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The impact of the recession on child poverty
By Will Horwitz | November 3, 2009
The End Child Poverty campaign released a report today which highlights the obvious, but is still depressing reading. In a recession where unemployment rose rapidly and is still rising, there are 170,000 more children in families without jobs, and two million in families reliant on benefits.
You can argue about the statistics, as thinktank Policy Exchange tried last week, but it’s hard to argue with the consequences and surely more important to focus on the solutions. This film, made by some of Community Links young reporters in Newham, clearly shows what needs to change…
One of the proposals in End Child Poverty’s ‘Recession Recovery Package‘ is to allow parents to take on part-time or ‘mini-jobs’, which make up a third of all Jobcentre Plus vacancies. They recommend an increase in the earnings disregard - the amount someone on benefits can earn before their benefits begin to be withdrawn, to allow people to take on these jobs without affecting their benefits. Our Need Not Greed campaign has long maintained that increasing the earnings disregard would be a valuable way of helping everyone, not just parents, into work and out of poverty, and we’re going to be talking more about that in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, why not sign the petition on the 38 Degrees website, calling for government to introduce measures to combat child poverty in their Pre-Budget report, due later this month.
Topics: General |
We spent a week debating the way poverty is portrayed in the media, generating over 20 fascinating posts from a wide range of authors. 
November 4th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
[...] media, technology, Young People | by chainreactionteam A new post today over at our sister blog, LinksUK, reports on the impact of the recession on child poverty. Depressing reading, but illustrated with [...]
November 19th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
[...] new post today over at our sister blog, LinksUK, reports on the impact of the recession on child poverty. Depressing reading, but illustrated with [...]