Poverty journal

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.

Making the case for a decent welfare state has become difficult. Much of the media takes every opportunity to cry ‘scrounger’. Each case of fraud gets extensive coverage. It has become a hot party political issue.

The Webb Memorial Trust is hoping to reframe the debate about poverty. Here, Barry Knight explains why and discusses some early results.

During the recent economic downturn, we have seen public attitudes towards benefit recipients harden. But are attitudes towards child poverty behaving in a similar manner or is the public becoming more sympathetic?

What do the benefit cap, tougher conditionality for claimants and means testing child benefit all have in common? They all hit families with children hard. And they will all drive up child poverty in the next five years and beyond.

In 2010, a political consensus seemed to have emerged – that poverty was relative, too high, and needed to be tackled with preventative measures as well as by raising people’s incomes.