Child poverty

Tax and benefit changes announced by the Chancellor in his 2012 Autumn Statement will mean an extra 200,000 children living in poverty by 2017-18, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.

The Autumn Statement announced several important changes to the tax and benefit system from April 2013 – including a higher personal tax allowance and a 1 per cent cap, for three years, on the annual uprating of most working-age benefits and tax credits.

43 bishops of the Church of England have signed a letter to the Sunday Telegraph warning that benefits cuts being proposed by the coalition will have a 'deeply disproportionate' effect on children.

The letter was sent ahead of the House of Lords debate on the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill, which will cap annual increases in many benefits at one per cent for the next three years, regardless of inflation.

Good progress is being made in implementing the 'troubled families' programme, according to the coalition government. Figures gathered from local authorities in England show that between April 2012 and January 2013 62,000 families were identified as coming within the scope of the programme, with their names and addresses included in a database. The government's target is to identify and 'turn around' the lives of 120,000 families by 2015.

The figures released by the government have been collated from data submitted by upper-tier local authorities in support of claims for result payments under the programme. They do not constitute official statistics.

Fuel poverty can have severe and life-long effects on children, according to a new report from the Association for the Conservation of Energy. The authors point out that although it is widely recognised that fuel poverty has severe effects on older people, the position of families and children has been relatively neglected.