The Tories musn’t turn their backs as more children fall into poverty

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/12/tories-targets-children-poverty

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There’s a cursory reference to poverty in the Tory general election manifesto. A Conservative government, it practically mumbles, will “work to eliminate child poverty”. How precisely it will do this, as we have come to expect on welfare matters, is not explained.

Nonetheless, David Cameron faces a legally binding target to eliminate child poverty by 2020, or at least reduce it to below 10%. His chances of meeting it are slight: the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates child poverty, currently 17%, will rise to 21% by the end of the decade.

Does missing a target conjured in the last days of Brown’s Labour government matter for the Tories? Even Labour frankly admitted in its manifesto that the 10% goal was “very unlikely to be met”. But there is a difference between missing a target, and treating it with contempt.

This is where the Tories must tread carefully. As Alan Milburn, the social mobility and child poverty tsar, pointed out last year, 2020 will see not just failure to eradicate it, but the end of a decade in which, for the first time since records began, absolute child poverty increased.

Strange as it may seem, Cameron has much invested in tackling poverty. Less than 10 years ago he declared poverty “an economic waste and a moral disgrace”. The Tories voted for the Child Poverty Act, and the coalition renewed its commitment to the 10% target.

The Tory manifesto suggests the government will attempt to change the way child poverty is measured. Shifting the goalposts late in the day will be seen as cynical. Cameron used to defend the relative measure of poverty (less than 60% of median income), and ministers crowed when falling median incomes in the first two years of the coalition showed that on the accepted metric, child poverty reduced by 300,000.

Related: Revealed: hitlist of welfare cuts facing Britain's next chancellor

Within a few weeks we will have the latest child poverty figures for the period 2013-14, when the coalition’s main tax and benefit changes were introduced. According to one preliminary estimate, these will show 300,000 more children below the poverty line. This is just the start of an uncomfortable trajectory of “deepening, worsening” poverty over the next five years, say experts.

Turbo-boosting that trend will be £12bn of social security cuts. This poverty driver will be offset, the government hopes, by rising wages and employment. Iain Duncan Smith’s reappointment as work and pensions secretary is surprising, not least because there is so little hard evidence that his “behaviour change” reforms, from benefit sanctions and the benefit cap to the work programme, have succeeded in directly propelling huge numbers off the dole.

Moreover, he is an abrasive figure, and the next five years will be even more turbulent for social security. It is worth noting, for example, that around 60% of the electorate voted for parties that explicitly promised to abolish or neuter Duncan Smith’s unpopular bedroom tax, and the squeezed middle are yet to feel the impact of potential further cuts to tax credits and child benefit.

Some of those welfare cuts may require primary legislation, putting the government in conflict with an oppositional House of Lords packed with Lib Dem peers freed from coalition restraints. Poverty will be be a big, noisy story over the next half decade, and target or no target, it is one the Tories will ignore at their peril.