Britain in 1904 looks both very far away and very near: far away in that it was a country where 40% of families had no running water or sanitation; 40% of volunteers for the army were rejected on grounds of ill-health; 3% of children made it to secondary schools; less than 1% of GDP was spent on education; 4% owned 90% of the wealth, 80% had no property; most people had no holidays; 300,000 a year emigrated; landowners exercised huge power; could block laws and budgets and most adults didn�t have the vote.

Near in that, like Britain today, it was sharply divided, with a tiny minority of the superrich, cut off from daily life, immersed in rounds of parties and high fashion, flush with the fruits of globalization, some devoting their surplus energies to hunting, alongside entrenched poverty in the big cities, millions excluded from the wealth and opportunities and living, according to Charles Booth�s surveys, in the very same places that are poor today.

Those continuities and changes are very visible where I am now based in east London�s Bethnal Green: a haven for Huguenot refuges in 16 and 17th century, transformed in the 19th century with a huge influx first from Ireland and then from eastern Europe into what Friedrich Engels described as the largest working class district in the world, jammed with people working in factories and docks, and servicing the rich upwind in the West End. Today it�s an equally complicated geography, with pockets of extreme poverty, areas that are predominantly Bangladeshi, areas of gentrification, new connections to the City and Docklands, new moral anxieties over drink and crack and sex, and a new economy with new opportunities but also its own deadends.

Within this area the specificities of place have long been very apparent. In Booth�s account, every neighbourhood had its own identity: Whitechapel was full of homeless people, Hoxton full of criminals, while Bethnal Green�s population was largely in work but constituted, according to its clergyman, the poorest parish in London where �the poverty is almost entirely the result of drink�, and, he complained, the weddings degenerate into orgies.
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Globally we can find the same complexity. The favelas of Rio have little in common with remote Russian cities that had depended on one industry. They in turn have little in common with the hives of activity that make up a Mumbai slum (probably more like east London in the 1890s than it is today); or the crime ridden ghettos of south-central Los Angeles (which are in the paradoxical position of throwing up so many of the world�s music and sports stars and receiving so few of the rewards); or a depressed fishing community in north east Scotland. And poverty in multi-ethnic Newham, full of refugees is very different from poverty in Hull, or the HLM housing projects on the edge of Paris or Lyons.

Those differences only reinforce the point that place matters � that where you are born or live shapes what you become. Place have a very direct impact on the character of poverty - sometimes directly through crime or the quality of the air; sometimes less directly through the contacts, links and opportunities available to people; sometimes more subtly through the dominant time horizons, the hope or lack of it. The evidence on some of these effects is now powerful, and we know that in east London every tube stop means a year lower life expectancy, that in northern England there are wards where noone has a university education and streets where noone has a job.

We�ve heard a lot � rightly � about what could be done. The goal of any charity should be to make itself redundant � and Joseph Rowntree certainly didn�t want anything to be in perpetuity. So in the spirit of a centenary I want to draw on the last days discussion and set out some of the elements that might be necessary to end the poverty of place which is such a marked fact of modern Britain.

The characteristic optical illusion that governments suffer from is that they overestimate what can be achieved short-term and underestimate what can be achieved long term. Over the last 30 years we have seen many hurried initiatives fail � but we have also seen inflation, long term unemployment and high levels of strikes contained and many of the worst diseases consigned to history.

I have no doubt that we could bring to an end most of the poverty which now surrounds us. But it will require decision-makers, and the entire community that surrounds them, to get many things right in tandem.

Empathy

The first starting point is empathy. Without empathy for how people live their lives, how they feel, and what they aspire to, little else is possible.

It matters for research at a time when much of social science has lost the art of observation and whole careers are entirely based on secondary material. It matters for decision makers whose decisions are bound to be distorted if they live far removed from the people on the receiving end of their decisions. It matters because that detachment, distance from empathy, has helped social policy be corrupted by caricatures � of feckless fathers, and lazy lone mums on sink estates. It matters because at times the research community has simply not been sufficiently sensitive to fears over issues like crime and anti-social behaviour.

