19 June 2020
Black lives matter, particularly the lives of children. Poor children are more likely to be behind in school than their wealthier peers, have reported lower sense of well-being, have poorer health outcomes and even employment difficulties in adulthood. But we don’t talk enough about the fact that some children in black and minority ethnic (BME) families are more likely to experience poverty.
11 May 2020
We were very sad to learn that our longstanding friend and inspiration, John Veit-Wilson, died on 10 May. He was CPAG's last remaining founder member. John was a Trustee for many years and an intellectual power house on our policy committee. He will be sadly missed. This was his last blog for CPAG.
21 April 2020
Coronavirus has sent a seismic shock through the whole of Welsh society. In the space of a few weeks, workplaces and schools have closed, and nearly all of us have experienced major disruption to our normal lives. It has been a deeply unsettling time for welsh children and young people. Nearly half a million children have suddenly found themselves cut off from their schools, their friends and their extended family. In the midst of this, educators are working round the clock to develop distance-learning strategies so children and young people can continue their education at home.
26 March 2020
As the Government puts in place welcome emergency measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic, child poverty continues its upward trend without an effective strategy to tackle it.
26 March 2020
The increase to the universal credit (UC) standard allowance and the working tax credit basic element by £20 per week as part of the government’s response to the Coronavirus is welcome. According to the Resolution Foundation[1] “Having recently fallen to their lowest real-terms value since the early 1990s, the main adult rate of unemployment benefits is now at its highest ever level, as the chart below shows. Relative to average earnings, it is at its highest level since 1998-99
13 February 2020
Families already living under the poverty line have been pushed deeper into poverty since 2012, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows. And, the analysis finds, the number of children in poverty in households where all the parent(s) work full time - be they single or couple-parents - has doubled from 200,000 in 2012/13 to 400,000 in 2017/18.*
13 February 2020
Lots of attention is given to the number of children in poverty but as a society we do not only care about the rate of poverty but also the depth of poverty. If everyone in poverty is very close to the poverty line we should perhaps worry less than when millions of people are substantially below the poverty line. A good way to measure the depth of poverty is the median poverty gap, which indicates how far below the poverty line the average family in poverty is.
24 January 2020
In this new paper, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw of the University of York takes a look at child poverty in the North East
05 July 2019
CPAG was founded more than fifty years ago to bring the facts of family poverty to government and public knowledge and to press for reform. The devastating report (2018) by Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, shows how government withdrawal of responsibility and resources during the past decade has led to more families being pushed into poverty, and relief work by NGOs to alleviate poverty is not enough to compensate sufficiently.
