In 1999 the Prime Minister of the UK announced that he had a plan to decrease the number of poor children within 10 years and eradicate child poverty within 20. This seems like a wonderful plan but now that the deadline is quickly approaching, some things need to be changed. The yearly budget needs to be increased to allow more money to be given to this cause. "The plan must be to hope that the public finances get better." Apparently tings are slowly getting better according pensions secretary Peter Hain, "a huge amount of success had already been achieved, with 600,000 children lifted out of poverty over the last decade". Official statistics define children in poverty as "those in households whose income is less than 60% of the median for similar households".
Not only is the government working on program directed twoard the children, they are also involving the entire family and their work ethic. Mr Hain said "the combination of helping people into work and targeting help where it is needed will help the government reach its goal of ending child poverty". He also added that, "we know that children in households where no one works are up to seven-and-a-half times more likely to be living in poverty". It is important that children can see the benefits of work and aspire to a life in work and break the cycle of worklessness that still blights too many lives. Child poverty is a major issue in every country around the world. I think that this is a great policy and should be used to inspire other countries as well.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7054286.stm
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