Child poverty is the defining issue of this Labour government. Tony Blair pledged to reduce it; Gordon Brown turned that into a target to halve it by 2010 and eliminate it by 2020. The latest figures, which show a 100,000 rise in the number of children in relative poverty from 2005-06 to 2006-07, bringing the total to 3.9 million, suggest the target can now be reached only with an enormous increase in spending.
Child poverty is the defining issue of this Labour government. Tony Blair pledged to reduce it; Gordon Brown turned that into a target to halve it by 2010 and eliminate it by 2020. The latest figures, which show a 100,000 rise in the number of children in relative poverty from 2005-06 to 2006-07, bringing the total to 3.9 million, suggest the target can now be reached only with an enormous increase in spending.
The only consolation for the Prime Minister, who has made this a personal crusade, is that 100,000 fewer children experienced material deprivation as defined against a checklist including whether the family can afford to pay for school trips. Yet that is not the case in Scotland, where the number in material deprivation increased from 130,000 to 160,000, while the proportion in relative poverty remained static at 21%. This is deeply disappointing and underlines the persistent nature of severe poverty. Mr Brown remains able to boast that measures such as child tax credits have taken 600,000 children out of relative poverty, but those were the least poor. The remainder will be more difficult, or as Beverley Hughes, the Children's Minister in England, describes trying to meet the target of eradicating child poverty as like going up a down escalator. Moving off benefit and into work will always be the best way out of poverty, but some people can lose out in the transition. The government's decision to remove child benefit from the calculation for housing and council tax benefit from October 2009, will help, but other measures will be needed if more parents are to earn their way out of poverty. Affordable childcare should be the priority. Mothers who successfully complete training schemes too often find they cannot hold down a job because there is no suitable childcare. To be effective, policies require to be much more integrated.
The 200,000 increase in the number of pensioners in relative poverty is further worrying evidence that the government's policies are missing their target. The relatively low take-up of pensioner credits illustrates the basic problem with all means-tested benefits: stigma and confusion about entitlement. This raises the fundamental question of how best to ensure that extra help reaches the people most in need of it.
The most effective way would be to increase the basic pension, and restoring the link with earnings would ensure pensioners did not slip too far out of line with the majority of the population, but that is expensive and inefficient in that it would also go to the better-off.
It is true that relative poverty is a moving target, but the real task is to slow it down. If poverty is defined as living on less than 60% of median income, the only way to reduce the proportion of the population on the wrong side of the midpoint is to reduce the gap between the richest and the poorest. It is unacceptable in 21st-century Britain, the world's fifth wealthiest country, that the number of pensioners and children living in poverty is rising.
