improving the quality of particular services, it is now important to improve the joins between them. We are developing a much better understanding of the relationship of poverty to a set of complex problems:  mental health, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, inadequate housing, worklessness.  We now need to consider solutions that start with the problems as experienced by the individual and family and their articulated needs, and provide a coordinated response across a range of services that is greater rather than less than the sum of the parts.
• And prevention has a new importance. Better data is making it increasingly possible to identify earlier who needs support.  Doing so can not only turn lives around, but also improves life for everyone and can release money that would otherwise go on recovery. The poor behaviour of a very few children in a class can make learning difficult for the rest; families living in the poorest areas are most likely to be victims of crime; a child in care with additional support needs can cost up to £300,000 per year. 

How will it be done?

Social exclusion is being tackled across government. The Social Exclusion Task Force assists othersin giving priority to social exclusion, where collaboration across government is critical.

To help tackle social exclusion, the Task Force has three roles:

• The Social Exclusion Task Force identifies priorities for people suffering from social exclusion. Last year, we did in-depth analysis of the causes of deep exclusion. Our priority this year is to understand the persistence of exclusion across the lifecycle, publishing four research projects by June; and to work with the Strategy Unit on a review of Life Chances, examining what has worked over the last decade for which groups, and what should be the priority in the future
• The Social Exclusion Task Forcetests solutions to tackle social exclusion. Our priority this year is to find ways for agencies to work together, so services for adults take account of their roles as parents, and services for one member of a family take account of others. The Families At Risk Review is testing new ways of ensuring real collaboration across children’s and adults’ services, thereby providing a seamless support structure for families with deep and entrenched problems. 
• The Social Exclusion Task Force facilitates collaboration across Government and from Whitehall to the neighbourhood.We are bringing together departments and local authorities to drive an ambitious Public Service Agreement on two outcomes, jobs and homes, for at-risk adults.

Our longer term vision is to use the lessons from all our work, and the work across government to narrow gaps and address deep seated disadvantage.  By 2009 we expect to see some real progress on the ground in the outcomes of the PSA, and in the system reforms from the Families at Risk work.  We can then apply this learning to other aspects of disadvantage, and new needs as they emerge.