The emergency Budget offered a glimpse of the impact that slashing the public deficit will have on families.
Child poverty campaigners, think-tanks, and financial analysts alike have voiced their doubts about how the budget has, as Chancellor George Osborne claims, protected the most vulnerable. The £2bn boost in child tax credits for the poorest families does not compensate for the wide-scale reduction in out-of-work benefits.
Junior work and pensions minister Maria Miller, whose remit covers child poverty, is convinced that reducing benefits and creating incentives to work will tackle the root causes of poverty.
"When you look at the budget in its totality you can see it is absolutely designed to protect children living in the most difficult circumstances," she says. "By removing ad hoc grants and replacing them with sustained funding through the child tax credits families are going to get the help they need week in week out and not simply at a time when a baby is born."
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