Comprehensive spending review 2007
What it needs to deliver on child poverty

What should the spending review deliver?

In 2005, CPAG published two documents, Ten Steps to a Society Free of Child Poverty and At Greatest Risk: the children most likely to be poor. Our Manifesto sets out practical policy changes needed to bring about reductions in child poverty, and although there have been some improvements - the Conservative party has signed up to the ambition of eradicating child poverty by 2020,9 John Hutton has announced that future policy will be 'poverty proofed',10 and changes to the recovery of tax credit overpayments have been made - the majority of steps remain to be taken. At Greatest Risk,11 profiles the experience of groups of children who face a particularly high risk of poverty, with a poorer quality of life in childhood and poorer outcomes in adult life: children in large families, children with disabilities or a disabled parent, black and minority ethnic children, traveller and gypsy children, those who have been in care and those who have sought asylum in the UK. The challenge for the spending review is to mainstream concerns about these children.

There have been two other notable contributions to the debate. The Fabian Society published the final report of its Life Chances Commission12 in March, which made a series of practical policy recommendations to make greater use of life chances as a conceptual tool to drive policy to reduce poverty. This was followed in June by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's What Will it Take to End Child Poverty? Firing on all cylinders.13 This report, together with the numerous working papers and associated publications produced around it, presents a significant analysis of the problem - to families and society - and discusses and models ways of reaching the 2010 and 2020 targets.

To reduce child poverty, the Government has had recourse to two key mechanisms - increasing incomes through financial support and increasing gains from work, primarily by increasing the employment rate. Alongside this - to reduce future poverty - policy has sought to improve educational outcomes (through the education system, Sure Start and good-quality childcare). More effort is clearly needed here, given the slow progress on narrowing the gap in educational attainment, and this will be vital to reaching the 2020 target and to sustaining a much lower level of child poverty in the long term. But it is the more urgent former set of issues - on which education can build - to which we now turn.

Notes

9 O Letwin MP, ‘Why We Have Signed Up to Labour’s Anti-poverty Target’, the Guardian, 11 April 2006
10 J Hutton MP, ‘What Will it Take to End Child Poverty?’ speech to Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 6 July 2006
11 G Preston (ed), At Greatest Risk: the children most likely to be poor, CPAG, 2005
12 Fabian Society, Narrowing the Gap: the Fabian Commission on life chances and child poverty, 2006
13 D Hirsh, What Will it Take to End Child Poverty? Firing on all cylinders, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2006

Comprehensive spending review 2007
What it needs to deliver on child poverty

Contents page
Introduction
The Government’s record
What should the spending review deliver?
Provide most for those children at greatest risk of poverty
Work towards better jobs, not just more jobs
Ensure the safety net protects families against poverty
Maximise the contribution of child benefit within family support
Introduce free at the point of delivery good-quality childcare
Make the reduction of child poverty central to the new child support policies
Make education truly free at the point of delivery
Provide benefit entitlement to all UK residents equally, irrespective of immigration status
Reduce the disproportionate burden of taxation on poorer families
Improve the quality of delivery and gear it to the needs of the poorest families
Notes

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