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Report claims 200,000 north children could "slip into poverty" ABOUT 200,000 children in the region will be plunged back into poverty unless the Government rethinks its “disastrous” policies, a report warns today.
A new Child Poverty Strategy – pouring cash into tackling “problem families”, rather than lifting incomes for the low-paid – risks wiping out the “remarkable” gains of the past decade, say campaigners.
Those gains saw about 100,000 children lifted out of poverty in both the North-East and Yorkshire during Labour’s years in power – an achievement described as being “without historical precedent”.
Between 1998 and 2010, the proportion of youngsters living below the breadline fell in both the North-East (from 34 per cent to 26 per cent) and Yorkshire (from 32 per cent to 26 per cent).
Across the UK, the number of children surviving on less than 60 per cent of median household income, the legal measure of poverty, dropped by 900,000.
But the Child Poverty Action Group warns today that a cocktail of cuts – to tax credits, housing benefit, the education maintenance allowance, health in pregnancy grants, and child trust funds – will slam that progress into reverse.
The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) had predicted the numbers in poverty to rise by 800,000 by 2020, a figure now expected to be even higher, with further billions of welfare cuts to come.
Alison Garnham, the action group’s chief executive, said: “The warnings for the current government are crystal clear.
“Under current policies, they risk wiping out all these hard-won gains.
“Unless their strategy improves, their legacy threatens to be the worst child poverty record of any government for a generation.
“As the Prime Minister has said, child poverty is a moral disgrace and an economic waste. Other countries in Europe already have the low levels of child poverty we are targeting, so nobody should make excuses for why we can’t do better for British children.”
Today’s report marks the half-way point to Tony Blair’s pledge to end child poverty by 2020. On Thursday, figures are expected to confirm that, by March last year, a million children escaped poverty.
The Child Poverty Action Group said Britain was, before the Coalition came to power, on course to hit that ambitious target in 2027 – only seven years late.
Now, however, it said ministers were hitting low-income families with the harshest cuts, while trying to tackle worklessness, educational failure and family breakdown.
Condemning the approach as “wholly mistaken and potentially disastrous”, the report concludes: “It is clear that reducing income poverty for today’s children (or indeed preventing increases in poverty) is not a current policy priority.”
Earlier this year, Middlesbrough was named as the North-East’s child poverty capital, with 34 per cent of youngsters in families still below the breadline – even last year.
The next worst-hit areas were Newcastle (31 per cent), Hartlepool (30 per cent) and Redcar and Cleveland (26 per cent), but no comparison is available, at local level, with the late-1990s.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/9 ... _poverty_/
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