In his blog earlier this week, Max Wind-Cowie commented on the FT’s report that the Conservatives plan to move away from Labour’s narrow, income-based measure of child poverty, towards a broader range of measures that would reflect the wider social context of child poverty (e.g. underage pregnancy, joblessness, lone parenting and other factors).

What perplexes me about these plans is that we already know which children (and parents) are affected by child poverty; Government figures tell us that children living in a workless household are most at risk of living in poverty, while 59 per cent of poor children live in a household with at least one adult in work and 40 per cent of poor children live in a household headed by a lone parent.

It seems like an obvious point, but the reason for focusing child poverty targets on income poverty is that living on a low income (and the stress and deprivation this entails) is the worst aspect of being poor. It has been shown to have a detrimental impact on almost every area of children’s lives, from physical and mental health to cognitive development and educational attainment. Conversely, the evidence shows that increasing the incomes of poor families immediately improves children’s standards of living, including better nutrition, less stress and more positive activities.

Narrow measures of poverty do not have to mean narrow strategies for addressing poverty. It is clear that redistribution through the tax and benefits system is not enough on its own - a range of strategies are needed to reduce the number of children living in poverty, including help for workless parents to achieve sustainable employment and ensuring that those parents who are in work are adequately paid and are not penalised by the immediate withdrawal of benefits (children in households where all adults are working still have an 8 per cent chance of living in poverty). However, in the context of a recession and rising unemployment when new jobs are increasingly hard to come by, benefits and tax credits will have an important role to play in ensuring that momentum on reducing child poverty is sustained and the gains of the last few years are not reversed. 

While child poverty remains such a pressing issue and it is looking unlikely that the 2020 target of ending child poverty can be met, the Conservatives’ plans to invest public money in incentivising marriage look frivolous. By the reckoning of Imran Hussain, head of policy for the Child Poverty Action Group, “the same amount of money invested in tax credits and benefits could lift 100,000 children out of poverty."

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