I was struck a few weeks ago reading again Friedrich Engels Condition of the Working Class of England, a remarkable book published in 1845, in which he wrote: �I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors �I forsook the company and the dinner parties, the portwine and champagne �� Its not a bad description of the spirit in which research today should be conducted too.

Analysis

Second, analysis, the core of the JRF tradition. What happens in complex social systems is not common sense, and good intentions can have perverse effects as Joseph Rowntree warned when he wrote that �the charity which takes the place of justice creates much of the misery which it relieves..�

Analysis matters because we need to know how things are � and although our data on localities has greatly improved, it still doesn�t capture many of the truths about urban areas, where much takes place away from the gaze of the statisticians.

Analysis matters because social phenomena can be counterintuitive: it is not intuitively obvious that arresting drugs dealers can often strengthen the drugs economy; not intuitively obvious that building roads may increase congestion; not intuitively obvious that one of the best ways of cutting crime amongst teenagers is to provide more help for the under-3s.

And it matters because we still lack a sufficiently robust intellectual consensus on what really does drive growth and poverty reduction in poor areas. My own views tend to draw from Jane Jacobs argument that what makes cities and city districts grow is above all their ability to import and export; they trade up by making themselves useful to others, and suffer when those links are cut, or when the terms of trade turn against them. More circulation within a community is better than money flowing in and straight out again. But it�s no substitute for trade of that kind.

Vision

Third we need vision of how things could be different. There are many visions of how places could be different, but not many that are very compelling. Too many architects plans still have tiny stick people wandering around a bit lost amidst the pretty trees. Others too easily refer back to a romantic closed community, whereas for many people the preferable vision is still to move out to the suburbs.

Wallace Stevens wrote that �People live not in places, but in the description of places�. The descriptions of poor neighbourhoods got in the way of clear understanding in the 1890s (and prompted Booth�s work) and the worsening descriptions of places in the 1970s and 1980s, which turned them into places of fear, full of strangers and violence often ahead of the reality, had an impact too. So we need clearer visions, but also ones that make sense in a country where most people have mobile phones; and where � troubling for someone, like me, who has the word �community� in their organisation�s name - where people say that they share less in common with their neighbours than with readers of the same newspapers.

Strategy and policy

Fourth we need strategy. What policies and actions will realize the vision, deal with the analysis? We are half way through an ambitious strategy for renewing neighbourhoods, with many things improving in jobs, schools, crime and health but also worrying trends of poverty becoming more concentrated, driven in part by the powerful coupling of housing markets and schools.

Government has produced many strategies, but what we�ve often found hardest is the clarity and simplicity that all the best strategies have.

What matters for strategy is not only knowing what needs to be done, but knowing what the right sequence of actions is (should crime and antisocial behaviour come first? Or literacy? Or public health?); knowing where marginal resources should best be spent (if government had another �10bn what should it use it for?); and, even more tricky, knowing what will really change behaviours.

A lot can be done through �pull� policies: services and incentives �like tax credits and Surestart centres. But disagreements tend to boil up over the use of more directive measures (�push� policies) � whether designed to force employers to train their staff, or to tighten welfare conditionality.

The best policies are really about �plumbing� � changing the nature of the system so that problems are solved, but these are also often the most difficult to design and implement. To take just one example: in most poor cities around the world we now look to see where are the assets are that can be used to help growth. Yet in most of Britain�s poor areas much the most valuable assets are tied up in local authority and social housing and do very little to contribute to the economic prospects of the people living in them. So there is a huge issue of plumbing there � but huge barriers in the way of fixing it.

Communication and politics

Fifth, we need to get the communication and politics right. Strategies for reducing poverty are intensely political. That�s why visibility matters. When Attlee was asked what Churchill had done to win the second world war he said �talk about it�, and any war on poverty has to start with us talking about it.

The fundamental political issue is how to persuade the relatively affluent majority, many of whom feel hard pressed to make ends meet, to spend money on areas they may rarely visit, people they may not know, lives they may not understand.

It�s easy to call for more redistribution and everyone here would be supportive. But we need to apply the same sophistication to the political analysis of redistribution as we do to the policies it might fund. I would suggest that any significant redistribution has to meet four conditions: it has to be seen to be fair; it has to be seen to somehow fit the interests of the majority; it has to be seen to be money well spent; and how it is spent has to fit with everyday morality, of need and desert.

