POVERTY: England: A third of children in Birmingham living in poverty

Kat Baldwyn, May 18 2011 
MORE than one in three children in Birmingham are living in poverty with thousands believing they will never achieve their goals in life.
A new, disturbing report from youth charity The Prince’s Trust revealed that in Ladywood alone around 49 per cent of youngsters lived in poverty – one of the highest figures in the UK.

It highlighted the growing gap between the city’s richest and poorest with one in ten young people believing they will “end up on benefits for at least part of their lives” and 17 per cent feeling that “few” or “none” of their goals in life were achievable with those growing up in poverty more likely to feel that way.
Kathy Williams, regional director for The Prince’s Trust, said: “The aspiration gap between Birmingham’s richest and poorest young people is creating a ‘youth underclass’ – who tragically feel they have a bleak future.
“We simply cannot ignore this inequality. The Prince’s Trust is helping the city’s most disadvantaged young people build the skills, self-esteem and aspirations they need to free themselves from a life of poverty and unemployment.”
One of the people the charity has helped is 25-year-old Naomi Spencer who grew up on a deprived estate in central Birmingham.
Naomi dreamed of becoming a police officer but as she got older she came to believe that people like her didn’t work, as no-one on her estate had a job or money.
After school Naomi secured a job in clothes shop but was made redundant and remained unemployed for more than two years, despite applying for anything she could.
But three years ago, with the help of The Prince’s Trust Enterprise Programme, Naomi gained the business skills she needed to launch her own business, Candy Bubbles, selling home made cakes and balloons.
Naomi said: “The Prince’s Trust has turned my life around by giving me an amazing opportunity to break out of the cycle of poverty. Without them I’d probably still be unemployed and struggling financially.”
Official figures show that 72,000 people aged 18 to 24 are unemployed in the West Midlands, an unemployment rate of 20 per cent – twice the average adult unemployment rate in the region.
Economist Fionnuala Earley, from The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, said: “By helping young people into jobs and enterprise, we can not only help them to escape poverty and change their lives for the better, but we can help to break down the pattern of low aspirations. This will reap wider benefits for the UK economy both now and in the future.”
www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2011/05/18/a-third-of-children-in-birmingham-living-in-poverty-97319-28711899/#ixzz1NC4lGfv7

POVERTY: UK: Homelessness: The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them

Nov 4th 2010

WHEN the workers in the City of London head home each evening, a hidden legion of homeless people shuffles out of the shadows to reclaim their territory. The Square Mile has more rough sleepers than any other London borough except Westminster: 338 were identified by Broadway, a charity, over the past year, most of whom had spent more than a year on the streets. Policymakers have long struggled to find ways to shift such people, some of whom take deluded pride in their chaotic circumstances, resist offers to come in from the cold and suffer from severe drug, drink or mental-health problems (sometimes all three).
Broadway tried a brave and novel approach: giving each homeless person hundreds of pounds to be spent as they wished. According to a new report on the project by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a think-tank, it worked—a success that might offer broader lessons for public-service reform and efficiency.
The charity targeted the longest-term rough sleepers in the City, who had been on the streets for between four and 45 years (no mean achievement when average life expectancy for the long-term homeless is 42). Instead of the usual offers of hostel places, they were simply asked what they needed to change their lives.
One asked for a new pair of trainers and a television; another for a caravan on a travellers’ site in Suffolk, which was duly bought for him. Of the 13 people who engaged with the scheme, 11 have moved off the streets. The outlay averaged £794 ($1,277) per person (on top of the project’s staff costs). None wanted their money spent on drink, drugs or bets. Several said they co-operated because they were offered control over their lives rather than being “bullied” into hostels. Howard Sinclair of Broadway explains: “We just said, ‘It’s your life and up to you to do what you want with it, but we are here to help if you want.’”
This was only a small-scale pilot project—though its results have been echoed by others elsewhere in Britain—but it underlines the importance of risk-taking in the provision of public services. In this case, although finance directors (and many voters) might balk at buying the homeless caravans, the savings should outweigh the costs. Some estimates suggest the state spends £26,000 annually on each homeless person in health, police and prison bills.
The scheme also reinforces the view that handing control to the users of public services, even in unlikely circumstances, can yield better results. It is perhaps the most radical application yet of “personalised budgets”, increasingly used in Britain for the disabled and chronically ill. That is itself in keeping with an emerging international trend to use “conditional cash transfers” to solve intractable social problems.
Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, has invested more than $6m to test the proposition that paying pupils can improve poor schools. The most successful method was the simplest, in which children in Dallas were rewarded for reading books. Similar schemes are proliferating in the developing world. In Malawi, the World Bank recently gave a trial to the idea of paying adolescent girls to stay in school. That worked, too. Researchers also found that rates of HIV infection were much lower among girls paid to stay in classrooms: one more lesson in the power of responsibility and self-control.
http://www.economist.com/node/17420321?story_id=17420321