More children 'are escaping poverty'

Communities minister Margaret Curran said, 'We have taken 210,000 Scottish children out of absolute poverty and 100,000 out of relative poverty. We are on track to meet our pledge to end child poverty within a generation.'

The Westminster Government said last week that 200,000 children in the UK had been lifted out of relative income poverty in the past year. Work and pensions secretary Andrew Smith said the number of children in absolute poverty had fallen more rapidly, with 2.1 million fewer 'growing up with their opportunities undermined by acute financial hardship'.

Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions' Households Below Average Incomes Survey showed that 700,000 children have escaped income poverty since Labour came to power in 1997. But research for the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) found the Government's tax and benefit policy 'has kept the lid on what would otherwise have been a much bigger growth in inequality'. It pointed to an 'unusual combination' since the mid-1990s of 'slightly rising income inequality and yet falling relative poverty'.