Hi ,
Is child poverty something we should, as a society, try to solve? Put it like that and the question sounds ridiculous. But if you ask yourself that question, you might then want to ask yourself some follow up questions, like "why is the UK the only European country with sharply rising rates of child poverty? Are the policy choices that experts warned would increase child poverty increasing child poverty? Should we do something else instead?" So you can understand why governments over the last decade haven't been keen to ask themselves this question.
This is why the Child Poverty Strategy commissioned at the start of Labour's term in government is an interesting change: it shows signs that people in power are now considering this question. It's not everything we'd want it to be, but unpacking it gives a useful insight into how this government understands problems like poverty and inequality, and well as their will to do something about them. Our co-executive director Priya Sahni-Nicholas has done exactly that in our new briefing on the strategy.
The headline intentions of the strategy are important, if unsurprising: the government restates that it thinks child poverty is a problem and would like to reduce it. But even setting this out is a big departure since, as we just discussed, acknowledging that there's a problem immediately prompts the follow up question of "do you intend to change the thing causing it?" In the case of child poverty, the biggest single driver of it was obvious: the two-child benefit limit, which was pushing over 450,000 children into poverty. However, this is a policy that Labour did not want to change. One of the reasons behind the creation of the strategy seemed to be a vain hope they could keep the limit without continuing to increase child poverty.
But the consequence of the government seriously asking itself the question of child poverty meant that eventually, after a full year of seriously fighting to not scrap the two-child limit, they were forced to end it. This is the power of the mindset shift Priya finds throughout the strategy: she writes that there's a strong focus on the systemic causes, like low pay and insecure work for parents, or inequalities of income and between regions. There was meaningful involvement for parents and experts in creating it, which again helps the strategy focus on the root causes of the problem.
There are certainly flaws – such as the gaping hole of not addressing inequality of wealth – but this is a significant shift in what the government believes about child poverty, its causes, and the fundamental question of whether we should try to solve it.
We need much deeper structural change to our economy in order to get close to the strategy's goal of reducing child poverty rates by the end of this parliament, let alone to eliminate it altogether. It'll need to include real wealth redistribution, a total change to housing, and action on racial and disability inequalities. But this shift in mindset will make asking those questions much easier. |