Half a chance

In 1999, UNICEF released statistics suggesting that Britain's levels of child poverty were among the worst in the developed world. In May 2001 the Organisation for Economic Development pointed out that our levels of child poverty were still unacceptably high. Around 30 per cent of children in the UK live in poverty, compared with 5 per cent in some other European countries.

Who is poor? David Piachaud, a highly respected professor from the London School of Economics, maintains that poverty is distributed across family types. Some of the poorest are conventional two-parent families, where the father is employed on a very low wage. Poverty is linked to being without work, but in some cases, where people are on a minimum wage and/or employed on a casual basis, they are only marginally better off being in work, even after tax and benefit reforms. If they took a job where they ceased to claim benefits, they would only gain 6p with every additional pound earned. In Piachaud's view the major cause of poverty is low income, whether or not people are in work, and the most direct way to address it is through tax redistribution.