The first of these is not too hard � most of the British public favour a fairer and more equal society. But the other three have turned out to be much harder. New Labour successfully recast much of the poverty debate by addressing these issues directly: talking more about children than poverty as such; pointing out the indirect impact of poverty on the rest of society through crime and drugs; showing the costs and waste of mass unemployment; and realigning policy more around public views of needs and desert (for example through welfare to work policies).

Any arguments for further redistribution need to be just as carefully thought through, and as attuned to these conditions, if it is to be more than rhetoric, especially at a time when there is likely to be more competition for resources, and potentially more anxieties over issues like migration and asylum.

Delivery

This brings me to the sixth essential � good delivery. It�s a clich� and a truth that services in poor areas tend to be poor. I sometimes think that strategies in poor areas are also relatively poor, or can get away with more errors than those directed at the articulate middle class. Certainly the field has been quite slow to take up the panoply of management methods � metrics, precision, performance management, systematic use of knowledge. Top down solutions generally fail and we know that involving the beneficiaries and communities involved in change is vital to making them work. But sometimes we go too far in the opposite direction and talk as if every community needs to invent its own solutions, when common sense surely tells us that there are some things that are best taken off the shelf � if I need an operation to fix my leg, or software for my computer, or an engine for my car I don�t expect me or my community to have to invent it from scratch. I want some say and some choice, and if I really do have a better way of doing things I should be allowed to do so. But too much of a fetish of self-invention threatens success and the confidence we so badly need.

Learning

Seventh and finally we need better learning. All knowledge in social matters is conditional and temporary. So we need continuous learning between projects, areas and people, learning not just within the UK and the developed world but also from south to north, during a period when the south can offer lots of innovations in how to achieve growth and improvement in poor areas, in fields as diverse as microcredit, participative budgeting and community transport.

Success over 20, 50 or 100 years needs all these things. Any one can be the weak link in a world where ideas, perception and action inseparable, and as Mencken said �for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat � and wrong�.

Looking to the future, areas will rise and fall; they always have and always will. But where you live shouldn�t matter much. It shouldn�t be career threatening. It shouldn�t make you poor.

This is a phenomenally rich country. We live in houses stuffed full of gadgets; we have gourmet food available in every supermarket. People on middle incomes travel the world and use luxuries beyond imagination of past generations.

The worst poverty should be easier to deal with in a small country, one where the areas of deprivation are close to wealth.

I�ve said that we underestimate what can change in the long term. Looking at the long view my sense is that we are in the early stages of a turnaround that has historical parallels. Industrialisation in the 19th century pulled millions into towns and cities where conditions were miserable, with crime and sickness rampant. It then took more than 50 years of work by charities, municipalities and eventually national government, to put right, and deliver half decent living conditions, full employment, and a functioning welfare system.

In the 70s and 80s the shocks of deindustrialization and the move to a post-industrial society were just as destabilizing as industrialization had been a century before, knocking out whole ways of life, and rupturing families and communities. My guess is that it will take just as long to remake institutions, and policies to give people a decent security in this very different economy. But we have definitely seen the turnaround begin. The statistics are beginning to move in the right direction, and fewer areas have that feeling of all hope being sucked out that was so common a decade ago.

Fatalism is the worst thing that can happen to any area. And fatalism is the worst thing that can happen to any society. That�s why retaining the confidence that the world is malleable, that what looks natural is wholly man made, is the greatest gift that the policy community can offer.

Rowntree has an honourable tradition of giving people that confidence, and of bearing witness to what is really happening on the ground. It is a modern expression of that great tradition of nonconformist dissent that has been responsible for so much of what is most decent in this society, allied to Britain�s other great tradition of empirically based social research.
As we�ve repeatedly over the last 24 hours Joseph Rowntree�s legacy of a century ago has shown its worth in many many different ways (and I hope that some of the new rich of the last few years are as foresighted).

But the job remains at best half done. We still live in a country scarred by poverty, and we all have a lot more to do if we are to be sure that when we meet again in 20, 50 or 100 years time it will be in a country where having the wrong postcode is no longer a life threatening condition."

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