Child poverty campaigners denounce Labour’s spending plans

Child poverty campaigners have criticised the government for backing inheritance tax cuts and turning away from its promise to halve child poverty by 2010 in this year’s comprehensive spending review.

This criticism follows the announcement yesterday from the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, that his party would tackle child poverty if it came into power.

Jo Coles, trustee of the End Child Poverty campaign told delegates on Thursday at the National Children and Adult Services conference that it did not “expect” a Labour government to turn away from its socialism roots.

The government needed to invest £4bn, in the CSR for 2008-11 to meet its target to halve child poverty by 2010, but Coles said, “unfortunately there was no money attached to the recent CSR” and only “100,000 children would be pulled out of poverty”.

She added that if the government did not show a real commitment to meet its targets to end child poverty by 2020, another generation of children would grow up in poverty.

Caroline Abrahams, director of programmes for children and families at the Local Government Authority, called for services to link up to tackle child poverty.

She added: “We have to work hard to make the leap and build bridges between the daily business of councils and ending child poverty.”