Field recognised the danger of UK’s sick note culture
‘Frank Field is one of the really good men of politics,” wrote former environment secretary John Gummer in 1998, just after Field had resigned as Tony Blair’s minister for welfare reform.
“Where Peter Mandelson makes enemies, Frank makes friends,” Gummer continued. “His intelligence is obvious but never flaunted, his commitment real and not contrived. What Frank believes shines through in all he does. Frank is therefore NOT in the Cabinet, while Peter Mandelson is.”
Despite spending four decades in the House of Commons, Frank Field was in government for little more than a year and was never elevated to high office. Yet the death of the former Labour MP from cancer last week, aged 81, has generated an outpouring of heartfelt tributes, from senior figures across the political spectrum.
One reason is that, before he entered Parliament in 1979, representing Birkenhead, Field was a formidable anti-poverty campaigner. While founding director of the Child Poverty Action Group, he then simultaneously established the Low Pay Unit – pushing for the introduction of a national minimum wage. Another reason for the widespread tributes to Field is that during his time in Parliament, he displayed detailed policy expertise in difficult, highly contested areas – including the welfare state, pensions and tax. His commitment to cross-party collaboration in a bid to get things done has won him admirers – including among Conservatives, as the quotation from Lord Gummer above demonstrates.
Yet, despite his determination to tackle poverty, Field often offended his own party’s tribal sensitivities. During the early 1980s, as a lone, fresh-faced backbencher, he inveigled his way into No10 and personally lobbied Margaret Thatcher to award a vital government contract to Cammell Laird shipyard, then a major employer in Birkenhead and across Merseyside.
Combining forces with Tory MPs in adjoining constituencies, Field’s campaign was successful – yet, despite the positive outcome, many in his party chided him for working with an opposition government. Years later, while Field was in government during the first 14 months of Blair’s New Labour administration, he was again undermined by the party machine. Powerbrokers such as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were happy to watch as Gordon Brown, chancellor at the time – spooked by Field’s expertise and determined to control all aspects of welfare and pensions from the Treasury – drummed the minister for welfare reform out of office.
An old-school Christian socialist, Field believed strongly in helping the poor to help themselves by ensuring paid work was available, warning against over-reliance on an everexpanding welfare state. With his own constituency ravaged by unemployment, he consistently warned that “benefit dependency”, the sustaining of millions of households
Former Labour MP believed in helping the poor to help themselves by making work available
entirely on welfare payments in perpetuity, was “degrading” and “economically unsustainable” – annoying more statist Labour MPs.
During his long public policy career, Field wrote dozens of detailed books and pamphlets on benefits policy and pensions. Despite so little time as a minister, his influence on these subjects was huge – with Field acting as an unofficial adviser to a succession of Cabinet ministers working in this area, at their request, whatever their party.
Having studied his writing closely, and co-authored books and papers with him myself, I would argue that Frank Field, despite the political brickbats he endured, was probably the UK’s most influential welfare policy thinker since William Beveridge – who wrote, of course, the 1942 report launching Britain’s welfare state.
So what would the UK policy landscape look like had he prevailed and consolidated his power during the New Labour years? Field’s principle aim in government – “thinking the
‘Frank Field was probably the UK’s most influential welfare policy thinker since William Beveridge’
unthinkable”, as Blair asked him – was to restore the contributory principle, compelling workers to pay into their own individual “pension pots” run by new mutual societies, on top of the basic state pension. Widely admired by industry experts, these ideas were diluted into today’s far less ambitious, employer-based “stakeholder” schemes.
Had Field prevailed, perhaps the public finances would now be stronger.
For decades, Field warned against Britain’s “sick note culture”, with historically high numbers living entirely on benefits, despite a national labour shortage. Existing Tory ministers and their likely Labour replacements are, this very month, worrying aloud about the same thing – and the costs and societal impact are only climbing.
He believed in, and had the courage to attempt, a more co-operative politics – focused on the deep-seated, long-term issues that modern democracy so often finds hard to address.