Schroedinger’s child poverty - Be £8,000 a year better off and just as poor

We think this from Bridget Phillipson is interesting:

At @educationgovuk

we're saving families cash:

£450 on free breakfast clubs

£50 on school uniforms

£500 on free school meals

£300 on school holiday clubs

Now it's confirmed we've halved childcare costs, saving parents £8,000.

Well, OK. We’d not agree with much of that - our own memories are not that more school food is better for example - but OK, a government elected to do such stuff does such stuff. Democracy is a thing etc.

We do have a problem though. By the usual and official measure this will lift not one single child up out of child poverty. We did think that one of the major ambitions of this government was to abolish child poverty. And spending £8,000 per family with children and yet reducing child poverty by not one jot, tittle, iota nor fraction of one does seem a more than wasteful method of doing so.

For child poverty is defined as living in a household on less than 60% of median household income, adjusted for size and either before or after housing costs to taste. None of those things - which all cost money to provide, are increases in the consumption ability of the household - are counted as income to said household. So, they do not change household income relative to the median - they do not reduce child poverty by this usual and legal measure.

Think on it a moment. Increasing the cash income to a household - say, removing the two child limit - does reduce child poverty by this measure. Increasing consumption opportunities by goods and services in kind does not. Which leads to the alarming insistence that if this £8,000 was given to households as money then child poverty would be substantially reduced, giving free school meals reduces it not one whit, iota etc.

We rather do need to have a better measure of poverty, no? Unless, of course, this is the point - to be able to ramp up tax, spending and government influence all the while claiming that there was still this mountain of a problem to climb. But who would be cynical enough to believe that of a British government?

Tim Worstall