Earlier this year, the Government published a strategy re-committing itself to ending child poverty by 2020. Earlier this week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the share of children growing up poor is set to rise from a fifth to a quarter by the end of the decade.
Politicians stick resolutely to the ambitious target, while pursuing policies that have no prospect of meeting it. Caught in the middle are millions of families on low incomes.
The Government's attempts to make progress in this area face the major headwinds of lower employment and stagnant wages. In fact, (relative) child poverty is set to rise despite average household incomes falling by 7 per cent over the next three years - described by the IFS as an 'unprecedented collapse in living standards'.
On its own, the Universal Credit - Iain Duncan-Smith's overhaul of the benefits system - will take nearly half a million children out of poverty. However, this will be more than offset by the Government's reductions in welfare spending, in particular the decision to lock in the declining real value of benefits by up-rating them by the (lower) CPI measure of inflation.
For people who believe child poverty is a social and economic scar on our society, this leaves a parlous situation. To prevent the gap between rhetoric and reality drifting further apart, we must identify some interim priorities, and then face up to hard choices to achieve them.
Given how crucial the early years are, top of my list would be ensuring no child starts life poor by focusing resources on the under-fives. This might mean varying Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit by age, and finding ways to prevent the damaging bias in favour of income transfers over spending on childcare in the way poverty is calculated. As children get older, we need to enable parents to work. In return we should abolish in-work poverty.
Such steps involve acknowledging that ending child poverty will take longer than we'd hoped - while not letting politicians give up on the current generation of children.
