Top parties fail child poverty test

A children's lobby group says Labour and National have both flunked an election test on the key issue of child poverty.

Every Child Counts, a coalition backed by child-focused agencies such as Plunket and Barnardo's, praises Labour's Working for Families package, but says it is a pity the party has no timeline to eliminate child poverty.

"Gone by lunchtime, perhaps?" it asks.

It also praises National's plans to work more closely with agencies such as Plunket, but attacks the party for opposing a requirement for all Government measures to be assessed for their impact on children.

"No votes in it, I guess," the group says.

Its caustic comments come in a statement introducing verbatim answers by five parties to 32 questions on children's issues, published on the group's website yesterday.

Spokeswoman Emma Davies said all eight parties represented in Parliament agreed at a forum last week that eliminating child poverty would be possible.

But only one, the Green Party, promised to push for ending it by a specified date - in its case 2010.

Dr Davies said the British Government had committed to halving the number of children living in poverty by 2010 and eliminating it by 2020, and it could be done here.

"It's a matter of political will. There is a lack of political will to end child poverty."

The issue is controversial because child poverty is defined in relative terms, rather than in absolute dollars.

If poverty is defined as living in a household with less than half of the median household income, 16.3 per cent of children lived in poverty last year, the fourth-highest rate among 26 developed countries.

Higher family support payments under Labour's Working for Families package are due to reduce that number to 3.9 per cent by April 2007.

Last week's National Party tax package would cancel the final family support increase due in 2007, freezing child poverty at the level of 7.3 per cent of children which is forecast for next year.

Dr Davies, children and families leader at the Auckland University of Technology's Institute of Public Policy, said neither party had clear plans to reduce poverty further beyond 2007.

"We are talking about our poorest kids not getting substantial help," she said.

"Those are the kids likely to have the worst outcomes in health, education and so on. That is a long-term issue that needs to be dealt with."

On other questions, Labour and National both endorsed the Family Start programme which provides long-term intensive support to at-risk families in 16 locations. National started the scheme in 1999 and Labour has promised to extend it to at least 14 more sites.

But Dr Davies said a 2003 evaluation found the scheme had "mixed results". She urged the parties to look at Britain's Sure Start programme, which works with local councils to establish children's centres in every community by 2010 providing childcare, pre-birth education, parental support and other services.

"We need to be pulling together some of the bits and pieces we have in different silos of government departments and make them much more integrated," she said.

"We still have too much of a national focus. What we should be looking for is to have much more regionally and locally driven programmes with research and real-time evaluation attached to them."

A principal adviser in the Ministry of Social Development, Bryan Perry, warned in a paper last year that there would be no point in aiming to eliminate child poverty without further research about the 3.9 per cent of children who would remain under the poverty line in 2007.

He said many would be in families with self-employed parents whose reported low incomes "may not accurately reflect the financial resources available to the household".

Others would be in families that split during an income year. The sole mother who ended up with the children might have had no income while she was married, so her income for the full year would be low.

He said further work was needed to understand these "noise" problems in the figures.

"In the context of a commitment to 'eliminate child poverty', the presence of the noise will make it look as if the target is never achieved, whatever threshold is used."

Ending child poverty

Have you set a target date for ending child poverty?

Greens: Yes, 2010.

Labour: No ... But we are committed to constantly measuring progress in reducing child poverty.

National: No. It has taken 30 years of welfare dependency to become ingrained. It will take some time to remove it and replace it with a culture of self-esteem, personal responsibility and worth.