Make Child Poverty History

 

Last year showed that together we can achieve real change. Then, it was Africa and international development.
 
But poverty and deprivation aren’t confined to far-flung continents. In twenty-first century Britain, nearly three and a half million children live in poverty. That number seems remarkably high for the world’s fourth richest economy.
A third of poor children don’t eat three meals a day and a little girl growing up in Manchester can expect to live six years less than her friend in Chelsea.
The cost of not confronting this problem just doesn’t bear thinking about. Today’s poor children are more likely to struggle to find work and become cash-strapped adults, resulting in lost revenue from taxes and more cost in benefits.
 
But it doesn’t have to be like this. The government have lifted 700,000 children out of poverty since 1997, but that’s just the start. In some deprived areas of the country, even in Exeter, there are families struggling to get by. The Working Families’ Tax Credit and the Minimum Wage have helped, but to beat poverty we need to do more than just dole out welfare.
 
In his Beveridge Lecture on 17 March 1999, Tony Blair surprised many people when he pledged to try and end child poverty by 2020. The government narrowly missed their first target in 2001, but since then a redoubling of efforts has seen what some have described as radical change.

In 2005, a coalition of voluntary organisations, charities, churches, children, concerned citizens and students campaigned to Make Poverty History, which successfully saw the cancellation of debts owed by the poorest countries. But poverty, like disease and terrorism, crosses borders. We need to end it once and for all here at home. 
  
We are proud to support the campaign to eradicate poverty on those shores, but we need your help. We’d like you to sign the petition which urges the government to do more to help kids living in the poorest parts of Britain.

We’ve got some ideas of our own about to reduce poverty in Exeter, but we’d like to hear from you. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to pop them in an email.

If you’d like some more information, we recommend the following websites:

The Child Poverty Action Group

Make Child Benefit Count

The Government’s Social Exclusion Unit

A report on how we can eradicate child poverty by 2020, commissioned by the Department of Work & Pensions, and written by Lisa Harker has just been published. You can read it here.