Child Poverty Act to be scapped

 

"The Child Poverty Act will be scrapped and replaced with a system of reporting on levels of children living in workless homes, the government has announced...In its place, the government would be given a statutory duty to report on measures of `worklessness` and `educational attainment`."

"The worklessness measures will identify the proportion of children living in workless households, and the proportion of children in long-term workless households. The educational attainment measures will focus on GCSE attainment for all pupils and for disadvantaged pupils."

"Campaigners on child poverty have acted angrily to the announcement."

"Peter Grigg, director of external affairs at The Children’s Society said the government has `broken its promise to end child poverty by 2020`. "

" `Scrapping the Child Poverty Act and replacing it with inadequate measures based on worklessness and low educational attainment will do nothing to help the millions of children who are suffering in real poverty now,` he said. `Critically, the government is failing the two million children who are living in low-income working families`. "

" `By ignoring the reality that most children in poverty are living in working households, the government will fail to develop effective plans to help these children and turn its back on its own commitment to end child poverty by 2020`..."

"Duncan Smith said that alongside the statutory measures of worklessness and educational outcomes, the government `will develop a range of other indicators to measure the progress against the root causes of poverty`..."

" `We are currently developing these measures, including family breakdown, problem debt, and drug and alcohol dependency`."

" `We will report each year on these life chances measures as well`."

- See more at: http://www.cypnow.co.uk/cyp/news/1152351/government-to-scrap-child-poverty-act#sthash.4TJH29uG.dpuf