Child poverty

In all the talk of tackling child poverty, one group has been largely ignored, children of refugees and asylum seekers. Stephen Crossley reports on poverty amongst this 'minority within a minority' and the role local agencies should play.

The percentage of people living in households with an 'absolute' low income was 17 per cent (before housing costs) in 2011-12 – nearly a million higher than when the coalition government took office in 2010-11 – according to the latest official Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistical report.

The HBAI report uses three main measures of low income/inequality:
Relative low income – where someone lives in household that receives less than 60 per cent of the average (median disposable) income in the year in question.
Absolute low income – where someone lives in household that receives less than 60 per cent of average (median disposable) income in 2010-11 adjusted since then by inflation.
Income inequality – measured by the Gini coefficient, on a scale from zero (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality).

High levels of child poverty are currently costing the country at least £29 billion each year, or £1,098 per household, according to new calculations prepared by Loughborough University for the Child Poverty Action Group.

The research updates a similar study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2008, which found the cost of child poverty to the UK at that time to be £25 billion a year. The estimate includes the costs of policy interventions required in childhood to correct for the effects of poverty, as well as the longer-term losses to the economy resulting from reduced productivity, lower educational attainment and poorer physical and mental health.

The target for eliminating child poverty by 2020, set by the previous Labour government, has been criticised as 'technocratic', over-centralised and unaffordable by Nick Pearce, director of the influential Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.

Pearce said Labour's attempt to end child poverty had been so expensive that 'it was running out of road even before 2008, never mind now'. He added: 'At the same time, [Labour's] highly centralised, even technocratic approach to tackling child poverty failed to speak to people's everyday concerns about childhood, not least those officially labelled as 'poor'. As a result, Labour struggled to secure widespread public support for its ambitions or mobilise families and communities behind them. Contrast this to the popular attachment generated for the newly created children's centres'.