The government has claimed it has 'hit the ground running' when it comes to child poverty by setting up a task force that will begin meeting 'in the next few weeks' to consider the issue.
They have said:
The Prime Minister has today [Wednesday 17 July] appointed the Work & Pensions Secretary and the Education Secretary as the joint leads of a new ministerial taskforce to begin work on the Child Poverty Strategy.
A new Child Poverty Unit in the Cabinet Office - bringing together expert officials from across government as well as external experts - will report into the taskforce. The new unit will explore how we can use all the available levers we have across government to create an ambitious strategy.
Recognising the wide-ranging causes of child poverty, Secretaries of State from across government will take part in this work, with the first meeting set to take place in the coming weeks.
In the immediate term, the taskforce is expected to consider how we can use levers related to household income as well as employment, housing, children's health, childcare and education to improve children's experiences and chances at life.
Let me stand back for a moment and consider what poverty is. This is a definition from the Cambridge English Dictionary:
the condition of being extremely poor
Their definition of being poor is:
having little money and/or few possessions
I think this gives us enough on which to base a discussion.
First, most children living in poverty live in a household where adults are at work. Unless the parents of children are to be paid more for their work than others, there is no solution to child poverty there, unless minimum wages are to rise universally.
Second, children are in poverty now. Not in a few weeks, or a year or two when this task force reports, and certainly not in the five years hence when housing, children's health, childcare and education might (and I stress, might, subject to there being no money left) be reformed. This is a current crisis.
Third, the crisis is caused by the families in which these children live having insufficient money. That is the beginning and the end of the explanation of child poverty. They need that money now. To pretend otherwise is patronising, paternalistic, and dogmatic nonsense.
Providing more money means ending the two-child benefit cap as a starting point.
That would cost £1.7 billion. There are a number of ways to raise this in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024.
Having done that, the next step is to improve other benefits.
In that case, this task force faces a choice. It can prevaricate for a year or two and then issue a report which they know will not be acted upon. In other words, they can be the enablers of continued child poverty, which, as far as Labour is concerned, can only fuel the rise of Reform.
Or, they can report by October, saying end the two-child benefit cap and then move on to spend more having achieved that goal, because that is the only way to end child poverty.
Child poverty is caused by a lack of money. Only more money for those in poverty can solve it. There is no point in pretending otherwise.
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Thank you and well said, Richard.
Yesterday evening, I went out for dinner with an SW friend.
During the day, she was helping out at a charity to help women who have had to resort to such work and need help to move on / out. A few weeks ago, I cited some figures about the work and educational backgrounds of such women. Yesterday, I learnt that about a third or so are mothers, including my friend. The austerity of the past 14 plus years has driven many women to such desperate measures. It’s not ending.
But, we can’t afford to do anything about it – Rachel says so.
Thank you, Richard.
That community has little time for these fakes.
That’s one of the attractions of austerity for the wealthy, the law of supply and demand being what it is, it makes affordable sex more available.
Scammer & Co clearly want to avoid accountability because they are closet fascist politicians (avoiding accountability to the many as opposed to doing the bidding of their rich sponsors is the hallmark of fascist politicians). What better way to avoid accountability in regard to tackling poverty than kicking the can down the road with yet another commission or task force? You really can’t trust Scammer & Co as far as you can throw them to use an old adage!
Why bother with a task force? Why not just learn from the Rowntree Foundation reports etc?
This would be cheaper and quicker.
Oh silly me, they don’t want a proper solution, so let’s kick it down the road.
You don’t need a task force to identify what people in poverty need.
They need opportunities. They need basic provisions. They need more money.
There use to be a time when a single wage-earner could provide for their family.
That this is not the case today, shows that the system is broken.
Ever since this policy was announced when in opposition it was clear (and said at the time by many) that it would be reversed.
We now have to go through this “dance” – do a review, express surprise/shock at its findings, eventually remove the cap…. but with some fig-leaf as cover from the cries of “U-turn”.
Utterly ridiculous; performative politics at its worst.
Now, there is room for a review… one that might link in with your post about “out of ours” minimum wage etc.. But if the patient is bleeding you staunch the flow….. not set up a committee to discuss underlying health issues.
Let’s be honest, from the moment Starmer was placed in politics to the present moment, his record is performative posturing and lies. He lied – now admitted – to gain the leadership. When the nation wakes up to this, Farage or some similar will be there with their lies, to line rich pockets, as the human race sinks further into the swamp of extinction.
It’s the despair that gets to you, when all the levers to change things are there, but deliberately neglected.
‘UK’s new government announces legislation for ‘national renewal’ as Parliament opens with royal pomp’. Meanwhile in the real world –
‘a report of height in five-year-old children from 200 countries has alarming news for the UK. In 1985, boys and girls in the UK were shorter than those in 68 other countries. We slipped down the rankings, steadily, so that by 2019, UK boys ranked 102, and girls 96. By five years of age, UK children are, on average, 7cm shorter than children in the Netherlands’.
‘The same Unicef comparison looks at public spending on child education and care for children aged nought to five. The average for OECD countries is $6,000 per child per year. Norway and Sweden spend around $12,000, France close to $9,000. In the UK, we spend $4,000, limping along below average’.
