Child poverty: a step forward

JPIT’s Paul Morrison explains the context for the response from faith leaders to the government’s child poverty strategy

Today faith leaders have responded to last week’s child poverty strategy. The headline from the strategy, and the headline from the leaders’ response, is the abolition of the two-child limit on benefits from April next year.

The rule meant that the benefit system ignored the needs of third and later children in a family. As soon as the policy was announced a decade ago a coalition of faiths came together to challenge it. The objections were two-fold; that all children are valuable and none should have their needs ignored by the benefit system as well as the substantial and increasing hunger, hardship and poverty the policy inevitably generated. Leading poverty expert Prof Jonathan Bradshaw called it “morally odious” and the “the worst social policy ever”. The strategy ends it, and for that reason alone it should be welcomed with great joy.

The process of creating the strategy was also to be welcomed. There was a genuine engagement with people who experience poverty, which went far beyond the usual calls for evidence and consulting with stakeholders groups. The mechanisms for real consultation and co-working with people with experience of poverty were genuinely innovative and not easy to do within the normal Whitehall culture. Alongside this there was an enormous effort to collect evidence and use it to describe poverty and its immediate drivers in the UK. This was not shallow, nor was it seeking evidence to justify a particular pre-decided policy.

The strategy’s weakness comes with the next steps. We now have a well described and understood problem. The first step of removing the biggest block to progress – the two-child limit – has been taken, but the next steps outlined in the strategy are small and tentative.

The faith leaders wrote to government on two occasions this year, in March and August, asking for a “bold and ambitious” child poverty strategy. The removal of the two-child limit is important, but it alone will not turn the tide on child poverty in the UK. The strategy has opened the door to bold and ambitious action, but it does not describe it.

For the many groups that worked together to remove the two-child limit, we must take this moment to celebrate, but not think our work is yet done. Our task now is to build a movement for bold ambitious action from government and across society to create flourishing communities free from poverty. In short, to push the government through that now open door.

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