Kids stuffed

When I left the Home Office two years ago to join Barnardo’s, I was keen that our top campaigning priority should be the reduction of child poverty in the UK.

Any optimism that the government would meet its target to halve the numbers of children growing up poor by 2010 is rapidly diminishing among poverty campaigners, especially the Campaign to End Child Poverty, which I chair. That is not to say that progress has not been made – 600,000 children have been lifted out of poverty since 1999. But, more recently, progress has been deeply disappointing and the number of children in poverty has started to grow again.