Child poverty target 'to be missed'

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The Commons Work and Pensions Committee said that it was still possible to turn the situation around before the target date of 2010 - but only if ministers were prepared to make more resources available.

The target to halve child poverty - with a view to eradicating it completely by 2020 - was first announced by then prime minister Tony Blair in 1999, when the number of children living in poverty stood at 3.4 million.

Since then the number has fallen by 600,000 to 2.8 million - still well short of the goal of 1.7 million.

On current trends, the committee said that the Government will miss the target by about 1 million - or 1.5 million if housing costs are taken into account.

The committee pointed to the way some groups of children had a much higher risk of growing up in poverty, such as those who were disabled or had a disabled parent.

It said that it was "particularly concerned" that one-in-five families with a disabled child were so hard up they had to cut back on food.

Poverty rates among Pakistani and Bangladeshi children were twice those among white children, while black children also experienced higher rates of poverty than whites. The rates were also particularly high in London.

The committee endorsed the Government's strategy of lifting families out of poverty by helping parents find "sustainable" work. However it expressed concern that the Jobseekers Allowance regime was too inflexible to cope with the "complexity" of many lone parents lives, particularly those with disabled children.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell said that the Government had made significant progress but acknowledged that more needed to be done.