Figures just out indicate that the government has cut the number of children living in poverty significantly ֠but it's not enough, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The answer is to spend 1% of GDP on boosting benefits.

"Our historic aim will be for ours to be the generation that puts an end to child poverty forever", proclaimed Prime Minister Tony Blair in his 1999 Beveridge Lecture. Soon afterwards, this rhetorical ambition was made concrete by the publication of firmer commitments to abolish child poverty by 2020, to halve it by the end of the decade, and, most explicitly, to reduce it by one-quarter by 2004/5 against a specific definition on poverty.