‘the social circumstances of early childhood, including good nutrition, are linked not only to height, but to educational and social success. Height, then, is both an outcome of conditions in childhood and an indicator – by which I mean that shorter height is a likely reflection of adverse conditions that will affect other aspects of children’s development: cognitive, linguistic, emotional’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/25/britains-shorter-children-reveal-a-grim-story-about-austerity-but-its-scars-run-far-deeper
A sustainable ‘national renewal’ would need to treat children as central to the future health of the UK, not as a cost to be minimised (while other far less important costs are hugely expanded). So just more renewal hot air from those seeking to benefit (especially in the future) by being a neoliberal salesperson.
Thanks
“National Renewal” – Scammer & Co code for “National Indifference” – In other words continuation of the 14 years of the Tory attitude to poor people! Labour voters were warned but couldn’t be bothered to check out if the hype rang true. The British disease – suckers for hype!
An interesting aspect of those statistics is that because they refer to ages 0–5, the outcomes could be completely turned around within one parliament.
In Wales, 30% of children live in household Poverty and Labour has ruled the Assembly /Senedd since its inception 24 years ago. Useless as ever and Starmer is no different. Sad but true
Please don’t be crass here
The Senedd has almost no revenue raising powers so of course it can’t solve this issue.
Is there a danger that if you just see dealing with child poverty as a cash issue it ignores other ways of improving children’s lives? If the poor get more money those that feed off the poor will expect more for themselves in terms of increased rent and prices. Parts of the press will also delight in proving that cash ends up wasted on scams, drugs, booze, cash and holidays. (Not that a family holiday is a bad thing.)
The country does need to decide a basic level of family living that should be available and should set in train actions that make sure it is provided, such as proper accommodation, living space, beds, etc.. These will be longer term objectives than removing the cap, though if I were in charge I would quickly remove the cap to indicate the direction of travel.
Sure
But poverty has never been relieved without those suffering it having more money
Taking drugs and “cutting”can be an escape for despair if only for a short time.
My drug of choice is reading especially science fiction and fantasy.
I wonder if we need the equivalent of firstly the old ‘Supplementary Benefit Commissioners’ charged with looking at both what a ‘basic but adequate’ standard of living looks like and then with the power to recommend Benefit and Minimum Wage rates.
Possibly in addition to this some sort of ‘Tribune’ with the job of looking after the interests of the majority of the population and with the power to put the boot in when Companies etc were not acting in the public interest?
There was a time when benefit letters explicitly explained you were being given what you were because it was assessed as being the minimum you needed to live on. IDS ended that with the introduction of Universal Credit and the five-week wait before you get any money for anything. During this five week period you’re expected, apparently, to live on air and rent/mortgage-free, suggesting the govt have entirely abdicated responsibility for your well-being and, since social security is an integral contributor to the well-being of the economy, they don’t care about that either. It’s a great shame, in my view, none of this is better understood by the electorate, so stupefied by the media they cheer on their own impending deprivation.
It’s been mentioned before – the “well kept secret” of the Scottish Child Payment (well kept by Unionist media and politicians). The submission by Danny Dorling is eye-opening. Also a blog from the David Hume Institute.
And the SG really doesn’t have the facility to create money like the Westminster government and really does have to produce a balanced budget (more or less). Funny how the Daily Mail isn’t all over this?
https://www.parliament.scot/-/media/files/committees/social-justice-and-social-security-committee/scottish-child-payment/danny-dorling–scottish-child-payment.pdf
https://davidhumeinstitute.org/latest-news/2023/9/18/scottish-child-payment-why-arent-more-people-talking-about-itnbsp-and-why-they-should
It will be interesting to see what happens with the SNP’s amendment about the two child benefit cap.
You’d hope that a lot (and I mean, a lot) of the Labour MPs vote in favour. If they are whipped otherwise, they should ignore it – if a large number of them rebel, there wouldn’t be much of a chance of ‘punishment’ for disobeying.
It will be interesting to see how somebody such as Torsten Bell would vote. Surely he couldn’t be hypocritical to vote against it given his job for the past number of years?
Abstention is the best you can hope for.
But most of them will say if the SNP proposes it then it must be wrong….
Well, it didn’t take long. “ Minister blames ‘economic circumstances’ for failure to ditch two-child cap”
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24461758.minister-blames-economic-circumstances-failure-ditch-two-chil/
Oh dear, that means more……difficult decisions.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24461533.rachel-reeves-warns-difficult-decisions-fix-public-finances/
On child poverty the government has hit the ground running, face first.
A week or so ago on a BBC Radio Scotland phone-in, a notably shrill, know-it-all caller telephoned to assert that nobody could ever explain to him how child poverty was determined. The reason for that was the caller was too lazy, complacent or politically biased to find out. The Children’s Commissioner for England (CCE) website provides the working definition for the UK:
“A child is living in poverty if they live in a household whose income falls below a given threshold. In the UK, there are two definitions of that threshold:
The threshold for relative poverty is set at 60% of the average (median) net household income (after taking into account taxes paid and benefits received) in the year in question. This threshold can fluctuate from one year to the next.
The threshold for absolute poverty is set at 60% of the average (median) net household income in 2010/11. This threshold does not fluctuate over time”.
The CCE claims there are 4.2m children currently living in poverty in the UK; an increase of 600,000 since 2010/11.
There, that isn’t difficult to understand. Clearly 4.2m children living in poverty is not in the highest priority for the Labour Government, because all we have to show is a new Task Force, without a timetable, looking at how they can kick the can down the road, without anyone noticing. After all, addressing that sort of problem might breach a Conservative fiscal rule, and we can’t have that, at any price.
There are Labour MPs in Scotland who think, or hope that nobody there will notice. Good luck with that. Only two weeks in; but the same old, outdated, shifty Party, living the scam.