Friday 19 July 2024

Continuing chld poverty is a deliberate choice by Labour

 

Yesterday, the Leader of the House of Commons reiterated that Labour have no immediate intention of abandoning the two-child benefit cap, because “the economic circumstances do not currently allow for us to abolish the cap”. She talked about Starmer’s announcement of a taskforce to consider the issue of child poverty and report back at some future unspecified date as though that was some sort of solution to a problem which exists now. But the result of this approach is that those children suffering from poverty now will continue to do so, and more will follow them into poverty as a result of continuing the fiscal policies of the previous government.

As Richard Murphy pointed out yesterday, poverty is, by definition, a lack of money. And the solution to a lack of money is to get more money to those in poverty. It really is as simple as that; and it doesn’t take a commission or a taskforce to tell us that. How we get more money into the hands of the poorest is more complex, but we know that most of the children living in poverty live in households where parents are working. Part of the solution must lie in understanding why work does not provide an adequate income so that benefits are needed to make up the deficit. Those benefits are, in effect, a subsidy to under-paying employers. It could reasonably be argued that solving the problem of low wages is more of a long term project, but allowing poverty to continue unrelieved in the meantime is a deliberate political decision which damages the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children.

It is, of course, true that ending the two child cap would be an incomplete solution because it wouldn’t immediately help all children currently living in poverty. It would, though, lift around 300,000 children out of poverty very rapidly. It’s a simple and straightforward first step which the government could take today, and which it is deliberately deciding not to take. They have elevated their desire to be seen to be ‘tough’ in restraining public expenditure over the interests of the next generation because they’ve confined themselves to working within a wholly arbitrary set of fiscal rules. They talk of hope for the future, but hope for the future doesn’t put food on the table today. The number of children in poverty today may be an inheritance from 14 years of Tory government, but every day they remain in poverty is a decision taken by Labour, for which they can blame no-one but themselves.

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