Don’t be fooled by today’s child poverty figures

By Kayte Lawton

Don’t be fooled by today’s child poverty figures. The stats on poverty and inequality show that child poverty fell by 200,000 in 2009/10. This brought the number of poor children in Labour’s last year in office down to 2.6 million, around 1 million fewer than they inherited in 1997. In absolute terms, the improvements were even better: child poverty was down 2 million, pensioner poverty fell by 1.6 million, working age poverty was down 1.3 million and among the overall population, there were 5 million fewer people in poverty by 2010.

Taking a million children out of relative poverty is not a bad record for the Labour government, yet this progress is dwarfed by the challenge of ending child poverty by 2020 – the goal of the Child Poverty Act passed last year.

Meeting that target would mean lifting at least another million children out of poverty over this parliament and the next. To achieve the same level of progress in the next decade that was made over the last 13 years is looking incredibly challenging and perhaps even impossible. The Institute for Fiscal Studies projects an increase in child poverty in 2012/13 as a result of the coalition’s tax and benefit changes, with further increases likely beyond that.

Just as worryingly, the coalition’s approach to child poverty is in disarray. The Child Poverty Strategy published last month was little more than a position paper, far too light on strategy to make enough impact. The document reels off a list of current government policies that affect families in some way or other – from welfare reform, to GP commissioning, to localism. Many are laudable in their own terms but taken together they are little more than a disconnected set of policies driven by a host of competing priorities and the individual reform agendas of departments and ministers.

The only genuinely new plans were underwhelming – a wider set of indicators to measure the progress of children and a new commission to monitor activity. We have less than ten years to hit the 2020 target yet the strategy contains no new poverty projections factoring in possible labour market scenarios over that period, no milestones for what needs to be achieved each year and no clear route to success.

Both coalition partners say they are serious about reaching the 2020 targets and both signed into law the 2010 Child Poverty Act. But to parade that commitment and then produce a strategy that is completely incapable of achieving the goal is politically risky, if not reckless. The political reality is that there will be very little new money for better benefits or services, while employment levels are unlikely to reach pre-recession levels before at least 2016.

The risk is that we continue to demand that those 2020 targets are met, while all the time knowing that they cannot be. Instead, we need to offer the coalition (and whoever forms the 2015-2020 Government) a realistic action plan and then hold them to it.

As part of this, we may need to accept that the targets are simply not achievable, as they are currently set out. One idea is to focus efforts on particular age groups: IPPR favours a focus on under-5s. With over half of poor children living with working parents, raising pay through living wage policies and improvements to skills and productivity will be a vital part of any strategy, and too often overlooked by Labour as well as the coalition. Two-earner families have a low risk of poverty but childcare support and flexible working opportunities need to be much better to make that a reality. We also need to find better ways of accounting for spending on things like childcare, which supports working parents but does not feature directly as family income.

With the government’s child poverty plans so clearly under-developed, it is time for campaigners and researchers to come up with ambitious and realistic alternatives that have the best chance of improving the quality of life for the maximum number of children.

Kayte Lawton, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Public Policy Research