IAIN Duncan Smith has been warned not to focus on moving the goalposts on defining poverty but on producing policies that helped people get work and care for their children.

The call came as new figures showed the number of children living in poverty in the year to 2010/11 fell by 300,000 across the UK and by 30,000 in Scotland.

The Work and Pensions Secretary pointed out the main reason for this was the recession.

As poverty is defined as 60% of average household income, a fall in incomes throughout society caused by the downturn lifted thousands of families above the poverty line without their circumstances changing.

"How perverse that the simplest way of reducing child poverty is to collapse the economy," said Mr Duncan Smith. He said the UK Government remained committed to Labour's target of eliminating child poverty by 2020, enshrined in the 2010 Child Poverty Act.

However, he said the figures proved that the previous government's strategy of pouring "vast amounts of money" into benefits designed to lift families above the poverty line had failed.

The Secretary of State said it was increasingly clear poverty was not about income alone and the Coalition's aim was to tackle poverty "at source" by addressing the problems of worklessness, welfare dependency, addiction, educational failure, debt and family breakdown.

A consultation this autumn will seek a way of measuring child poverty, rather than setting an "arbitrary threshold" above which a child was deemed to have been lifted out of poverty.

Labour's Liam Byrne accused the Government of running away from the problem.

Alison Garnham of the Child Poverty Action Group said: "By measuring whether the poor are getting poorer compared to the rest of society, the relative income poverty measure is the single best indicator of whether 'we're all in it together'. It would be shameful if the Coalition's approach on child poverty was moving the goalposts rather than tackling the problem."

Douglas Hamilton, Save the Children's head of Scotland, said: "Now is not the time to be arguing about definitions of poverty, it is a distraction. The UK Government must stop these spending cuts, which are pushing families into poverty."

The SNP's Jamie Hepburn welcomed a fall in the Scottish figures.