Child poverty is something that I want to see eradicated from Bath and the UK, a view that I share with the Government. In Bath, I have begun a project that helps to coordinate charities to work together to help tackle this issue, with the aim of halving child poverty by 2020. A step towards this aim would be to ensure that the correct issues are addressed. The existing income-based child poverty measures, introduced in the Child Poverty Act 2010, do not address the root causes of poverty and incentivise Government to focus only on the symptoms. That is why the Welfare Reform and Work Bill contains provisions to repeal the 2010 measures and introduce new life chances measures of worklessness and educational attainment. Annual reporting on these new measures will ensure Government is focussing action in the areas that the evidence shows are most important for children's life chances.
Setting targets based on relative income does not encourage policymakers to address the underlying causes of poverty. It led the previous Labour Government to simply spend more and more money on income transfers to lift people just over the poverty threshold, without doing anything about why those people were in poverty in the first place. The relative income measures showed the number of children in relative poverty falling during the last recession because of falling median incomes, but of course in reality children were not better off at all.