The government has abolished the Child Poverty Unit, a cross-departmental organisation established by Labour to tackle social deprivation.
The work undertaken by the Unit has now been subsumed into the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as a whole, Minister Damian Hinds has claimed.
In response to a parliamentary question, Hinds wrote that the Unit no longer had a clear function following the abolition of child poverty reduction targets.
“The child poverty unit’s main function was to support ministers in exercising their duties in relation to the income-related targets set out in the Child Poverty Act 2010 and the associated child poverty strategy. Following the repeal of those targets, responsibility for child poverty policy and analysis transferred to the DWP.”
Nevertheless, he insisted that Prime Minister Theresa May “is clear that tackling poverty and disadvantage” remains a priority for the government.
In response Labour MP Yvette Cooper, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, wrote in The Guardian that abolishing the Unit sent the wrong message:
“No government should stand by while more and more children grow up hungry or homeless. Yet that is what is happening here in Britain in the 21st century. Already one in four of our children live in poverty, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies warns we are about to see the biggest increase in child poverty in a generation. That is the backdrop to the government’s decision to abolish the child poverty unit.”
Image by Howard Lake via Flickr under a Creative Commons licence