In brief
Progress reports

In March 1999, the Prime Minister announced the Government’s intention to set in train a programme to abolish child poverty within 20 years. In September 1999, Opportunity for All: tackling poverty and social exclusion made its appearance. This was announced as the first of a series of annual reports, designed to track progress towards the Government’s objectives in attacking poverty and promoting social inclusion.

Opportunity for All insisted that the Government was prepared to be judged on its results and to that end included a number of ‘cross-government indicators of success’. It was easy to criticise their lack of precision: ‘an increase’ in good things, such as standards achieved in literacy and numeracy at age 11, and ‘a reduction’ in bad things, such as living in a household with a persistently low income or experiencing fuel poverty. Nevertheless, the policy commitments were pointing in the right direction and the concept of monitoring progress was at least established.

In September 2000, the second edition appeared. Opportunity for All: One Year On - making a difference essentially sums up the situation as one in which ‘progress so far has been encouraging although there is much more to do’. In his foreword, Alistair Darling asserts that ‘…there are no quick fixes or simple answers to tackling poverty…but we are committed to year-on-year progress in meeting four key objectives’. These are:

• ‘Eradicating child poverty in 20 years and halving it in 10’.
  
  
• ‘Helping all adults into work when they can and providing greater help when they cannot’.
  
  
• ‘Making sure pensioners can live secure, active and fulfilling lives’.
  
  
• ‘Building thriving communities where all can enjoy a decent quality of life’.

As regards child poverty, the report understandably makes much of the fact that ‘tax and benefit reforms announced in the last four Budgets of this Parliament will lift 1.2 million children out of poverty’. But it also focuses on other aspects of poverty, such as disadvantage in the fields of child development and educational achievement, pointing to a number of recent initiatives including the Sure Start programme for young children, the Connexions Service for 13-19-year-olds and the education maintenance allowance pilots.

The indicators of progress remain very general, but there is some tightening-up of the target for eradicating child poverty (reduction by at least a quarter by 2004). The Government’s progress so far – and the resources available to the Chancellor – suggest that this should not be too difficult to achieve, but the task will become harder as time goes by: digging the very poorest out of poverty is a much taller order than raising the incomes of those just below the poverty line.

Speaking of the poverty line: a problem with the report, in its presentation of poverty statistics, is the frequent lack of clarity as to which definition of poverty it is using at a given point in the text. After allowing for differences in household structure, poverty has been defined by this Government in terms of numbers living below a percentage of the average, either 50 per cent of the mean or 60 per cent of the median. Figures can be given either before or after housing costs have been taken into account. (The difference is important: CPAG would argue that ‘after housing costs’ gives a better idea of what disposable incomes are really like). It is useful to have these various alternative sets of figures in appendices and in statistical publications, such as Households Below Average Income, but in the main body of the text (and in popular material such as press releases) it is nevertheless important that the reader should be clear which measure the Government is using.

It would also be useful to be able to compare these percentages of averages with minimum income standards based on measures of need in the context of contemporary society. CPAG has frequently called for such standards to be developed, most recently in discussions around the proper level of the proposed integrated child credit – another initiative given emphasis in this report.

In December 2000, a few months after the publication of the second Opportunity for All, the New Policy Institute and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published the latest edition of their own poverty audit. Of the 50 indicators studied, 9 had deteriorated and 17 had improved during the previous year. However, like the Government’s own study, the timescale meant that the Chancellor’s more recent initiatives had not yet fed through into the findings. If, at last, policy is to be guided by serious measurement of poverty, then ways of achieving a quicker research turnaround could usefully be explored.

Geoff Fimister, CPAG

Poverty 108, Winter 2001