It’s time to measure child poverty properly
From our UK edition
David Cameron's decision to bin the disastrous measure of child poverty is an important step towards improving young people’s life chances. Its very existence has led policymakers to use tax credits to manipulate this metric, rather than turn lives around. Child poverty refers to parents, not children: the parents whose income is below 60pc of the national average. This was set up by left-wing academics in the 1960s and then adopted by Eurostat. This means, for example, that ‘poverty’ can fall during a recession (as it did after the financial crisis), or rise if the state pension goes up. Children can go to bed in poverty and wake up out of it without experiencing any change in their lives whatsoever.
