The government’s childcare plans leaves a £200 million question unanswered, as working poor families miss out on vital support
The government today launched a consultation on proposals for extra support with childcare costs for working families.
poverty
Today’s child poverty figures show we are leaving our children utterly exposed
Work pays, we are always told, but for many it is clearly not paying enough. The latest official child poverty figures released today show that in-work poverty is on the rise, with two-thirds of poor children now living in families with at least one working parent.
Household incomes fall for second successive year and child poverty is up
Average incomes have fallen for the second successive year, leaving median and mean incomes six per cent and seven per cent below their 2009 and 2010 peaks, according to government figures released today.
A reply to Nick Pearce: Why Labour must stick to child poverty targets
First, for the last 30 years, poverty in the UK has hovered close to the one-in-five mark, mostly a little below, but sometimes a little above, but a rate almost double the level of the 1970s and much higher than the average amongst other rich nations.
This has been driven by a sustained widening in the gap between top and bottom along with the erosion of life chances.
The coalition has already abandoned the Child Poverty Act
Yesterday on the pages of this blog, Stewart Lansley claimed that I had “hurled a hand grenade” into the poverty debate by urging Labour to rethink its approach to child poverty. Leaving aside the hyperbole of that statement, Lansley’s case seems to be that my intervention “chimes with the line being taken by the coalition” in its attempts to redefine child poverty and its causes. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Poverty: The 2010 consensus in tatters
Dropping the child poverty target would mean accepting a level of poverty much higher than almost all countries of comparable wealth.
The global shortage in health workers is at crisis point
The global shortage in health workers is a global crisis that is undermining efforts at international development.
Thatcherism saw child poverty grow by 121 per cent
Yesterday we ran a piece on the level of people living in poverty under Margaret Thatcher in response to a claim by Guido Fawkes which claimed the poor had “got richer under Thatcher”. I dealt with a lot of this yesterday; but here is another graph showing a bit more straightforwardly the growth in relative poverty during the Thatcher years.
Did the poor get richer under Thatcher?
A post at Guido Fawkes’ blog boasts that under Thatcher “wages went up across the whole spectrum, including for the poorest”. As evidence, he produces this graph taken from Channel Four Factcheck.
Council tax changes will ‘push more people into poverty’
The coalition’s changes to council tax benefits will “invariably push more people into poverty or deeper into poverty”, according to a report out today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.