Ruth Smith examines why it fell behind and the action needed to get theanti-poverty drive back on track.
Gobsmacked. That was the reaction of Frank Field, the Labour MP andformer social security minister, when in 1999 the Prime Minister pledgedto eradicate child poverty within a generation.
To achieve this historic goal the Government set itself ambitioustargets: to cut child poverty by a quarter by 2004/05; to halve it by2010/11; and eliminate it by 2020. To hit the first target, the numberof children in poverty needed to fall by around a million, where povertyis defined as the number of children living in households with less than60 per cent of median income. Figures just out reveal the figure is700,000, a drop of 17 per cent since 1999, but 300,000 children short ofthe 25 per cent target.
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