Cost of living focus for new child poverty strategy

A draft child poverty strategy for 2014-17, published today, pledges to cut the average energy bill by £50 in 2014/15, reduce water costs by capping bills for low-income families with three or more children and reduce food costs through the existing Health Start Vouchers scheme.

Attempts to boost education centre around increasing the number of disadvantaged children getting quality pre-school education through the government's free childcare offer and the pupil premium.

The government also wants to help parents provide the “best possible home environment” through parenting classes and free books, and giving schools increased freedom to develop children’s “character” skills.

Controversially, the government’s so-called bedroom tax policy, which critics claim results in more children ending up in poverty, is listed in the strategy as a way of freeing up housing stock.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said the draft strategy “builds on the good progress we have made so far in tackling child poverty”.

In a written ministerial statement he said: “Despite the tough economic climate, employment has increased by 1.3 million since 2010 and the number of children in workless households has fallen by 274,000.

“Poor children are doing better than ever at school; the proportion of children on free school meals getting good GCSEs including English and maths has increased from 31 per cent in 2010 to 38 per cent in 2013.

“Alongside our strategy, we are publishing an in-depth evidence review which identifies what leads families to be stuck in poverty and what leads poor children to become poor adults.

“By identifying and understanding the root causes of child poverty, now and across generations, we can target action effectively. This is an important step in our mission to eradicate child poverty.

“Based on the evidence in the review, our strategy sets out the action government is taking to tackle child poverty.

“It sets out how we will tackle poverty now through supporting families into work and to increase their earnings, support living standards through decreasing costs for low income families and prevent poor children becoming poor adults through raising their educational attainment."

There is no mention in the strategy of new indictors for measuring child poverty, although ministers have vowed to develop better ways of recognising the root causes of poverty including entrenched worklessness, family breakdown, debt and drug and alcohol dependency.

Matthew Reed, chief executive of the Children’s Society, said that while the government’s continued commitment to ending child poverty is welcome, the new strategy contains no new ideas on how to make it a reality.

“It falls far short of what is needed to prevent a significant increase in the number of children living in poverty by 2020,” he said.

“Too many of the strategy’s measures will fail to end child poverty. Some will make the problem worse.

"The inclusion of the bedroom tax in this strategy is alarming. We know from our direct work with families that this will only make children poorer, for example by displacing more families.”

A public consultation on the strategy will run until 22 May.

Enver Solomon, director of evidence and impact at the National Children’s Bureau said the strategy falls short of setting out a comprehensive cross-Whitehall approach that makes tackling child poverty a top priority across all government departments.

“Education, living standards and work all matter but tackling health inequalities for the poorest and local and regional investment strategies for deprived neighbourhoods are equally important.

"The reality is that families managing on low incomes are being hit hard by cuts to services, having to turn to food banks to supplement a much reduced safety net.”

“There needs to be a fundamental shift, so that tackling the gross inequality and pernicious poverty that exists today is a collective priority for all decision makers.”

Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, said the proposed strategy “lacks the vision or the means” to eradicate child poverty.

“We know that millions of children suffer from multiple problems, including poverty, and we would like to see a far more radical approach to supporting families through early intervention and preventing more children from living in poverty rather than waiting until the situation has reached crisis point, with a clear target of when this will be achieved,” she said.

“Focusing on getting parents back into work is important but, at present, most of those in poverty are working and the stark reality is that some parents can be worse off in work than being unemployed.

Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said the strategy contains little new, or likely to make a dent in the numbers of children growing up in poverty.

“We can reduce child poverty under the existing measurement – we know this because other countries have much lower child poverty under the same measure.

"If they can do better for their children, we can do better for British children too. It will continue to be the measure by which independent experts hold the government to account.

“Parents want secure jobs, living wages, fair rents and affordable childcare. This should not be too much to ask in one of the world’s richest economies, yet these things remain out of reach for millions of families.

"The draft strategy is weak in these essential areas with nothing to say on living wages and only limited investment in affordable homes."

Paul Soames, chief executive at Contact a Family said families with disabled children have always been at greater risk of living in poverty.

"Until the government takes the opportunity to tackle the additional financial pressures faced by families with disabled children such as carrying out an impact assessment of its welfare reforms specifically on disabled children, we fear that families with disabled children will continue to be disproportionally effected by poverty," he added.