Child poverty measures to be knocked out of Welfare Reform and Work Bill

I received a press release on Friday that left me bloody angry about the lengths to which our government will go to screw the poorest in society. This blog will look at an analysis by the London School of Economics of new criteria by which the Child Poverty Act will be ignored in calculations to cap families’ benefits – in short, the government doesn’t give a cuss about children living below the poverty line and will cut family incomes regardless.

What is the Bill? 

From my decidedly angry and oppositional point of view, the Bill is legislation on cutting welfare to the bone while the right wing media screams that anyone who is weak and needs support are scrounging scum.

A good summary of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill can be seen here. The broad headings are Full employment and apprenticeships, Troubled families, Social mobility, the Benefit cap, Benefit rate freezes, Child tax credits, Universal Credit, Limited capability for work, Conditionality of Universal Credit for responsible carers of children, Mortgage interest payments, social housing rents, and a number of things that can be enacted through ‘secondary legislation’ – passed through Parliament as a Statutory Instrument. These include the widely discussed tax credits thresholds, UC thresholds, social housing income limits, housing benefit for young people, and childcare.

 LSE analysis

Last week I received a short press release by email stating, “The Welfare Reform and Work Bill, currently going through the House of Lords, proposes to remove all income and material deprivation measures from the Child Poverty Act. By doing so, the government is acting against the advice of 99% of respondents to its own consultation on the matter, according to a new LSE analysis presented to the House of Lords yesterday by Dr Kitty Stewart.”

I naturally emailed in, asking for the analysis.

In reference to the Child Poverty Act, Dr Stewart stated in the introduction to the piece, “Under proposals in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, now under discussion in the House of Lords, the current suite of income-based child poverty measures and targets in the Child Poverty Act 2010 are to be removed. They will be replaced with new measures of worklessness and of educational attainment at age 16. In addition, duties and responsibilities on national and local government to reduce child poverty will be removed, and the Act itself will be retrospectively renamed the Life Chances Act 2010.”

From here on in, I’ll leave my own opinion and invective out and let you read and decide – is this a kind and decent Bill going through Parliament or is it focused on kicking the poorest while the right wing press and media cheer from the sidelines?

Child Poverty Act 2010

The four main measures are:

The Child Poverty Act contains four measures:

• relative income poverty (children living in households below 60% of the national median);
• ‘absolute’ income poverty, calculated against a poverty line pegged to median income in 2010/11;
• a combined low income and material deprivation measure;
• a measure of persistent poverty (below the relative line in three years out of four).

Consultation by the government

Between November 2012 and February 2013 the Coalition Government ran a public consultation into child poverty measurement entitled Measuring Child Poverty. The consultation document put forward the idea of a new multidimensional poverty measure that “will reflect the reality of growing up in poverty in the UK today and how this has an impact on outcomes in later life”, and asked for views on a range of potential ‘dimensions’, including income, worklessness, unmanageable debt, poor housing, family stability, parental health, drug/alcohol addiction and the impact of attending a failing school. The DWP published a brief summary of the 257 responses in 2014, but in light of the current proposals we decided to examine the responses themselves, to gauge the level of support for the current measures and for the role of income in poverty measurement. A Freedom of Information request has given us (to date) access to 230 of the responses, submitted by academics, think tanks, local authorities, voluntary sector organisations, frontline services and individuals, between them pulling together many decades of experience in service delivery and research.

Our findings

Our analysis indicates that the proposed changes stand in direct conflict with the vast body of expertise and opinion on the definition and measurement of child poverty. 

First, there is a very high level of support for the measures in the current Act. Although the consultation form itself made no reference to them, 82 responses specifically stated that they would like to keep the existing measures as they are and wanted no change, while a further 52 made it clear that they would only support indicators relating to additional dimensions if they were treated as supplementary information (relevant to wider child well-being or to children’s broader life chances) but not as measures of child poverty itself (see Table 1). A total of 56 respondents were open to new child poverty measures but for a significant share of these this was still only in addition to the full suite of current income-based measures. Only around 14% of respondents wanted to change the measures themselves. Clearly, there is little appetite for change amongst those most concerned with child poverty. 

