Politicians who avoid the poorest areas must show moral courage

They set ambitious child poverty goals, and did some good things like raising the minimum wage and bringing in allowances to help poor children stay in education after 15.

But in retrospect, their policies were mostly designed to do the easy fixes, raising families who were just below the poverty line just above it. The poverty rate declined, then shot up again. It's unforgivable and cruel that 13 years later we still have 650,000 children in London — more than two in five — living in poverty.

Labour failed to tackle what I call "the dirty spaces" — the crumbling homes on poverty-impacted estates where children are reduced to savagery and scavenging and where the deprivation, violence and unemployment is just jaw-dropping.

Politicians avoid these places because they want to look good, but we need to shine a light on them to make a difference that's more than superficial.

Societies that are balanced are safe. When people are severely disenfranchised, a sense of rage builds and builds and then erupts, as we have seen with the knife crime epidemic.

What ordinary people don't realise is that life at street level has become so savage that children need a high credit rating to survive. Their "cred", to use their terminology, is determined by two sources: what they own — designer clothes, the latest phone — and their capacity for violence.

They have to be seen to have their "pieces" — a gun, a knife — something that shows they'll take revenge if their "bredrens" are violated, and that's why we see so many "respect" killings in London.

What is the solution? The first thing we need is for the CEOs of London boroughs to be braver. In private, they tell you their services are dysfunctional because they don't have the resources. But why do we never hear from them in public? Why don't they shout from the roof-tops?

Local councils collude with central government to sustain the dysfunction. There are 550,000 referrals to child protection in the UK every year, but only 33,000 are put on the child protection register because once a child is on, they have to be allocated a social worker and that costs money. What happens to the other 517,000?

We must put more resources into helping children in care. We currently dump our most disturbed children with foster carers and fail to give them proper training. No wonder so few children in care end up with an education and so many wind up in prison — the system is not fit for purpose.

We also have to end the practice of pauper graves. Not much surprises me these days, but I was shocked to read we still bury the penniless four to a grave in London. It exemplifies a lack of human dignity and it's this disregard for our most vulnerable citizens, in death as in life, that's creating an atmosphere of savagery among us.

All this costs money, but it's not just money that will solve the problems of dysfunctional families. Perhaps we need a Minister for Vulnerable Communities to join up the thinking. You can't use a plaster to fix a broken leg. We need our politicians to show moral courage.

Camila Batmanghelidjh is founder of the children's charity Kids Company