The strategy, unveiled earlier this month, states that providing more support to families is fundamental to ending child poverty and expanding opportunities across generations. 'Ensuring parents with low earning power are able to access childcare and engage with the labour market is critical to helping families break cycles of poverty and disadvantage, and promoting social mobility,' the strategy document says.
Increasing childcare tax credits is a key element of the strategy, welcomed by CPAG chief executive Kate Green. She said, 'The increase in and extension of the childcare element of the Working Tax Credit will help low-earner families to meet more of their childcare costs. More must be done to increase take-up of this tax credit and administration must be simplified and improved.'
The CPAG also praised the extension of paid maternity leave to nine months, but urged the Government to 'bring forward plans to achieve the goal of 12 months' paid maternity leave at the earliest opportunity'.
Head of policy and research Paul Dornan said the CPAG was 'happy with some aspects of the strategy and less happy with others'. He said, 'It is extremely welcome that childcare has now got greater recognition, but it needs to go further.We are calling for universal free childcare.
'We are also concerned about child tax credit and child benefit in the long term. Some generous increases in tax benefits have been made in the strategy report, but we would like the Government to be clearer about what will happen after the election. We need all political parties to address the issue of childcare and give broader support across the political spectrum. We must push harder if we are to reach the Government's long-term target of halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it by 2020.'
These comments follow the publication of a new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The report, Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2004, reveals that the number of children living in low-income households fell from 4.3 million in 1996-1997 to 3.6 million in 2002-2003, suggesting the Government is on target to reach its short-term target of reducing child poverty by a quarter by April 2005.
The Joseph Rowntree report, along with a separate report for Scotland, is available at www.poverty.org.uk.
