The latest child poverty figures make sober reading. They show that the proportion of children living in poverty has doubled in the past generation, and the UK now has proportionately more poor children than most other rich countries. This is not what was promised or expected. In 1969, Thatcher having tripled child poverty in the 1980s, Tony Blair committed Labour to halving it by 2010 and eliminating it altogether by 2020. By 2005 there were still 3.4 million children living in poverty (i.e. living in households whose income was less than 60% of full-time median earnings), the number having been reduced by 600,000 since the pledge was made. However, this was well short of the cut rrquired since the reduction was just 17% whereas the target was 25%. What is more disturbing is that the total, having been cut inadequately, is now starting to rise again significantly. This is freversible, but not on current policies.

In the UK, though child poverty is not killing millions of children a year as it is elsewhere in the world, the suffering that poverty causes (especially relative to the rich whose income and wealth has quadrupled) is nevertheless devastating to those who experience it. What then are its causes and how should they be tackled? The underlying causes of entrenched child poverty in Britain come from low wages and inadequate employment opportunities, often lone parent families or families where only one parent is in any kind of employment.
The extent of low pay is little understood. Half the working population earns less than £17,597 a year (£338 a week), 1/8th of the £150,000 threshold for the rich that featured in the last Budget. A 40-hour week on the national minimum wage offers a gross salary of £11,918 (£229 a week), 1/13th of the threshold for the rich. The adult rate of jobseeker’s allowance is an impoverishing £3,344 a year, a mere £64.30 per week, which is just 1/45th of the threshold for the rich. It is quite simply morally wrong and socially demeaning for a society to tolerate such enormous gaps. It is also indefensible when those on the lowest rates of pay in the public services, retail or hospitality sectors are performing services on which the rich, and indeed the rest of society, depend.
There are several policies to deal with child poverty which could be dealt with much more vigorously. The minimum wage, currently just £5.73 an hour, should be raised (without risk of increasing unemployment) to £7 an hour within 18 months; certainly the proposed 1% rise in October this year (a miserly 5.7p increase) should be raised to a 5% uplift, which would still leave the minimum wage below £6 an hour. The adult rate, which is being extended to cover 21-year olds from October next year, should also be extended to 18-year olds so that younger workers are not discriminated against. And rather than the State subsidising low-paying employers through tax credits, it would be far better to allow net incomes to rise through making earnings disregards more generous and altering the tapers and generosity of benefits and tax credits, so as to reduce the poverty trap and boost work incentives. Investment in training should be targeted at those with low skills. Wider use of pay audits should squeeze out pay discrimination. And Government should lead by example by tackling low pay in the public sector where a quarter of all low-paid jobs are found – the GLA’s Living Wage (not minimum wage) campaign shows what can be done.

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