Working parents ‘in child poverty trap’

from Metro

Efforts to combat child poverty are failing to help poor parents who are holding down a job, according to a leading think tank.

The number of youngsters in poverty despite having at least one working parent has stayed the same since 1997 at 1.4 million, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) said on Thursday.

It means the Government's much-vaunted progress in reducing child poverty has been almost exclusively to the benefit of families in which neither parent works.

Some 600,000 children have been raised above the official poverty line since Labour came to power.

But the Government is committed to helping all 2.8 million poor children out of poverty by 2020 - half of which have at least one parent with a job.

In a report, the IPPR warned there was little incentive in the benefits system for a second parent to enter work and enable this "forgotten million" to increase their prosperity.

The think tank - which has close links with New Labour - urges a series of measures to help such working families at the bottom of the labour market, including:

Kate Stanley, the IPPR's head of social policy, said: "Significant progress has been made in the last 10 years in lifting nearly 600,000 children out of poverty.

"However, half of all poor children now live in households where someone is at work and the challenge is to ensure that work really is a route out of poverty.

"Tax credits and the minimum wage have 'made work pay' relative to being on benefits but these don't yet go far enough to ensure more children are lifted out of poverty.

"More action is needed to combine financial support and measures to boost parental employment with action to deliver fairness on pay and opportunities for progression at work."