Poverty measures will hide the reality

Ending child poverty is an objective to which all major political parties are now committed. From the day back in 1999 when Tony Blair unexpectedly announced his aim of eradicating child poverty by 2020, the children’s sector concentrated on securing cross-party backing for the idea. It took several years – most politicians find themselves reluctant to sign up to the pledges of their opponents – but gradually the End Child Poverty coalition wore down the resistance, and in 2007 David Cameron committed the Conservatives to the target, following the earlier example of the Liberal Democrats. In 2010, shortly before the general election, all parties supported the Child Poverty Act, which set the target into legislation and committed future governments to reporting annually on progress.

If you were in government, what would you do? You would be bound by law to report each year on the numbers of children in poverty, and every independent expert predicts that the numbers are going to rise, so you would have two options. You could introduce some measures to reduce child poverty, or you could change the way in which you counted poor children.

So the government’s consultation was born. In the introduction, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith says encouragingly that “the government will always stand by its commitment to tackle child poverty”. He and Liberal Democrat education minister David Laws both argue, quite correctly, that poverty is not just a matter of income. To get a true picture of child poverty, they suggest that we need to look at the quality of housing; whether a child is living in a workless family; levels of debt; the quality of parenting the child experiences; family stability; and parental health. They set out a way of creating a single child poverty index, drawing on all these factors, to create one measure that captures the rounded reality of child poverty.

At first glance it seems reasonable. Of course money isn’t everything; we all know of children who have flourished despite the hardest financial conditions, and we all know of children from prosperous backgrounds for whom life has been terrible. Every government document since 1999 on the topic has emphasised how the challenge of tackling child poverty is a cross-government responsibility involving the need to improve child health, education, pre-school support, housing and many other policy areas.

We all know too that the current child poverty measures have some perverse effects. In 2010/11, the figures showed a drop in the number of children living in relative poverty, because the national average had gone down so much in the recession, yet the number of children in absolute poverty stayed roughly the same. That is the reason for having four measures at present, so we can get an overall picture.

It is right to be monitoring those other poverty-related factors. Under the previous government, all these factors, and many more, were reported on annually as part of a report on social deprivation. That process of reporting was stopped, as part of the coalition’s understandable belief that there were too many targets. Bringing some of them back seems to be very sensible. It could even be described as a “U-turn”, and a welcome one at that.

But these factors should not substitute for income measures. The current package of four measures allows us to compare the UK’s performance with all other developed nations; under the government’s proposals, those comparisons would no longer be possible. Creating one overarching measure will conceal what is really happening to incomes, and what is really happening to children who live in poverty. And including in such a measure some very subjective factors – for example, the quality of parenting – raises the suspicion that it would be easy to adjust the final result. Which is maybe why every academic has opposed the proposal.

Are they fiddling the figures, or painting the picture? You decide.

Sir Paul Ennals is interim strategy director for Sense, the national deafblind charity