Our journal aims to stimulate debate about the nature, causes and consequences of child poverty in the UK, and potential solutions. To contact the Editor, Josephine Tucker, please email: jtucker@cpag.org.uk
In recent years there has been a great deal of political activity directed towards the goal of ‘eradicating’ child poverty in the UK. The Child Poverty Act enshrines this goal in law, two child poverty strategies have been published and, at times, a great deal of progress has been made.
As Poverty goes to press, we have just completed a party conference season that, in its headline policy announcements, has made depressing viewing from a child poverty perspective.
Stories and pictures in the mass media form an important basis for creating opinions of ‘the poor’ and welfare recipients. The media content influences who we think these people are, how we think they behave and what we think should be done to either help or punish them.
The denigration of people in poverty is not new. It has been evident since at least the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII when the Tudor state assumed de facto responsibility for the care of ‘paupers’, and the terms ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ were coined.
More than half of all people in poverty now live in a working family. For children in poverty, this figure rises to nearly two-thirds. In each case, this proportion is the highest for all the years for which we have data.
As the consultation on the government’s latest three-year child poverty consultation closes, it seeks to articulate the policies it sees as reducing poverty, even as it prevaricates over how to define it.
The need to prevent child poverty is often acknowledged, but it is astonishing how quickly we slip away into being ‘realistic’ about what can be done now.
Many sick and disabled people, including those with Huntington’s Disease, uncontrolled epilepsy, kidney failure or brittle bone disease, are refused employment and support allowance.
The Child Poverty Act 2010 requires the government to produce a strategy every three years, setting out the action it plans to take to end child poverty in the UK. Alongside this, the Act established an independent Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission.
As Poverty goes to press, we have not yet had sight of the government’s next three-year child poverty strategy that it is obliged to produce under the terms of the Child Poverty Act 2010.
