Many public bodies, including local authorities, police and the NHS, are to have new responsibilities for children who are in poverty.
The Child Poverty Bill was introduced into Parliament recently and will have its second reading soon. Speaking about the Bill, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said the government still hoped to eradicate child poverty by 2020.
Amongst other things, county and district councils and London boroughs will have to:
* take the lead in making arrangements to reduce child poverty, and in fostering co-operation with and between ‘partner’ public bodies; and
* publish an assessment of the needs of children in poverty and a strategy by which those needs can be met.
The Bill is said to be influenced by recent climate change laws. In fact, the new duties resemble the ones imposed on local authorities and criminal justice agencies to formulate crime and disorder strategies and make public protection arrangements, imposed under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 respectively. Like them, the child poverty duties might prove less than onerous.
Some excitable commentators have already suggested that the Bill will promote litigation between competing public bodies. That is very unlikely. The new duties should not be hard to satisfy. Although the Bill imposes challenging targets on the government, it doesn’t extend them to public bodies in any measurable way, and in the case of the so-called partners, it imposes no targets at all; merely the duty to co-operate in the making of anti-child poverty arrangements. Surely that isn’t too much to ask.
