Britain’s impoverished children

Almost a third of children in Britain are still living below the official poverty line From The Week, May 31 2008

Where do these figures come from?
The shocking figures for London come from a new report by the London Child PovertyCommission (LCPC), which found that 41 per cent of children in Greater London - and half the children in inner London - still live in what is defined as 'poverty'. This percentage hasn't altered since 2000, though it's a modest 1 per cent down on 1998 levels. Poverty is especially acute in London owing to the high cost of housing and childcare, which makes it very hard to survive on the minimum wage of £5.52 an hour. In the East End, the main problem is unemployment: in Tower Hamlets, the borough that borders the City, the unemployment rate is 14 per cent, the highest in the country. It is actually hard to believe, says the LCPC, that such poverty exists "in one of the richest cities in the world".

What about poverty in the country as a whole?
Between 1979 and 1997, levels of child poverty in Britain tripled to become the highest in the EU. And they have stayed higher, in relative terms, than in all but three of the 24 other EU countries. New Labour has spent billions on the problem, and since 1998 there has been an improvement: in that time some 600,000 British children have been taken out of poverty. But progress has stalled and recently the number of children classed as 'poor' has grown by anything from 100,000 to 200,000. The total number of children living in poverty in 2005-6 was 3.8 million - that's to say, 30 per cent of all children in Britain. By contrast in Denmark, which has the best record in the EU, just 5 per cent of children are defined as poor.

But what is the official definition of 'poverty'?
Living in a household whose income is just a fraction of the average household income. In Britain, even if you earn the median income (ie if you're at that point on the income scale where half the population earns more than you do, and half less) that doesn't exactly make you well off: in 2006 the median household income for a couple with two children was just £502 a week after tax and housing costs. But to be classed as 'poor', that couple would be living on less than 60 per cent of