Tom MacInnes writes:
The government’s latest figures on child poverty, released today, 10 June, show an increase in the number of children living below the poverty line, for the second successive year.
The increase seems small – from 3.8 million in 2005/06 to 3.9m in 2006/07, measured after housing costs– but in terms of the government’s stated goal of eradicating child poverty by 2020 it is disastrous.
Media comment so far has centred on the likelihood of the government missing its 2010 target, of halving the number of children in poverty. Concentrating on 2010 seems optimistic when even the short term target for 2004/05, of a 25% reduction to 3.3m children, has still not been reached. In fact, we’re not even half way to that target. The policy has stalled.
In fact, it stalled some time ago. The last five years’ worth of figures show no improvement - all of the 500,000 children lifted out of poverty by New Labour were lifted between 1998 and 2003. This was on the back of policies such as the minimum wage, New Deal for Lone Parents and Working Tax Credit that were introduced in the government’s first term. The second term had no remotely comparable innovations , and today’s figures are partly the result of that.
Since 2007 changes have been made to the levels of Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit. The government estimates that these changes will lift 500,000 children out of poverty – equal to the total number of children taken out of poverty since 1999. It is difficult to understand how some welcome but small changes to already existing benefits can make as big an impact as all the other measures that have been taken put together.
These adjustments to benefit levels will be particularly ineffective if the UK economy continues to slow down, and this slowdown results in job losses. This makes the inaction of the second term all the more inexcusable. With a huge parliamentary majority in a period of sustained economic growth, before the credit crunch, before oil at $130 a barrel, before food and energy bills started racing upwards, before mortgage repayments increased by 25% per year, that was the time to make a radical and long lasting difference in the proportion of children in the UK who grow up poor.
Now with government finances tight and the general public concerned that their own standards of living are threatened, there is neither the money, nor the ideas, to turn the child poverty target into a reality.
Peter Kenway adds.
Today’s figures for the year 2006/07 are lamentably late. But since that was the last year of Tony Blair’s Premiership, they do allow us to draw up an account of his whole time in office.
What does it show? One statistic stands out above all others.
Using the government’s preferred definition of poverty (that is, on the ‘Before Housing Costs’ basis), overall poverty fell further in both percentage and absolute terms during John Major’s time as Prime Minister than during Mr Blair’s.
To be precise, the percentage of the overall population in poverty fell from 22% in 1990/91 to 19% in 1996/97, Major’s last year in office, down 3%. By 2006/07, Blair’s last year in office, that figure fell to 18%.
In terms of absolute numbers, the figures for the three years (all for the
UK) are 12.1 million, 11.2 million and 10.7 million respectively.
The source for these numbers is table 3.1tr and table 3.3tr
here.
Note that the 1996/97 figure of 11.2 million is based on the published GB
proportion applied to the UK population.
The differences are not great: a fall under Major of 3%, or 0.9 million, compared with a fall under Blair of 1% or 0.5 million. The percentage difference may also somewhat misleading as a result of rounding.
Nevertheless, the fact that the comparisons can even be made, never mind
found to be in Major’s favour, is quite astonishing. After all, for Labour under
Blair, poverty was a crusade. Major's government simply ignored it.
A list of the projects areas of interest NPI expects to examine in 2008 has now been published. The list is not exclusive and will be updated as and when necessary.
NPI's tenth annual report assessing the state of progress on poverty and social exclusion across the UK was published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on 3 December. With the latest official figures on UK poverty showing a rise for the first time in a decade, this report reviews its usual wide range of evidence in order to reach an overall conclusion on where the strategy to end child poverty now stands. Looking to the future, the report tries to assess whether all that is needed is more of the same - or whether instead the time has now come for a fundamental rethink.
The report can be accessed from our poverty publications page.
The New Policy Institute is a progressive think tank, founded in 1996. Wholly independent, it has neither financial backers nor political patrons.
Almost all its funding is project-based and comes principally from charitable foundations, trade unions, voluntary sector organisations and public sector bodies.
Most projects lead directly to public-domain reports, of which there are now over 100. The exceptions to this are those projects carried out on a consultancy basis. Some reports - and most submissions to inquiries - are unfunded.
The New Policy Institute team is: Peter Kenway, Tom MacInnes, Guy Palmer, Angi Driver, Jenny Pannell, Cathy Street and Steve Macarthur. Click here for more details.
