How to halve poverty in 15 years

Poverty A child eating corn
ViewsSeptember 1st, 2014

Back in 1999, then Prime Minister Tony Blair made a commitment to end child poverty by 2020.  With child poverty levels at the time of around 34%, this was an ambitious target that would always have been tough to achieve.

Fifteen years on, child poverty has fallen, but at neither the pace or scale required to even halve it let alone eradicate it by 2020.  27% of children in the UK (and 31% of children in Wales) currently live in low-income households with the proportion set to rise over the next few years.  The prospects of even halving child poverty, let alone eradicating it, by 2020 look bleak indeed.  

If Tony Blair had chosen a different age group, he might have cause to celebrate.  

The decrease in pensioner poverty is one of the unsung success stories of the last twenty years.  In that period, poverty amongst people over pension age has fallen steadily, and now stands at 14% (in both Wales and England) compared with 29% in the UK (and 26% in Wales) for the three-year period ending 1999. 

Pensioner poverty graph

The usual reaction to news about the relative prosperity of pensioners is to contrast them with young people, setting claims and counter-claims about who has ‘never had it so good’.  What a waste of time.

What is much more important is that it IS possible to achieve a dramatic reduction in poverty in a relatively short space of time.

A mix of sustained increases in the state pension, targeted support for the least well off through Pension Credit, rising employment levels and an increasing number with occupational pensions has achieved what many have thought would be impossible. Whether this can be sustained, especially as public spending remains extremely tight, remains to be seen.  

The same policy mix has been less successful for children. Child tax credits and free child care to enable parents to work just haven’t been enough to raise family income levels.  Partly I suspect this is because many of these interventions were simply not bold enough:  free child care places are arguably for too few hours to enable parents to work and the problem of care for school-age children remains; similarly the increases in child benefit were probably too small and working tax credit to0 complex to have an effect.

At a time when many feel that 2020 might mark the return of child poverty to 1999 levels and not its eradication, perhaps we should pin the graph of trends in pensioner poverty on the wall to show that -with political will – poverty can be cut. 

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation. A briefing on income poverty in Wales will be published for Bevan Foundation members later this week.  Join us now to make sure you get yours.  

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