Experts in child poverty were aghast when the UK Government announced it was dropping previous measures and introducing new ways of recording deprivation among children.
We won't know if the targets set out in the 2010 Child Poverty Act, meant to be achieved by 2020, are ever met, because new measures will be used. Instead of income based standards, childhood poverty will be recorded using new measures related to family worklessness and the level of education achieved by age 13.
(Incidentally, the word 'Orwellian' is overused, but what else are you meant to call the doublespeak which will also see the five year-old piece of legislation itself retrospectively renamed the 'Life Chances Act'?)
Now we have found out just how many experts were dismayed by the change. Nearly all of them, according to researchers at the London School of Economics - who were curious about a consultation the government held about the changes.
Ministers asked for views on their big idea of tackling the root causes of poverty by measuring things like unemployment, drugs, parental health and poor housing, instead of the previous rules which looked at the amount of money coming into a household, and a family's material deprivation compared with other households to help decide whether children were actually - you know - poor.
The LSE researchers found out that of 230 groups and people responding to the consultation - including academics, local authorities, voluntary organisations and frontline services - only 16 per cent thought poverty statistics were unsound and only nine respondents thought income should be removed as a main measure of poverty.
Researchers, Kitty Stewart and Nick Roberts concluded: "There is very strong support for the existing measures, and near universal support for keeping income poverty and material deprivation at the heart of poverty measurement," and added: "It is disquieting to see the government acting in direct contradiction to such strong and unanimous expert opinion."
Alex Neil, Scotland's social justice secretary wrote to Iain Duincan Smith in September, asking for the elements of the Act which apply to Scotland to be repealed, so that child poverty can be targeted and measured here in the more traditional way. Or as Satwat Rehman , Director of One Parent Families Scotland said at the time, "A child poverty strategy which excludes income isn’t a child poverty strategy."
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