Former leader of the UK Conservative Party Ian Duncan Smith, once considered to be to the right of center in UK politics, outlined emerging ideas to help the most disadvantaged children and families, on Monday night.

Using a language that would be familiar to many liberals, he talked about ending the social apartheid that pervaded British “sink estates”.

In an after dinner speech to the Michael Sieff Foundation conference, he said, “Governments too often leave it too late to address social problems. Progress will require more backing for an early intervention and prevention agenda”.

Iain Duncan Smith leads the Centre for Social Justice [1]. Established in July 2004, it has set itself the core goals of rewarding effective poverty-fighting projects, developing policies that will help more people to live independently, and equipping a new generation to fight poverty.

As well as publishing reports, the Centre runs an awards program to recognize innovation in communities and by non-governmental organizations. It has also formed the “poverty fighters alliance” to network voluntary organizations to track the effects of government policy on the ground.

Arguably, it has succeeded in connecting UK MPs to the realities of living in disadvantaged communities. It has encouraged politicians to live and work in poor neighborhoods for a week, during which they see for themselves how family breakdown, gambling, drug and alcohol misuse are compounded by debt and lack of work.

The Centre’s analysis is left-leaning. It points to the prevalence of drug misuse, the high numbers of parents who have been brought up in state care, the high proportion of adolescents and young men going into and returning from prison with mental health difficulties. The solutions are more right-leaning. Failing to intervene early is likely to result in propping up ineffective interventions – not a cost effective strategy.

“I am more interested in building cross party support than launching a moral crusade,” he insisted on Monday night. And, to prove the point, he has collaborated with Labour MP Graham Allen on a book about more effective prevention and early intervention techniques. [See: Is early intervention printing the dream ticket? [2]]

The detail of these arguments awaits development. Indeed, it is in the detail of selecting programs, maintaining fidelity, promoting high quality evaluation and good dissemination that the policies of the present Labour administration have faltered.

Iain Duncan-Smith shows a strong interest in bottom-up innovation developed in local communities, but there is less acknowledgment so far of the what-works evidence or the strides being made by some local government areas to base their strategies on data that acknowledge the international evidence base on the needs of children.