Marmot principles should be applied to government departments for ending poverty

Professor Michael Marmot is like a rash all over this week’s Big Issue. We have made a celebration of his life’s work. We have bought into the idea that Marmot towns, where his eight principles are resoundingly adhered to, make sense. For they bring together the thinking and action around health, wellbeing and the professions that achieve results. They bring the providers into harmony with the needs of the client. 

Last week I spoke at the [cross-party think tank] Demos fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Even now I can’t help wandering around Liverpool wondering where Ringo Starr spent his childhood. What cafes did he drop into, etc? So the conference was a time for me to traipse off to places.

Yet I was there for serious business. The theme of the meeting was how to get more money into dealing with the needs of the many caught in poverty. I went as the co-founder with Sir Gordon Roddick (yes he’s joined Sir Ringo and others) of Big Issue. But also as the co-founder with Nigel Kershaw of Big Issue Invest; our investment business that works to prevent people slipping, falling or being born into poverty. Trying to break the inheritance of poverty has long been one of my most trenchant desires.

Read more:

• The only way forward is to split the poverty atom
• How government inaction is radicalising Britain
• The fall of Angela Rayner emphasises the rise in power of property ownership

In the same way that professor Marmot has endeavoured to re-engage different elements around health and wellbeing with the providers of services and their clients, Demos is determined to bring social investment into productive usage in the community.

The theme of the meeting was the reorientation of social finance to help bolster the work of business and government. And as a founder of Big Issue Invest I was hoping to be useful to the debate. Marmot provides clever ways of improving the health of communities; Big Issue Invest provides financial support to social businesses that likewise endeavour to bring about social justice through thoughtfulness. (It should be stressed that Big Issue Invest doesn’t take money out of Big Issue, the street paper and its social support work. We get money from trusts, high-net-worth individuals, banks and some government investment arms.)  

The first problem brought up was incredibly illuminating. A housing association working with underperforming children focuses on getting them into school and on into work. Into skills training and out of need. They are financed by the schools ministry yet the benefits they bring reduce the costs of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).  

The ministry that gives them money says it can’t afford to keep supporting the housing association. The DWP doesn’t have a budget for supporting them, yet they are helping keep costs down for that very department.  

It’s a Catch-22 scenario. Prevention is difficult to measure and price. But this silly situation where one department of government pays, yet the initiative helps reduce costs for another which doesn’t pay, needs rethinking. 

The key issue is this: that government has to be taught through re-budgeting how to make sure that if something helps government itself achieve its target, then it should not be stopped. 

This may sound difficult to grasp but it is simple arithmetic – even if not for the government department that pays for it yet doesn’t see a reduction in its own costs even as the support thus provided results in people exiting poverty.  

The problem is that government departments are riddled with complexities because no one for over a century has tried to reimagine how government can be run differently and more efficiently. Governments inherit the shape and departments of former governments. There is some titivating around the edges of government, but no one has addressed the difficult task of getting government to be more productive.  

‘Marmoting’ government would be about getting departments to take ownership of the abolition of poverty. They would work collegiately, across department, across ministry. They would gather to act as one, in unity, and not separately. Alas the prospect of governments reinventing the shape of their delivery by changing their silos is not even being talked about. We are unable to coordinate the work of poverty breaking or preventing because it’s not, really, anyone’s job.

But in a Marmoting world you would bring government departments and their budgets into strict alignment to dismantle the problems thrown up by separate and disordered delivery. So what Marmot has done – is doing in Marmot towns like Manchester and Coventry – is to systematise and organise to dismantle poor health and poor wellbeing.

Demos’s fringe meeting was an initial discussion about sorting out government delivery. About getting the sort of social investment finance into the community that Big Issue invest has achieved. Bridging
the gap between business and government so they meet in the community.  

But for me it was a clear indication that if government did look seriously at creating a Ministry of Poverty Prevention (MOPP), bringing together all of the efforts devoted to riding us out of poverty, this would – yes – be a Marmoting of government itself.

But MOPP has yet to set government on fire. There are too many vested interests in keeping things as they are. And that means a continuation of government departments cutting budgets simply because they themselves don’t get a share of the rewards that good delivery delivers.

Surely this conundrum demands an urgent solution, for the greater good of us all. 

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

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Reader-funded since 1991 – Big Issue brings you trustworthy journalism that drives real change.

Every day, our journalists dig deeper, speaking up for those society overlooks.

Could you help us keep doing this vital work? Support our journalism from £5 a month.