This morning the Government has published its long-awaited draft Child Poverty Strategy – a document that, in theory, constitutes its plan to meet its statutory obligation to end child poverty by 2020.
Government publications come and go but this one really matters because, as the Commission found in our State of the Nation report last October, the situation on child poverty has been stagnating - with 2.3 million children in relative income poverty and 2.6 million poor against the ‘absolute’ fixed line, a 275,000 increase on the previous year. And the projections of the IFS and others suggest that the situation is set to worsen further with the numbers to date only capturing benefits changes up to April 2011, before most of the reductions in spending took effect.
Two-thirds of child poverty is now found in working households. In three-quarters of those families, someone works full-time. That is why we called for the new child poverty strategy to deliver an ambitious detailed step-by-step plan for how the government will meet the 2020 targets. We looked for stronger action to raise low pay, to improve access to affordable, high quality childcare and to tackling the punitive costs of housing, energy and food that too often bear down hardest on the families with least.
Consultation is open until 22 May, and the Commission will respond in full in due course. But my first impression is that, despite including some good things, overall the draft strategy is a serious missed opportunity. It is more coherent than its predecessor, with a clear diagnosis of the problem, and some activity listed in all the main areas where progress is needed to make inroads against the UK’s appallingly high levels of child poverty. It is also welcome that the Government restates its commitment to the goal of ending child poverty by 2020.
But any good news is outweighed by the bad.
First, it is in truth a list, not a strategy. It is a set of policies the Government asserts will allow it to make progress, not a plan that makes clear the impact it expects its policies to have. It. does not engage at all with projections that child poverty is set to increase significantly to 2020 rather than being eradicated. Everyone knows that the 2020 child poverty target will be missed by a country mile. But the Government has simply sidestepped the issue and has given no indication as to what progress - if any - it expects to make in reducing child poverty over the next few years.
Second, though it marshals some excellent recent policy announcements – universal infant free school meals, removing National Insurance for under-21s – it needs to be far stronger on some central issues like low pay and childcare. For example it merely reminds employers to pay the National Minimum Wage - not even going as far as asking them to consider the benefits of the Living Wage.
Third, and most worryingly, it is a document without teeth. That’s because it lacks any clear measures against which the Government can be held to account. A strategy which cannot be measured is meaningless. Despite taking more than a year to think about it, the government has drawn a blank, apparently unable to reach agreement on what a new set of measures should look like. The Government has ended up in a no-man's land where it has effectively declared its lack of faith in the current measures but has failed to produce an alternative set. This is beyond Whitehall farce.
Ministers should get back to the table to decide whether the Government will either re-affirm its commitment to the current statutory measures or propose new and additional measures to supplement the existing framework. They should do so immediately and set a deadline of no more than one month to reach agreement.
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