Tomorrow, on 20 July, MPs will debate the welfare reform and work bill for the first time. A Pandora’s box for Britain’s poorest families, I’m concerned it includes many measures that risk locking more children into poverty.
Beyond the well-publicised cuts to tax credits, which will leave many families on low wages struggling to buy basics, the government also plans to cap benefits. For the moment this will be set at £20,000 (£23,000 in Greater London), but a clause in the bill allows the government to change the amount in future too – without consulting parliament. This paves the way for the threshold to sink ever lower, consigning children from larger families to the breadline without scrutiny.
The most worrying element is the decision to ditch the government’s duty to end child poverty by 2020. Instead this bill would redefine “poverty”, scrapping income as the way we measure being poor and replacing it with worklessness. Given that two-thirds of our poorest children already live in “working” families, this is a completely unacceptable way to measure hardship.
This bill would make the government dramatically less accountable for its policies, leaving poor families worse off and limiting children’s life chances.
Javed Khan
Chief executive, Barnardo’s
Keetie Roelen’s article (How to best measure child poverty?, theguardian.com, 16 June) rightly calls for income poverty measures to be complemented by non-income ones, following the UK government’s announcement of a change in the target for child poverty.
Research from Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford has demonstrated that people living in poverty around the world can experience a wide range of overlapping disadvantages besides a lack of income – for example they may suffer from poor health or malnutrition, lack of clean water or electricity, poor quality of work or little schooling. Focusing on one factor alone, such as income, is not enough to capture the true reality of poverty. Twice a year OPHI updates the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a Measure of multidimensional poverty covering over 100 developing countries.
The good news is that a growing number of countries are recognising the need for multidimensional poverty measures. The governments of Mexico, Colombia, Bhutan and Chile – as well as Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and Minas Gerais, Brazil – have launched official multidimensional poverty measures, with many others in the process of developing theirs, connected by a network of over 40 governments and institutions that supports policymakers to develop multidimensional poverty measures. Unicef and others have called recently for a child multidimensional poverty index (MPI) internationally, and 25 countries are exploring this. By showing exactly where and how people are poor, MPI measures enable policymakers to allocate their resources and tackle poverty more effectively, ensuring no one living in poverty is overlooked.
Sabina Alkire
Director, the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford; Oliver T Carr professor and professor of economics and international affairs, George Washington University
