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Government consults on reducing child poverty
The Government has launched a consultation over the best way to measure child poverty to reflect the reality in the UK today.
The current measures focus on a family’s income and now the Government wants to look at how a wider measurement can be developed, to tackle the root causes of poverty including worklessness, educational failure and family stability.
The consultation document states that family stability is important to a child’s experience of growing up and to their life chances. A multidimensional measure of child poverty that is able to reflect this will give a more realistic indication of what it means to grow up in child poverty.
According to the consultation:
- There were two million lone parents with dependent children in the UK in 2011 – increasing steadily from 1.7m in 2001.
- In 2005, step families were the fastest growing form of family in the UK with 10% of families recorded as step families.
- The pattern of forming partnerships in the UK has changed, with a falling trend in the number of people marrying and an increase in the number of people cohabiting: families consisting of a cohabiting couple with or without children increased from 12.5% of all families in 2001 to 15.3% in 2010.
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