An achievable target

Kate Green, Director of the Child Poverty Action Group, delivered the keynote speech at this year’s Law Centre AGM in Derry. Here, she explains that, while child poverty has been falling in the last few years, more needs to be done to tackle the structural causes of poverty in order for government to reach its own target of ending child poverty for ever.

Child poverty in the UK is falling. Since 1999, when Tony Blair made his historic pledge to end child poverty in a generation, more than 700,000 children have been lifted out of poverty. But whilst progress has been made, still one in four of our children grow up below the poverty line, and the government’s first target, to reduce child poverty by a quarter by 2004-05, was missed.

Of course, when the government publishes its poverty figures in the annual Households Below Average Incomes report, it excludes Northern Ireland data, as does the pledge to eradicate child poverty. But nonetheless, we can see that Northern Ireland’s income poverty is not dissimilar to the rest of the UK, particularly before housing costs are taken into account. And in fact, after housing costs, 23% of children in Northern Ireland, 92,000 children, grow up below the poverty line – better than in Great Britain, where the figure is 27%. Yet, in many other respects, Northern Ireland compares unfavourably: the number of people receiving out of work benefits, levels of pay among full time employees, and the high numbers without paid work – all are worse than in Great Britain.{footnote}P Kenway, T MacInnes, A Kelly, G Palmer, Monitoring poverty and social exclusion in Northern Ireland, Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2006{/footnote} And whilst some costs – for example housing costs – are lower in Northern Ireland than elsewhere in the UK, other costs, notably childcare and household heating costs are higher – so the experience of poverty in Northern Ireland is felt deeply by families who struggle to make ends meet.

There is then much ground to make up. And it is encouraging that political interest in child poverty has rarely been higher. The success of the global Make Poverty History movement has helped to draw attention to the problem of poverty at home, so that politicians, charities, commentators – although not yet, perhaps, the public - are all seized of the challenge and active in looking for solutions to tackle what is rightly seen as a source of shame in one of the richest countries in the world. Nonetheless, when policy-makers and opinion-formers know there is a problem, action follows, and certainly a host of initiatives have been seen from the UK government since 1999. New tax credits, welfare to work, investment in childcare, Sure Start, the minimum wage, money for education and skills, with more announced in the pre budget report in December, and increases in Child Benefit – all have helped to reduce child poverty, and made a real difference to the lives of many families. So it seems perhaps churlish to ask – where next?

Yet it is a vital question, since current policies and investment look nowhere near sufficient for the next milestone, to reduce child poverty by half by 2010, to be met. And for those children at greatest risk of poverty, policy still falls short. So families with a sick or disabled child, or a disabled parent, ethnic minority families, lone parent families, asylum seeker families, gypsy and traveller families, large families – all continue to face a high risk of poverty, and suffer hardship and damage to their children’s lifechances as a result. Policy needs to get smarter, and investment needs to increase, to meet the needs of these children. In particular, Child Poverty Action Group highlights three important areas where further investment and effort are required.

First, the level of safety net benefits to secure an adequate income for all families. A prerequisite for ending child poverty is that the safety net is set at a level that lifts all families out of poverty. But benefits levels, as well as deficiencies in the administration of benefits and tax credits, mean that the safety net is full of holes. A lone parent with two children aged five and eleven reliant on tax credits and safety net benefits would find him/herself living on £165 per week - £42 below the poverty line. And for a couple with two children, weekly income at £198 is a staggering £101 below the poverty line.{footnote}CPAG estimates based on benefits and tax credits rates and the HBAI series. Figures are rounded to the nearest pound.{/footnote}

For, whilst the government has focussed on raising payments for children (principally through tax credits, but also with a substantial increase in child benefit for the first child in 1999, and a more modest sum to pay child benefit from the 29th week of pregnancy from 2009), incomes for adults have been left behind. Yet parents do not necessarily separate the family budget into money for adults and money for the kids – household finances have to be seen in the round. The decline in the relative value of adult benefits has undoubtedly slowed progress in reducing child poverty, and for the most vulnerable families too. For that reason, CPAG warmly welcomes the recommendation of the government’s child poverty 'tsar', Lisa Harker, in her recent report for the DWP, that the department should review its uprating policy – and it is CPAG’s view that this should be based on a clearer analysis of what families need to live on as the basis for setting benefit rates.

The failure to address adult benefits of course reflects the government’s preference for paid work as a route out of poverty and good progress has been made in increasing the employment rate but problems exist in relying too much on this approach. Work does not always lift families out of poverty – indeed around half of all poor children live in a household where at least one adult is working – low pay and a lack of opportunity to progress or sustain work prevents these families from escaping poverty. In Northern Ireland, 22% of fulltime employees earn less than £6.50 an hour – and the proportion of the working age population with no qualifications is higher than in the UK as a whole – so the potential for these workers to progress at work and improve their pay is restricted. Furthermore, low paid workers are more likely to transit in and out of work, and these transitions serve to exacerbate poverty. It is clear therefore that significant extra investment is needed both to make work pay, and to ensure that parents are equipped to access the better paid jobs they need to support their families.

That does mean a role not just for government, but for employers too, but ministers have been remarkably cowardly in stepping up their demands of employers. Though rights at work have been extended and improved since Labour came to power in 1997, and Lisa Harker’s recommendation that Jobcentre plus should do more to consider the needs of all parents is welcome, there is considerable reluctance among ministers to go further to ensure that parents can properly combine work with their family responsibilities. In addition, certain group of employees are considerably disadvantaged in the labour market – workers from ethnic minorities, disabled workers, and women all face discrimination, suffering lower employment rates and/or lower rates of pay. This damages performance in relation to child poverty, and the government’s own welfare to work ambitions, yet ministers have done little to tackle and challenge this discrimination, preferring instead to seek to ’persuade ‘ employers to do better – so far, without conspicuous success. It is this reluctance to tackle the structural causes of poverty, and to focus instead on a strategy of enabling individuals to benefit from increased opportunities that underpins perhaps the least debated, but in some way most worrying, aspect of the government’s overall approach. And that is that a rights-based approach to tackling child poverty is almost nowhere to be seen. Whilst John Hutton’s commitment this summer to poverty proof the DWP’s policies was welcome, what we have in practice is an inadequate, complex and often unaccountable welfare system with poor administration moving towards greater discretion and conditionality. This opens up the risk of discrimination, more means testing and targeting, lack of transparency, accountability and appeal rights, lack of access to independent advice, contracting out of public provision to non-state agencies, and with an emphasis on choice rather than entitlement at its heart. CPAG is very concerned about this trend and the apparent indifference of ministers to the risk it carries for anti-poverty policy – indeed it seems that rights have almost become a dirty word.

But perhaps in Northern Ireland, where the debate on a proposed Bill of Rights is an active one, there is a chance to reassert the place of rights at the heart of the welfare state. For after all, the right to an adequate income, and a system to ensure and secure it, is surely the prerequisite for achievement of that boldest and most commendable of the government’s ambitions: the ending of child poverty for ever. And it is one that, as Tony Blair has said, can indeed be done.