We discovered this morning that the proportion of children living in relative poverty is at its lowest level since the 1980s. Great news of course, but this headline masks a much more complicated – and worrying – picture.
Falls in this headline poverty measure – which captures those children living in households with incomes less than 60 per cent of the median – can be divided into two phases. Before the financial crisis, reductions owed much to a concerted policy focus and some sizeable spending on family policies. Tax credits in particular both incentivised single parents into work and provided a boost to incomes for low earners. At the same time an ever greater proportion of children in poverty were from working families.
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