Tackling child poverty is this government’s ‘moral mission’, Keir Starmer insisted today. The Prime Minister has unveiled plans that he claims will lift some 550,000 children out of poverty by the end of the decade. The headline announcement of the government’s child poverty strategy came in last week’s Budget when Rachel Reeves announced that, after months of dithering, Labour would scrap the two-child benefit cap.
While a number of the measures in today’s policy bundle have already been announced, there are a few new elements. These include the provision of upfront childcare support for parents on universal credit who are going back to work, £8 million to stop families being placed in B&Bs for more than six weeks, plans to cut the cost of baby formula and a new legal duty on councils to inform schools and doctors when a child is placed in temporary accommodation.
Labour has faced criticism from the usual quarters. The Conservatives have already attacked the move on the two-child benefit cap, infamously branding Reeves’s fiscal statement a ‘Benefits Street budget’. Meanwhile, the SNP – which put pressure on Labour to scrap the cap – says the government’s plans do not go far enough. They believe Starmer should have introduced an equivalent to the Scottish Child Payment, a weekly payment to low-income families for every child under the age of 16, across the rest of the UK. Starmer can expect further tough questions from the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as they gather for the annual British-Irish Council summit in south Wales today.
The plans haven’t gone down all that well with anti-poverty campaigners, either. Lord Bird, the crossbench peer and founder of Big Issue, remarked: ‘The absence of ambitious targets to propel forward this government’s mission to reduce child poverty is deeply concerning. In this challenging economic climate, there is every reason to worry [that] warm words will not translate into tangible progress.’ The National Children’s Bureau said it had hoped to see ‘binding targets for further reductions over ten years’ but added: ‘This level of ambition is sadly missing’.
As Tim Shipman wrote in this week’s magazine, senior Labour figures believe there is a way to appeal to the right on immigration while also taking a tougher stance on tackling child poverty, appealing to the party’s membership and the left. The backlash to today’s announcement, however, suggests Starmer hasn’t quite managed that balance yet.
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