The Government's child poverty targets describe a wide group of children as "in poverty". The result is that the richest of the poor are the focus, while children in deepest poverty get left behind. In the first Labour term, progress was made. Yet today's DwP poverty report shows that in the last five years, the war against child poverty is increasinly being lost. On the Government's "60% median" measure, after housing costs, child poverty has gone from 4m in 2001/02 to 3.9m in 2006/07. On a measure focussed more strongly on the deeply poor (the "50% median") it was 2.6m in 2001/02, fell to 2.3m in 2004/05, yet is now back up to 2.6m. I suspect that the severe poverty measure of the "40% median", could make even more grim reading.
These figures are, of course, before the surge in prices over the last year, the 10p rate abolition and all the other things the Government has done to harm the most disadvantaged in society. So things could get even worse. For any Government these figures would be bad - for a Government that came to power promising to halve child poverty these figures are shocking.
