Alistair Darling’s package of measures designed to get a quarter of a million children out of poverty by 2010 have been broadly welcomed by campaigners. But some question whether he has gone far enough, says Herpreet Kaur Grewal.
On the whole, chancellor Alistair Darling’s Budget – with its proposed hikes in alcohol, cigarettes, fuel duty and higher taxes for the most polluting cars – was attacked by the press last week. But while supermarkets were bracing themselves for a stampede from customers buying booze before the duty rises, child poverty campaigners were quietly celebrating.
In his Budget speech, the chancellor promised to help the poorest families “escape permanently the cycle of deprivation that blights too many lives”, with £950 million worth of measures that the Treasury estimates will lift 250,000 children out of poverty by 2010 (R&R, 14 March, p1).
The measures including disregarding child benefit when calculating a household’s income for means-tested housing and council tax benefit from October 2009. Darling said this would give a one-child working family on £11,000 a year or less up to £17 more a week. This measure alone would lift 150,000 more children out of poverty, the Government claims.
Further announcements included a rise in the child element of the child tax credit by £50 a year from April 2009 to further help low- to middle-income families. This will mean that a family with two children, with household earnings of up to £28,000 a year, will be more than £130 a year better off.
The chancellor also announced that a £20 a week increase in child benefit for the first child that had been planned for 2010 would now start in April 2009. Around £125 million will also be spent over the next three years on child poverty pilots to develop new approaches to tackling the problem.
Charities’ coalition End Child Poverty (ECP) broadly welcomed the announcements, which they said signal the Government’s renewed pledge to meet its target to halve child poverty from 3.4 million in 1999 to 1.7 million in 2010. The latest data – for 2006 – shows 2.8 million children living in relative poverty. ECP director Hilary Fisher said: “In such a tight spending round, it is reassuring to see the Government is still serious about lifting children out of poverty.”
This optimism is understandable – especially after claims that last year’s pre-Budget report (R&R, 12 October 2007, p1) diverted money originally intended to tackle child poverty into cutting inheritance tax. But James Browne of research organisation the Institute of Fiscal Studies, (IFS) says that unless next year’s Budget has an even larger child poverty package, hitting the 2010 target looks “extremely unlikely”.
Browne says that, following last year’s report, the IFS estimated that unless the Government introduced new policies, it would miss its 2010 target by 700,000 children, and closing the gap could cost £3.4 billion. Browne describes this year’s Budget as “a significant step forward, but still more than 450,000 (children) away”.
An analysis published with the Budget, Ending Child Poverty: Everybody’s Business, sets out the Government’s long-term vision of how it intends to “renew” its drive to meet its 2010 target. As well as reiterating familiar goals, such as improving the quality of social homes and investing £8.4 billion to build affordable homes (the Government acknowledges that low quality housing can have a damaging impact on a child’s life chances), the plan also proposes a number of new initiatives. These will, it says, “address the fundamental causes of poverty and have a long-term and sustainable impact”.
These initiatives include new Child Poverty pilots, in which the Government intends to invest £125 million between 2008 and 2011. The pilots are intended to bring together a number of services, such as parental employment support and childcare, and examine new approaches that could inform future policy development.
The Government says it will also pilot Child Development Grants in ten local authority areas. Under the grant scheme, payments of £200 will be made to parents who take up childcare places and have contact with their local Sure Start Children’s Centre.
A spokesman for the Child Poverty Action Group says the campaign body will also continue to press for extra measures including more direct investment in family income, particularly child benefit “which helps larger families, out-of-work and in-work families, and has an almost 100 per cent take-up”. The Government needs to show consistent leadership, he says. “They can’t just be bold for one day. It has to continue right on through.”