Increasing Child Poverty

Do we really want thirty percent of the children in this country to grow up in poverty? That is the question we have to ask yourselves and what we can do about it if we care. The current Government for all their good words look to increase the number of children in poverty by three hundred thousand according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

As unemployment rises it will cause more poverty, but this will be made worse by other cuts that Government have planned that will cut even more into the income of those who are unemployed and on low income, with child tax credits cut and child benefit being frozen,only to be made worse by inflation topping the five percent mark. This Government has stopped the ring fencing of council tax credit and the social fund as well capping housing benefits. Then there is what they are doing to those on incapacity befits to take account of too, with those who are unable to work normally being forced to work or starve.

This Government is set to return us to the child poverty levels of the last Conservative Government. After all the work that has been done in recent years to pull children out of the poverty trap this is now being reversed and we are going backwards to a time when children have to go without. For the families on low incomes it becomes a choice between food and being warm, and this is set to get worse as we move towards the coming winter with even higher fuel prices predicted by the Bank of England while their income is being cut.

Even those in work will be affected, according to the Children's Society universal credit will cut childcare credits will mean a cut in childcare credits by twenty percent, effectively forcing mothers out of work and so decreasing family incomes. Then there is the end of education maintenance allowance, which means the loss of £30 a week for families with teenagers in post sixteen education. And finally there is the switching benefits RPI to CPI that means a loss of 10% of income, every decade why this measure of increasing benefits is in place.

I believe that our children are our future. They are the people that will power our future success as a country. We are setting up thirty percent of them to feel they are alienated from the country they live in rather than empowering to want to give back to the country that gave them a start in life. If we don't do anything to fight child poverty we will create a broken two tier society of have and have not's and problems in terms of crime and social exclusion that will bring. The sort of problems we had in the 1980's. The way forward isn't making the people at the bottom poorer as this Government believes is right, it is making sure they have a roof over their heads and enough to be able to eat and keep warm while giving them the opportunity to improve there situation.