Amendment to welfare bill means four indicators of child poverty including household income will be kept

The government has been forced into retreat after agreeing that it should continue to report lack of money as a measure of child poverty.



Ministers wanted to remove a statutory duty to publish levels of UK household income as part of the welfare reform and work bill but have now accepted, after a battle with the House of Lords, that the material deprivation measures should remain protected.

The government suffered a defeat in the Lords in January after peers pushed through an amendment forcing the government to retain four established indicators, including income, which use official statistics to track and monitor relative and absolute poverty.

Although the Commons voted to overrule the Lords vote earlier this week, the welfare reform minister, Lord Freud, on Friday published a government amendment that accepts the main thrust of the original Lords amendment proposed by the bishop of Durham.

The move, which is likely to placate peers, was welcomed by poverty campaigners. Sam Royston, chair of End Child Poverty and policy director at the Children’s Society, said: “You can’t know the extent of child poverty in this country without taking family income into account. The government’s legally binding commitment to continue measuring the number of families struggling on low incomes – including those in work – will at the very least stop child poverty from being hidden from view.”

The government played down the significance of its about-turn, saying it had always intended to continue collecting data on households with below-average incomes and insisted that it would have been unable to stop publishing the data even if it had wanted to because the statistics were protected.

But Alison Garnham, chief executive of the charity Child Poverty Action Group, said the move would help prevent child poverty being sidelined: “A legally binding duty to publish child poverty statistics reflects the overwhelming view of experts and charities that child poverty must be prioritised and that money matters when we’re discussing child poverty.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alison Garnham of The Child Poverty Action Group Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The welfare reform and work bill will repeal the Child Poverty Act, introduced by Labour in 2010, and get rid of child poverty targets for government and local councils while introducing new so-called life chances poverty measures around family, debt, and addiction.

A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “This government is dedicated to eradicating child poverty and improving children’s life chances and we strongly believe that we must tackle the root causes of poverty, rather than just the symptoms.

“Our new measures will be the foundation of a new, comprehensive approach to improving children’s life chances and will drive effective government action. But we’ve always been very clear that we will continue to publish low-income statistics.”

However, charities said that the government’s measures would not hold back the anticipated rise in child poverty. By 2020, 3.8 million children are forecast to be in poverty, up from 2.3 million.

Garnham said: “Official statistics measuring child poverty are crucial, but the number one priority has to be urgent and substantial action from government when we’re facing the biggest increase in child poverty in a generation.”

The four income measures – of which the best known is relative poverty, which considers children to be in poverty if their income falls below 60% of UK median income – were established in 2003 and are the standard poverty indicator used across the EU.

Owen Smith MP, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: “This represents a big victory for the campaigners who have come together to demand the government meaningfully monitors child poverty.

“Efforts led by the Labour party, our peers, the bishop of Durham and the charity sector have together forced the Tories to climb down on their bid to cover their tracks on child poverty. They will now be legally bound to keep monitoring child poverty and Labour will be sure to hold them to account for their failures to address it.”