Win for vulnerable children

Last week (25 January) the House of Lords voted by 290 to 198 to keep child poverty targets the same, forcing the government to rethink its plans to abolish them.

Back in July, work and pensions secretary, Ian Duncan Smith, announced plans to scrap household income as a measurement of child poverty.

Instead of maintaining a target set by the last Labour government to eliminate child poverty by 2020, they instead intended to change the definition of poverty altogether, as UniteLIVE reported in December.

The current measurement is based on the percentage of households with below average income.

Under Ian Duncan Smith’s proposed plan, this would no longer have been a target. Instead it would be substituted by a new duty to report levels of educational attainment, worklessness and addiction.

It was a plan that had left child poverty charities shocked and dismayed.

“This government knew they would not meet the targets for cutting child poverty – so they decided to simply stop measuring poverty, rather than tackle it,” said Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner.

Rebecca Stephens, a mother of two who argued that the new “life chances” indicators would mean children like hers would fall through the cracks, started a petition against the governments planned changes, which reached more than 50,500 signatures.

“Anyone who’s been there knows that poverty is mainly about a lack of money,” she said.

“It would have been ridiculous to have child poverty measures that ignore that,” she added.

Rebecca sent her petition in conjunction with Child Poverty Action group to the House of Lords and it was mentioned in the debate last Monday.

“If the Lords’ amendment becomes law, we will see how the government was trying to cover up substantially missing its own targets and failing to tackle child poverty,” said Rebecca.

The governments’ attack on children is just one of many of its wrongdoings against hardworking and low wage families from the National Living Wage, which is no living wage at all to the Trade Union Bill, which will silence the voice of working people.

“Changing the definition of poverty will do nothing to change the situation for the millions of children and their families living in poverty,” said Turner

“Rather than sweeping it under the carpet we need measures that tackle poverty – creating decent work for all, building proper housing for social rent and ending the cuts to benefits,” he added.

Debate on child poverty measures will now be returned to the House of Commons later this year.