Labour’s child poverty approach between 1998 and 2010 was broad-based, made a significant and long-lasting difference to families with children, and reduced child poverty on a scale and at a pace unmatched by other industrial nations during the period. These findings are published in a Child Poverty Action Group report, ‘Ending child poverty by 2020 Progress made and lessons learned’ written by leading national experts including ISER’s Professor Mike Brewer, launched today (12 June 2012) at the House of Commons.
Alison Garnham, Chief Executive of Child Poverty Action Group said
“The verdict is clear that prioritising child poverty across government improved the childhoods and life chances of millions of children and strengthened our economy but even so, much more needed to be done given the size of the challenge.The warnings for the current government are crystal clear. Under current strategies they are wiping out all these hard-won gains.”
Professor Brewer explains
“The extra investment on benefits and tax credits for families with children between 1997 and 2010 increased incomes amongst millions of families in the bottom half of the income distribution, not just those clustered around the poverty line, providing an unprecedented improvement to the material wellbeing of British families. As a result, child poverty looks to have fallen between 1997 and 2010 regardless of where precisely we set the relative poverty line.
So Labour missed its target, but reducing child poverty by 900,000 children was a remarkable achievement. If there was a failure, it was that it did not sustain the increases in spending on financial support for children and, perhaps, a ‘failure’ to set a realistic target. A lack of income is not the only way to define poverty, and we can debate whether cash transfers or improved public services are the best way of preventing poverty among future generations, but, given the coalition government’s desire to close the deficit chiefly through spending cuts, the outlook for relative child poverty over this decade looks bleak."