The Government is committed to tackling child poverty and improving children’s life chances. The existing income-based measures, introduced in the Child Poverty Act 2010, do not address the root causes of poverty and encourage governments to focus only on the symptoms. That is why the Welfare Reform and Work Bill contains provisions to repeal those measures and introduce new life chances measures of worklessness and educational attainment. Annual reporting on these new measures will ensure every Government concentrates action in the areas that the evidence shows are most important for children’s life chances.
Setting targets based on relative income does not encourage policymakers to address the underlying causes of poverty. It led the previous Labour Government to simply spend more and more money on income transfers to lift people just over the poverty threshold, without doing anything about why those people were in poverty in the first place. The relative income measures showed the number of children in relative poverty falling during the last recession because of falling median incomes, but of course in reality children were not better off at all.
By Patrick McLoughlin on February 24, 2016