This report looks in detail at food insecurity among benefit claimants using YouGov surveys of the...
Child poverty
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01/12/2011
Iain Duncan Smith rejects benefits as way to tackle 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.
Category: News stories -
29/11/2011
Chancellor’s Autumn Statement
Warning of six more years of austerity, the Chancellor’s package of measures included a number of provisions that, on the Treasury’s predictions, are likely to increase the numbers of children in poverty.
Key points in the statement include:
Category: News stories -
25/11/2011
PSE Northern Ireland 2002/03
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:
Category: -
01/11/2011
First director of Sure Start criticises government child poverty policy
Government policies on child poverty have shifted too far in their focus on individual families rather than wider problems, according to the first director of the Sure Start programme, Naomi Eisenstadt. Despite her own commitment to championing parenting classes as a key element of Sure Start, Eisenstadt is critical of the Coalition government’s drift towards promoting good parenting as a key theme in reducing child poverty. ‘I would rather put the food on the table. In the absence of any talk about paying the bills, this focus is disrespectful because it assumes that these are the problems poor people have, and does not recognise that the main problem poor people have is not having enough money,’ she is quoted in The Guardian. ‘It is true that conflict between parents is bad for children, so providing more couple relationship support is a good thing.
Category: News stories -
01/11/2011
Promoting a child focus in poverty impact analysis
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.
Category: Reports -
16/10/2011
PSE: UK team’s response to government social mobility review
The PSE: UK research team has produced a detailed response to the government’s call for evidence on their strategy on social mobility and child poverty. While welcoming aspects of the strategy and the overall aims, the PSE: UK team argue that the strategies fail to tackle the multiple structural causes of lack of social mobility and underestimate the importance of material deprivation. Key questions asked in the call for evidence were:
Question 1: What do you think are the links between social mobility and child poverty?
The PSE: UK team welcome the suggestion of increased emphasis on the early years, the availability and quality of services for families and children and improving parenting but argue that parenting quality is not a primary cause of poverty in the UK or in other countries. Parenting skills and poverty both have important but independent effects on children’s outcomes.
Category: Articles -
01/10/2011
Low pay underpins child poverty
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.
Category: Reports -
01/09/2011
Cash transfers to families reduces child labour
Transfers of money to poor families in Ecuador postponed children’s entry into the labour force, found research published in the American Economic Journal, ‘Poverty alleviation and child labor’. Eric Edmonds (Dartmouth College) and Norbert Schady (Inter-American Development Bank) made a random selection from poor women with children in Ecuador for a cash transfer equivalent to 7 per cent of monthly expenditures. The transfer is greater than the increase in schooling costs at the end of primary school, but it is less than 20 per cent of median child labour earnings in the labour market. Poor families with children in school at the time of the award used the extra income to postpone the child’s entry into the labour force.
The article can be read in full at the Dartmouth College website.
Category: Reports -
29/11/2010
UK poverty set to rise in next three years
Child and working-age poverty in the UK is set to rise in the next three years, according to projections from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies in Child and Working-Age Poverty from 2010 to 2013.
Category: Reports
