§ The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr. Andrew Smith)I have today published "Measuring Child Poverty". A copy has been placed in the Library.
The Government issued a consultation document in April 2002 to promote debate on how best to build on their existing indicators to measure child poverty in the long term. The document published today outlines a long-term measure of child poverty for the UK. Our conclusions are based on a thorough analysis of the responses to the consultation document and further methodological work. None of this affects any of our existing PSA's which we remain committed to.
Our new measure of child poverty will consist of: absolute low income—to measure whether the poorest families are seeing their incomes rise in real terms; relative low income—to measure whether the poorest families are keeping pace with the growth of incomes in the economy as a whole and material deprivation and low income combined—to provide a wider measure of 155WS people's living standards. Using this measure, poverty is falling when all three indicators are moving in the right direction.