Child Poverty Act 2010

The act provided a statutory basis to the commitment made by Tony Blair's Labour Government in 1999 to eradicate child poverty by 2020, which the Conservatives in Opposition under David Cameron had accepted as a "shared goal" ("an aspiration, not a pledge") in 2006.[4] The proposed legislation was first read as the Child Poverty Bill in June 2009.[5] Its sponsors were Labour politicians Stephen Timms, then Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and Bill McKenzie.

In its comprehensive, ambitious scope and focus on poorer children, the Act has been compared to educational proposals made in Australia over a similar timeframe by the 2011 Gonski Report.[6]

The act received Royal Assent on 25 March 2010, six weeks before the 2010 general election which brought to an end 13 years of Labour government. A paper published in the Political Quarterly in 2012 described it as "[o]ne of Labour's parting shots before leaving office": "Although passed with cross-party support, the Child Poverty Act 2010 was clearly something of a stitch up, intended to embarrass an incoming government if it tried to shirk its commitments or move the goal posts."[9]

As noted by the politically independent but Conservative-leaning think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in 2016, the targets had been deliberately envisaged as being impossible to delay or quietly lay aside.[10] In a meeting with the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June 2009, Timms had explained: "In the way the Bill has been drafted, the commitment to hit those four targets is binding by 2020. [...T]he only way to avert the possibility of a judicial review forcing a future government to take whatever steps are needed to hit the target would be for the legislation to be repealed." Timms further explained how this differed from the Climate Change Act 2008, as "with the Climate Change Act, there is there a mechanism to delay the target or to recognise that economic circumstances might make it impossible to deliver that. That provision is not in this Bill."[11]

It became clear to Parliament with the 2012/13 child poverty data that "under any plausible scenario, the [act's] 2020 targets will be missed".[12] 2013 was a turning point due to a renewed rise in middle incomes after the financial crisis while incomes continued to fall at the bottom, rising pensioner poverty, and rising poverty among social housing tenants.[13]

The targets were formally abandoned on 1 July 2015 when the Department for Work and Pensions and the Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith (one of the CSJ's co-founders) announced "a new and strengthened approach to tracking the life chances of Britain’s most disadvantaged children".[14]

The act was not formally repealed. However, the announcement was liveblogged under the title "Iain Duncan Smith announces Child Poverty Act being scrapped" in the Guardian.[15]