Table 1

Second, there is near universal support for the inclusion of an income-based measure. Indeed, the message is stronger than that: as can be seen in Table 2, for the majority of respondents – 134 – child poverty is defined by a lack of material resources, with income, alongside material deprivation, the best way to measure this. In other words, for most respondents, income was not seen as one more ‘dimension’ amongst others, but as the very core of child poverty. This was true right across the sample, reiterated in responses from academics, local authorities, voluntary organisations and frontline services. In fact, of the 203 responses that referred to income in their response, only nine responses felt that income should be included as anything but a headline measure and only one, from a private individual, felt that income should not be included at all.

Table 2

Third, there is also very strong support for the concept of poverty as relative, and for continuing to track relative income measures, despite the consultation document highlighting that a relative measure can give a misleading picture when median income falls during a recession. Respondents repeatedly emphasised that the existing measures each have strengths and weaknesses and need to be considered together. A small number advocated switching to a poverty line based on a defined income level, feeling it made more intuitive sense and would be easier to explain to the public. However, even amongst this group, the majority still took a relative stance, with many mentioning the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s ‘Minimum Income Standard’ measure. Only two or three argued for a more subsistence-type ‘absolute’ measure. 

The fourth and final point relates to the new ‘dimensions’ proposed as replacement measures by the government. There was support for tracking indicators relating to some of these, in order to help understand their relationship with poverty. However, they are widely considered to be unsuitable as measures of child poverty itself, as many responses very clearly spelt out. Taking ‘worklessness’ as an example, whilst many respondents acknowledged that children living in households with no working adult are more likely to live in poverty, almost as many pointed out that the majority of children living below the poverty line in the UK today have at least one working parent. Others noted that paid work may not always be possible or in a family’s best interest, such as in households where a lone parent is caring for a very young or disabled child. If children in these households live in poverty it is because of low material resources, and the inadequacy of policies to address this, not because of the lack of paid work per se. As repeatedly highlighted in responses from across the full spectrum of contributors, it is a lack of material resources alone that is common to all in poverty and only to those in poverty. It is therefore only a lack of household resources, with income as the best proxy, that is suitable as a measure of child poverty.

This gets to the heart of criticisms of the government’s proposals, as expressed in consultation responses. The dimensions that have been proposed can be understood as causes of poverty, like worklessness, or consequences of poverty, like educational attainment. They may also be considered important to wider child well-being, or to children’s development and life chances. But they are not poverty itself, as it is understood by the overwhelming majority of respondents to the consultation. In the eyes of this majority, the government’s amendments are not changing the child poverty measures, but bringing to an end the official measurement of child poverty in the UK.

Conclusions

Given the strength and coherence of views expressed in responses to the Coalition’s consultation, the Government’s proposed changes to the Child Poverty Act are disquieting. For one thing, it is of concern in and of itself to see the government acting in direct contradiction to such strong and unanimous expert opinion about the definition and measurement of child poverty. More importantly, it is troubling because of the likely consequences for children in low-income households. That the changes are not ‘just’ about measurement, but an indicator of government policy priorities, is underlined by the removal from the Act of the requirement for national and local authorities to have (and to follow) a strategy for child poverty reduction. These duties currently require authorities to consider measures in a series of policy areas – among them those the Conservatives have termed the ‘root causes’ of poverty, including parental employment and skills; information and advice to parents; and health, education and social services. That the government is opting out of holding itself to account over measures that are widely understood to be of crucial importance to children’s lives, while also removing the structures currently in place to drive broad-based policy action, is a serious matter. That it is happening alongside changes to the tax-benefit system that are predicted to increase the number of families living in material poverty must surely also raise questions about the underlying intention.

Richard Shrubb