The progress eradicating child poverty has gone into reverse, according to a report on severe child poverty (defined as those with an income of less than half the median and who lack one or more ‘necessities’) published by Save the Children.   The report highlights the links between poverty and lack of employment, single parenthood, low parental educational qualifications, disability and ill health and so on.  It also makes some very important recommendations about what governments should do – in the short term, make sure the poor don’t pay the price of the recession in terms of cuts to services and over-inflated prices, and in the long term helping more parents into employment and breaking the link between poverty and education.  All of this is extremely important and if implemented could help to reverse the upward trend, although eradicating child poverty by 2020 looks a tall order.

But what’s happening to the poorest is only part of the story. The other part is what has happened to the incomes of the rest of society – because poverty is defined in relation to social norms.  And here is the rub: over the last 10 years the incomes of vast majority of households – the middle 80% – have gone up by around 25% (those on lower incomes have done slightly better). But the poorest 10% have seen a fall in real incomes over the decade, whilst the richest 10% have seen their incomes rocket by almost 40% (see http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml).

There will be no eradication of child poverty while society polarises in this way. Ending child poverty needs some unpalatable action to close the income gap – increasing benefits for the very poorest and increasing taxes at the very top.  Without action to redistribute income, all the other much needed action is doomed to fail.