Boris Johnson has sparked outrage by falsely claiming that child poverty has fallen under the conservative government, despite soaring numbers with forecasts of worse to come
The prime minister was confronted over the Conservative government’s record on child poverty, which has left 600,000 more British children living in relative poverty since his party has been in power in 2010.
Statistics released in March showed that the total grew by an astounding 100,000 cases last year, which means that 4.2 million children in the UK , or 30%, are existing below the national poverty line.
The bleak figures follow steep cuts on benefits being paid out to struggling families, the disabled, the low-paid and the unemployed as part of the austerity drive at the hands of George Osborne.
This comes after the Prime Minister’s order to give his RAF Voyager plane a Union Jack-inspired re-branding has been called an “absurd waste” of money.
In the House of Commons, Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer pointed out that Boris Johnson’s own Social Mobility Commission was now officially forecasting a further huge rise to 5.2 million children in poverty by the year 2022. Sir Keir demanded to know:
“An even higher child poverty rate would be an intolerable outcome from this pandemic, so what is he going to do to prevent it?”
But the Prime Minister failed to answer the opposition leader, instead he denied the official statistics that were released by his own experts; he claimed:
“Absolute poverty and relative poverty have both declined under this government and there are hundreds of thousands – I think 400,000 – fewer families living in poverty now than there were in 2010,”
Asked later, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister was unable to produce any evidence to back up Johnson’s claim of a fall in poverty under the Conservative government.
Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said:
“The government cannot continue to shy away from rising child poverty on its watch.”
Pointing to the 600,000 rise since 2010, she added: “That’s a crystal clear picture – pre COVID-19 – and one that, as the reaction to Marcus Rashford’s intervention shows, is unacceptable to people across the UK.”
Calling for “a joined-up plan for bringing child poverty rates down,” Ms Garnham added: “Uplifting child benefit by £10 per child per week would be a good place to start.”
This comes after a new survey has suggested that the trust and confidence of the UK Government’s response to the pandemic have declined in the past six weeks.
In the Commons, Sir Keir hit back, saying: “The prime minister says that poverty has not increased. I have just read a direct quote from a government report – from a government commission – produced last week, which says that it has gone up by 600,000.”
He added: “The prime minister obviously has not got the first idea what the social mobility report, from a government body, actually said.”
“2020 is the year when Tony Blair’s government pledged to abolish child poverty altogether, a vow put into legislation in 2010.”
