We spend all our resources propping up the poverty emergency. We should be focused on the cure

Some years ago I started talking about PECC: Prevention, Emergency, Coping & Cure. I had developed this way of dividing up social intervention because a woman I met wanted to give money to help people in need and she sought my advice on how she should spend it.  

Overnight I broke social intervention down into four categories: Did she want to prevent need from happening? Did she want to respond to people with an emergency of needing? Or did she want to hold people’s hand, so to speak, and help them cope with their need? Perhaps she be interested in helping to cure people of need? 

It was a crude system. It had holes in it. At times, emergency help – giving people money, a home, drug or alcohol support – could bring them out of need. Remove them from dependency. It was crude also because it did not address the issue that there are people in old age, or with health problems, or victims of accidents, who will always need help. But crudely categorising it was not nuanced enough to include the enormous power, especially, of a good bit of emergency response. It sounded like acting in an emergency implied failure. 

It was crude, too, because it might be seen as dispassionate and unemotional. Would you, if you were stuck in need, needing help, want to be pigeonholed into a category? Or simply labelled as one of the needy? 

Alas the allocation of governmental and charitable resources operates, largely unconsciously, on the basis of PECC. So though it may hurt the feelings of people caught in need, when a third party is called on to aid them, the social spenders spend according to a largely unconscious categorisation. 

I was trying to address the issue of helping someone to allocate their money effectively. But in doing this I stumbled onto something bigger, deeper about society. About governments. About givers. 

Last week at a talk I gave at Cambridge University I referred to PECC. But I had knocked off ‘Coping’ so PECC became PEC. Prevention, Emergency, Cure. The reason being that Emergency has been extended by the givers to incorporate Coping. Emergency response to a need and crisis in someone’s life meant responding to an emergency, but this blends into coping – because they were never lifted out of the emergency of need. Their hands were held, so to speak, to help them cope, not to cure them of their dire circumstances. In other words, they remained permanently in emergency. 

This issue of ‘Permanent Emergency’, keeping you forever in a metaphorical A&E, is finally being discussed with some seriousness. The vast social support and social security bill has finally been realised as a giant sticking plaster for problems, not a cure. Government and opposition are now talking about ‘cutting’, lopping off, even decimating the cost of social security. Because it’s too large and too costly. And also at times because it is too destructive of people’s potential. Not a springboard but a concrete safety net – once you hit it, you’re down for life. 

Read more:

• More than 30 years on, my fight to prevent mass poverty continues
• The only way forward is to split the poverty atom
• Big Issue founder calls for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention ahead of the general election

The recent concern about NEETs – Not in Education, Employment or Training – has emboldened government to look closer at how they allocate resources. How nearly a million young people are stuck, unable to develop their lives and their careers.  Up to 15% of those NEETs have been to university and come out with a degree that has not led to a job. And most NEETs have been mopped up by the social security system as their principal provider.  

There is concern too about those unavailable to work because for mental or physical reasons. Can some of them be brought into the workforce? 

What I discovered all those years ago is that what I now call PEC showed the infinitesimal size of Prevention and Cure versus the enormous size of Emergency. As my diagram shows, governments of differing political persuasions have facilitated the behemothic rise of sticking people into the emergency support category, when there should have been a Cure attached to the emergency help.  

It is not like they haven’t tried. Universal credit has been developed but was seen as an attack on people trying to get social security. An incredible array of pilots and initiatives, a blizzard of projects have come out of governments over the years. Meanwhile, funding emergency support has become the biggest of all government bills. 

Emergency is largely poverty by another name. Ending the inheritance of poverty is the only answer. PEC was my way of uncovering what the government was doing with its money. But also highlighting that most social charities operate in the Emergency zone. 

Now, because government has spent its resources on Emergency, putting all of its eggs in one basket, it’s buggered our finances. PEC simply pointed that out. The woman who asked me to help her allocate her generosity chose Emergency – as most people do. It’s the more obvious choice. But it needs Cure attached to its tail. I will return to this subject next week. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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