Child poverty

Tackling child poverty by boosting family income through benefits is a narrow approach that ‘looks set to have failed’ said Ian Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, in a major speech. The speech followed the government’s Autumn Statement, which included welfare measures that on the government’s own projections would lead to an increase in child poverty – another signal of the government’s intentions to develop a new approach to poverty less dependent on benefits.

Duncan Smith claimed there are problems with officially classifying child poverty as a family on 60 per cent or less than the median income, as this had pushed governments into introducing policies with ‘perverse incentives’. He argued that this target created a ‘poverty plus a pound’ approach – where authorities did only enough to keep some families just above the 60 per cent mark without really changing lives, while those at the very bottom could be left behind.

While Northern Ireland had long been recognised as one of the most deprived parts of the United Kingdom, comparisons with other regions and countries was difficult as little specific data on poverty had been collected. Northern Ireland was not included in the earlier PSE and Breadline Britain surveys and had no tradition of publishing household income data. The PSE Northern Ireland survey set out to redress this. The core aims of the research were:

Ways of generating evidence on the impacts of policy reforms on children are outlined in a joint paper from the World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Integrating a Child Focus into Poverty and Social Impact Analysis.

This Guidance Note outlines some of the potential poverty and social impacts of common economic and social policy reforms on children and gives an overview of existing tools and methods that can be used for analysing these impacts. It also outlines approaches for mitigating negative and enhancing positive effects on children and discusses how children’s perspectives can be included in a Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA).

The full paper is available from UNICEF.

Work in itself is not a solution to poverty, in part because of the spread of low pay work over the last 30 years, argues Richard Dickens in the latest National Institute Economic Review (vol. 218, no. 1). In his article, ‘Child poverty in Britain: past lessons and future prospects’, Dickens examines the impact on child poverty of changes over the past decade in wages and work, tax and benefits, and demographics. He finds that benefit reform increased work among families with children but this did not translate into large falls in child poverty – those entering work depended on substantial increases in benefits to lift them over the poverty line. Changes in the wage structure and demographics increased poverty, while changes to benefits (and, to a lesser extent, taxes) over that period had reduced poverty by making the tax/benefit system more progressive and by favouring families with children over those without children.