15/05/2019

Anneliese Dodds, Labour MP for Oxford East, has reacted today to the release of statistics on child poverty showing that almost a third of local children are growing up in poverty.

Anneliese met this morning with the End Child Poverty Coalition to discuss the statistics.

The Coalition has improved the methodology for assessing child poverty, taking into account a broader range of factors. This means that it is not possible to compare the statistics for this year with last year, although they fall broadly within the same range (28% last year compared with 30.4% this year).

Anneliese said: “I know from discussions with my constituents that many local families are really scraping to make ends meet. Increasingly, local children are being brought up in poverty even when their parents are in work. Changes to social security added on to an increasingly precarious labour market and the high cost of housing are having a direct impact on our children. These figures really should be a wake-up call for action to boost peoples’ incomes”.

Work undertaken by the Coalition also shows that so-called ‘absolute’ poverty is now rising as well as ‘relative’ poverty. While ‘absolute’ poverty measures peoples’ ability to afford to live a decent life, ‘relative’ poverty measures how many people are falling below the general standard of living in a society.

 

FURTHER INFORMATION

www.endchildpoverty.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/child-poverty-indicators-2019-report-to-ecp-1.pdf

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