A week’s a long time in politics, Harold Wilson famously said back in the 1960s. He was of course referring to the unavoidable fact that just when you think all’s well with the world, real life has a marvellous way of sneaking up on you and “legging-you-over” – as the Chancellor, Gordon Brown found out to his cost just this week.
Back On 21st March 2007, just after his most recent budget speech, people were queuing up to promote good-news stories about Big-Gordie’s generosity and helpfulness towards the Child Poverty initiative.
Commenting on Gordon Brown’s eleventh Budget statement, Child Poverty Action Group’s Chief Executive, Kate Green, said: “As a member of the Campaign to End Child Poverty we recognise the important step that the Government has made in this Budget towards halving child poverty by 2010. Extra investment at this stage is vital to keep us in reach of that target. Today’s Budget investment must be significantly extended in the Comprehensive Spending Review, particularly for groups like disabled children and larger families.”
On the specific measures announced, amongst lots of other things she said this: “New investment of a billion pounds focused on the poorest families through Working Tax Credit and an above earnings increase in Child Tax Credit for 2008 is excellent news. It will take us an important step towards the target of halving child poverty by 2010.
Fast forward to Tuesday 27th March 2007 and what’s the headline, “Disasterous rise in Child Poverty” – aaarrggghh! Sorry Gordie – back in your box. The children’s charity Barnardo’s commented as figures were released showing a 200,000 rise in UK children living in relative poverty last year, Barnardo’s describing it as a “moral disgrace”.
Back in March 1999 Tony Blair had pledged to end child poverty within a generation (later clarified as being by 2020). On the road to that historic goal, the Government committed itself to cut child poverty by a quarter between 1998/99 and 2004/05, and by half by 2010/11. Barnardo’s said that ministers were a long way from honouring that pledge to halve child poverty by 2010. 3.8 million children live in poverty in the UK today, that’s one in three children – a shocking figure given the wealth of our nation.
So whilst those figures are indeed shocking and it’s certainly popular to beat-up the government of the day – more so apparently with Tony Blair at the moment; it’s also useful to look a little bit deeper into the background of this most recent set of unsatisfactory child poverty figures and attempt to try put them in context.
Child Poverty since 1979
Comparative data on child poverty isn’t available before 1979 – so to all intents and purposes 1979 is year zero for researchers, when the received wisdom had the child poverty level at 14%. Child poverty grew very rapidly in the 1980s – the era of Margaret Thatcher and her massive ‘change’ agenda – more slowly in the 1990s peaking at 33% by 1992/93 and staying relatively fixed at that rate until Tony Blair, said on March 18 1999, “Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty forever, and it will take a generation. It is a twenty year mission, but I believe it can be done.”
And indeed something was done with seemingly pleasing results, as the trend improved. So an easy option initially would be to blame it all on ‘Maggie’ – but of course that’s too simplistic. Undoubtedly, whatever policy judgements she made at the time almost certainly impacted child poverty in some way – but it’s almost certain that what was at work here was just the cardinal sin of omission – i.e. nobody paying attention. If you don’t pay particular attention to anything – it tends to get worse.
What is the Poverty Line?
In 2004/05 the poverty line – the amount of money below which, after adjusting for size and composition of household and after housing costs, a family was categorised as poor was as follows:
• £186 per week, (£9,672 per year) for a lone parent with two children aged 5 and 11
• £268 per week (£13,936 per year) for a couple with two children aged 5 and 11.
How do Child Poverty rates compare across The UK?
Child poverty rates vary across the UK; presented as 3 year running average (2002/03-2004/05) ‘after housing costs’ – Inner London is highest at 52% children in risk of poverty, and Eastern England lowest at 22%. Not a lot of surprises in the full picture with the classic pattern of inner cities being worse than the leafy glades of the garden counties and centres of industry.
How do Child Poverty rates in The UK compare to those in the rest of the world?
Although significant progress has been made in recent years, the UK is still towards the bottom of the child poverty league table for developed countries. UNICEF’s ‘Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005’ League places the UK 20th out of 26 countries.
The full report is available here: http://www.unicef.org/sowc06/pdfs/repcard6e.pdf. The Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) have the lowest child poverty while the USA and Mexico are at the bottom of the league. The UK is in the same relative position statistically as countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. Why should the Scandinavian countries be statistically so much better off than the UK in terms of Child Poverty rates? In our view (possibly simplistically) it’s surely got something to do with a combination of their long-term predominantly socialist inclinations over the years allied to the fact that Scandinavian countries don’t hold that compellingly magnetic appeal to immigrants – that countries like the UK and USA do.
When Tony Blair made his public pronouncement in 1999, what he was really doing was probably for the first time, committing significant government spending to the task of improving the child poverty situation. As always, significant government spending is usually accompanied by significant government scrutiny. And like the classic Hawthorne effect study showed, people’s behaviour and performance changes (albeit usually only temporarily) following any new or increased attention.
So here at Donation4Charity we take the view that the early years of improvement in child poverty (i.e. % reduction) under Tony Blair was bound to stall at some point – when the government’s overseers found themselves distracted by something else. And let’s face it – they’ve had plenty recently to get distracted about. But let’s leave the final word with the UK government’s Work and Pensions minister John Hutton who said: “We have made considerable progress against our historic goal to end child poverty in the UK.” He added: “We need to go further towards what is a very tough goal to reach.” We wish them well.
You can do your bit to help end child poverty by setting up a monthly donation with Shelter. If you make a charity donation each month, it could make a real difference :
- £5 a month could help Shelter run local advice surgeries for anyone with a housing problem
- £5.95 a month could answer a call to Shelter’s helpline from people in housing need
- £10.00 per month could help pay for drop-in facilities for homeless families where children play safely and parents can get support and advice
- £20.00 a month could help Shelter caseworkers settle families into new homes
