CYP Now - Editorial: Government must be brave on child poverty

Last week's Labour Party Conference in Manchester was dominated by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's speeches, and the knowledge that it was Blair's swansong. However, this doesn't mean that attendees, especially those that took part in the many fringe events that ran in parallel to the big set speeches, only concentrated on who will step in to the top slot next year.

As our conference diary (see Analysis, p12) demonstrates, ministers, MPsand party members discussed issues from healthy foods and the politicsof parenting, to the role of the voluntary sector in children's servicesand how best to support families with disabled children. But one subjectthat got more airtime than most was the debate over how best to tacklechild poverty, and what now needs to be done to hit the Government'sself-imposed target of halving child poverty by 2010.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation an extra 4bn isneeded to meet the 2010 target, but many organisations devoted totackling child poverty believe that money alone won't solve the problem.Equally, they realise that the Government's concentration on work as thebest route out of poverty has, and will, only take poor families sofar.

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