Who Goes Home?

Posts Tagged ‘Mr Cameron’

John Bird the outspoken social campaigner, who set up the ‘Big Issue Magazine’ sold by homeless people in 1991, has written to David Cameron urging him to reform Britain’s benefits system, which he believes traps the worst-off in poverty while fuelling addictions.

Bird astonishingly, reveals one of the biggest tragedies of the past 13 years of Labour rule. A period where spending on welfare and social projects spiraled out of control, where increases in budgets were more important than results. Gordon Brown at the dispatch box week after week would spew figures like cold war Soviet tractor stats. 3 billion here, 12 billion there, thousands more nurses, hundreds of new teachers, yet we heard little or nothing about the effects and results to our health and education services. Like all Labour governments before them, they truly believed that if you throw endless bundles of money in the direction of a problem, like fairy dust, they expect it to become magically solved.

In a Telegraph article, Bird says…..

Official figures show that the cost of keeping vulnerable children in care homes is £2,428 a week. Fees for boarders at Eton College, meanwhile, are £29,862 a year which averages out at £574 a week.

“To send a boy to Eton will cost around £250,000 in fees and that goes up to maybe £350,000 when you add in skiing holidays and university,” said Mr Bird.

“Around 80 per cent of people selling The Big Issue have been through local authority care at a cost of £2,000 a week. That’s £100,000 a year, £1million if they have spent 10 years in care. And the money that’s spent on them is yours and mine.”

He wrote in his letter to the Prime Minister, who himself was educated at Eton: “All the monies spent by the comfortable on their children pale into insignificance beside what we spend on our poorest child. Existing government structures and policies work to create crime and poverty.”

Bird is so right, at the end of an Eton education lies a life of success and ability. Many go on to be wealth creators and employers. But at the end of a childhood in local authority care lies a future of unemployment, drug abuse and further costs to society and most horrific of all, sometimes an early death!

David Cameron talks about a broken society, well now he has an opportunity to demonstrate just how broken it has become under feckless Labour. How can it come to this? The cost of going to the best, most excellent school in the country, and possibly the world, costs one quarter of the funds required to keep children locked in homes giving third world care and education?

We believe this is one of the most urgent problems facing our government today. How can they improve the prospects of these children whilst reducing the costs by at least 75% –  even then it will still cost the same to keep a child in council care as it would to send them to Eton, that is quite an incredible fact!