Stuart Adam

In the previous edition, we argued that governments might care about child poverty for reasons of equity and efficiency, and we introduced the concept of an equivalence scale as a way to help compare well-being across different sorts of households.

The current Labour Government wants to reduce the level of child poverty in this country.

This commentary describes the changes to the structure of child-contingent support through the tax and benefit system since 1975. It also presents new results, which were produced to quantify explicitly the amount of government support for families with children, using representative samples of families from over the past three decades. With these data, it is possible to examine whether child-contingent support has become more or less progressive, or more or less slanted towards large families, lone-parents families or families with young children.