Reducing child poverty comes down to political will. The UK experience shows that decades of austerity, which already started in the 80s, have made life much harder for many more families and children.
There are positive signs: the recent child poverty strategy led to some welcome changes and lived experience is tentatively being integrated in policy. However, the lack of strong targets and proposed changes to immigration rules may still leave many behind.
In this episode, we’re joined by Baroness Ruth Lister. Ruth has a longstanding career in tackling poverty, and especially child poverty. She was director for the Child Poverty Action Group from 1971 to 1987. She went on to work as an academic at Bradford University and Loughborough University, before retiring from academia and joining the House of Lords as a Labour peer in 2011.
In our conversation, we talk about the intricacies of the UK welfare system – or social security, as Ruth prefers, as it avoids the ‘us’ and ‘them’ connotations so strongly linked to welfare – and Ruth places trends in poverty and child poverty in the UK in historical perspective based on her more than five decades work on these issues.
Note that this conversation was recorded before Andy Burnham took over as Prime Minister; some of what Ruth is talking about may have been overtaking by events.
Links to some of the things that Ruth refers to:
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