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Child Poverty Bill

My recollection of the years I spent looking at those figures is very different. In the late 1980s, when there was public money to spare, it was spent on cutting the standard rate of income tax. Indeed, it was even spent on cutting the top rate from 60 per cent. to 40 per cent. That is where that Government spent money when they had money. Within a year or two of those tax changes, they also froze child benefit. The priority of dealing with child poverty was certainly not borne out in practice. The policy of the Conservative Government in office was to link benefits for children to the retail prices index. At a time of economic growth, that link means that relative poverty rates will rise remorselessly over the long term, year in and year out. We can argue about the efficiency of the delivery mechanism when it comes to tax credits, but the amounts that have gone into them have been a substantial increase over the RPI—a marked difference to what we saw under the Conservatives.