Employment ‘does not solve child poverty’
New research published today has found that children of parents who move from welfare to work are just as vulnerable to poverty as those whose parents remain on benefits.
The study carried out by Save the Children looked at 4,000 of the poorest children throughout the 1990s. It found that paid work did not always prevent severe and persistent poverty.
A fifth of the poorest families had at least one adult in work and more than 65% of very poor children had at least one parent move from work to benefits or benefits to work.
Around one in ten children, approximately one million, experienced severe poverty in the last decade and in 1999 the Government introduced measures such as the family tax credit to tackle the problem.
But Save the Children is calling for a more flexible benefits system to help ease the transition of parents into employment and to reduce delays in delivering benefits.
Sue Middleton, director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy and co-author of the report, said that if the UK wants to have a flexible labour market, then it also needed a flexible benefits system.
‘Our concern is whether the government can meet the targets without focusing on those in the most severe poverty,’ she explained.
