UK CHILD POVERTY

Policies for Tackling Child Poverty in UK

Policies for Tackling Child Poverty in UK

Poverty

Poverty and being poor is a multi-faceted phenomenon, broadly defined as “persons, families and groups of persons whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life” (Waldfogel 2010, pp. 132). This definition has embodied the concept of poverty since the 1980s although it includes such a wide range of issues that disagreements on the proper measurement of poverty have persisted while different countries often have idiosyncratic ideas of what it means to be poor. Poverty is therefore both an issue of absolute material resources and of participating in the social setting without hindrance. As such poverty is a relative issue differing from country to country and measures of poverty necessarily have to reflect this.

Children and Poverty

Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of poverty. According to UNICEF “many of the more intractable social problems facing economically developed societies can be seen to be in some way related to poverty, disadvantage, and denial of opportunity during the early years of life” (Vleminckx & Smeeding 2001, pp. 441). The early years of life is generally taken to mean ages 0-18 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Countries although definitions differ across countries. The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) defines children, with respect to child poverty, as those aged 0-15 years (Platt 2005, pp. 77). For the purposes of the Household Below Average Income Analysis, which guides the department's current measures of child poverty, children are defined as 0-16 year olds, but after April 2006, unmarried 16-19 year olds who are in full-time education were also included (Murdoch 2006, pp. 66). The measurement of child poverty thus requires two things. Firstly, consensus on how to define children, based on age, and secondly, a need to quantify the causes or effects of poverty broadly defined, in both an absolute and relative manner.

Measuring Child Poverty

The majority of research on poverty relates to non-OECD countries and a recurrent theme is whether survey data or national accounting data give the best estimate for the incidence of poverty. National accounting data is criticised as too aggregated and basic in many non-OECD countries and even if income data is accurate, its impact on the consumption and wealth of a household is often limited due to the nature of the economy (Jones 2006, pp. 80). For OECD countries which are mainly monetised fully functioning market economies, this issue is less significant, as the OECD Best Practice guidelines for poverty measurement emphasise: “in developed market economies, where basic health care and education for all have largely been achieved, income is the most useful single guide to poverty levels and to changes in those levels over time” (Joint Committee on Human Rights, Stationery Office 2009, pp. 45). Therefore a large part of the literature on child poverty relating to “high-income countries” as defined by the World Bank, focus ...