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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment