The Government has been accused of scrapping child poverty targets because they were due to miss the original goals by ‘a country mile’.
Iain Duncan Smith yesterday announced the Government was reforming child poverty measures and introducing a new system focussing on the ‘root causes’ of poverty and making a ‘meaningful change to children's life chances’.
He said measures introduced by Labour in 2010, defining a child as being poor when it lives in a household with an income below 60% of the UK's average, were ‘deeply flawed and a poor test of whether children's lives are genuinely improving’.
New legislation will incorporate the proportion of children living in workless households and the educational attainment of all pupils and the most disadvantaged school children at age 16.
Ducan Smith said: ‘The measures announced today are the foundation of a new, comprehensive way of addressing poverty and reflect our conviction that work is the best route out of poverty.’ However chair of the Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission, Alan Milburn, suggested the existing targets were going to be ‘missed by a country mile.’
‘The life chances of children, the poorest especially, depend on many things including good parenting, childcare, education and employment... It is not credible, however, to try to improve the life chances of the poor without acknowledging the most obvious symptom of poverty, lack of money.
‘Abolishing the legal targets doesn’t make the issue of child poverty go away. It remains a deep scar in the fabric of our nation. The key issue is less how child poverty is measured and more how it is tackled.’
Stephen Timms MP, Labour’s acting shadow work and pensions secretary, said: ‘David Cameron’s government is trying to make child poverty go away by pretending that if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. The Tory manifesto promised to "eliminate child poverty". But now Tory ministers are trying to change the definition of child poverty to hide the government’s lack of progress.
‘Ministers should be tackling low pay, boosting productivity and raising skill levels to cut child poverty, rather than threatening the tax credits that millions of working families rely on. It’s time for this government to make work pay, rather than making working families pay.’