Poverty journal

A lot has happened since the last issue of Poverty hit your desks. A new prime minister, new ministerial teams, and Brexit on the horizon. We have had only some indications of the direction the new government intends to take.

New research from 4in10 and the Family and Childcare Trust shows that parents in London are paying over £1 billion on childcare every year. In the run up to the mayoral elections, Megan Jarvie ran a series of focus groups with parents on low incomes to discover the issues they wanted the next mayor to address.

It is clear that the government intends to do little to increase the cash incomes of poor families with dependent children. Most poor families are set to get less and less over the next four years.

Living in a disadvantaged area hampers young people’s development: area-based deprivation is strongly related to higher crime, poorer educational achievement, health problems and high levels of disability.

Tax changes and cuts to public spending and social security have been key to the deficit-reduction strategy implemented by the coalition government between 2010 and 2015 and continued by the Conservative government elected in May 2015.

We are still not all in this together – so where now? Several articles in this issue add to the mounting evidence of the effects of government cuts on particular groups, showing once again that we are not all in this together.

New Zealand is traditionally regarded as a quiet, safe, egalitarian country with nothing in it more dangerous than a few hobbits. The reality, however, is that between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, it experienced the biggest increase in the gap between the rich and the rest of any developed country.

We will all have woken up this morning knowing there are children in this country who went to bed last night on an empty stomach. We also know that a large number of those children will have taken that hunger with them to school.

On 11 November 2015, Gordon Brown delivered CPAG’s 50th Anniversary Lecture. The former Prime Minister and Chancellor spoke powerfully about the history of poverty in the UK and pointed to low pay and the falling value of children’s benefits as important contemporary drivers of child poverty.

In this edition of Poverty we are delighted to feature an edited transcript of the rousing speech delivered by Gordon Brown for CPAG’s 50th Anniversary Lecture in November.