The poorest children
24. The Government's success in lifting children
out of poverty over the past decade is commendable. Nevertheless,
it is important that progress should be made in improving the
living standards of all children, including the very poorest.
This does not mean meeting targets only by lifting those just
beneath the poverty line above it. It is clearly a harder task,
requiring more resources, to raise the incomes of those families
whose current income falls far below the poverty line than to
help those whose income falls just below the 60% boundary. However,
some of our witnesses were concerned that the current focus of
government policies missed out the poorest families, allowing
them to fall even further behind.
25. When we asked Ministers what action they were
taking to reduce the inequalities between the richest and the
very poorest in our society, Rt Hon Jane Kennedy MP, Financial
Secretary to the Treasury, said:
…it is very useful for us as ministers to remind
the Committee and the public where we were when we came into Government,
particularly in terms of child poverty. We had the highest rate
of relative poverty in the EU and between 1979 and 1997, when
we came into Government, the proportion of children in relative
poverty had more than doubled, so we were inheriting a problem
that was not only a very great problem but had got worse over
a period and the trends were all in the wrong direction. The
efforts that we have made since 1997 to date have seen, again,
the biggest child poverty reduction in Europe with over 600,000
children having been lifted out of poverty and the number of children
living in absolute poverty[28]
has more than halved from 3.4 to 1.6 million; it is a fall of
1.8 million.[29]
26. We asked witnesses who had been the main beneficiaries
of the recent falls in child poverty. Evidence from Save the Children
highlighted their recent study, Britain's Poorest Children,
which showed that "while UK and Scottish Government policies
have succeeded in lifting many children out of poverty, current
policies are having no effect on the very poorest children and
their families".[30]
Mr Douglas Hamilton, Head of Policy and Research, explained why
he thought that current policies did not reach those with the
lowest incomes:
At one level if you are taking very topline measures,
you are saying 60 per cent median income as being that kind of
barrier there and if we only ever look at that we are ignoring
the reality of the different levels of poverty that exist beneath
that. What our evidence has shown […] is that the group living
below 40 per cent of median income, to use the income measure,
has not actually changed very much […] I think there is a
general recognition that this group exists, is that current policies
are not reaching the very poorest. The success that has been achieved
has been maybe with those who are closest to the poverty line,
if you like, sort of lifting them over that threshold, the ones
who were maybe closest to getting back to work or those who had
an income level just below the poverty line. For just under ten
per cent of children in Scotland who we describe as living in
severe poverty the policies are just not reaching them, so we
really need to look at how we can refocus attention now. We need
to carry on with the current policies that we have because they
seem to be having an impact on a large number of children, and
we are pleased with that, but there is a big group that it is
missing out.[31]
27. Save the Children told us that, despite reductions
in child poverty rates since 1999, the extent of severe poverty
in Scotland had not changed between 1999 and 2002. They estimated
that "approximately 80,000 children in Scotland (1 million
across Britain) live in severe and persistent poverty and that
there has been no change in this number in recent years".[32]
Kathleen Marshall, Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young
People agreed that Government action was only changing the living
standards for the families and therefore the children who are
on the margins of living in poverty, rather than those living
in households whose income fell well below 60% of the median level.[33]
28. Some of those who gave evidence to our inquiry
argued that the current focus of government programmes such as
tax credits and Welfare to Work (considered in sections 3 and
4 of this Report) was more likely to benefit those just below
the poverty line and was much harder to access for those families
in the severest poverty. Evidence submitted by Barnardo's Scotland
argued that "while tax credits have helped, they do not reach
children in families where the parents are unable to work through
sickness or disability, or lack of affordable child care".[34]
A 2007 report from Save the Children found that the poorest families
were distinguished by exclusion from the labour market, low levels
of take-up of benefits entitlements and poor educational achievement.[35]
They recommended that that resources needed to be focused on those
in the most acute poverty, supported by additional targets for
the reduction of severe and persistent child poverty.[36]
29. Our evidence has suggested that the efforts made
since 1997 will need to at least be matched if the 2010 target
of halving child poverty is to be achieved.[37]
The total eradication of child poverty will require the incomes
of the very poorest families to be raised significantly. In the
words of Mr Hamilton, "unless we do something about that
now then these longer term targets are never going to be met because
it is going to be even harder in future years because the gap
is going to increase even more".[38]
30. We are concerned
by the evidence we have received that those children living in
the severest poverty in Scotland may not have fully benefited
from the recent reductions in child poverty rates. The poorest
children are not helped if the Government meets its targets only
by reaching those just below the poverty line—a strategy
that also endangers the Government's longer term targets for the
total eradication of child poverty.
31. The Government
needs to do more to assess what progress has been made in raising
the incomes of the poorest families. The current child poverty
targets are based on a single poverty line of 60% of median income.
This is not sensitive to variations in standards of living that
fall below this line and we therefore recommend that additional
research should be undertaken to assess the standard of living
of the poorest children.
4 
