E-news
E-news is a monthly electronic news bulletin, it includes latest news, diary dates, useful websites and snippets of information. If you would like to subscribe to this service please email kim.jones@torfaen.gov.uk| with the message subscribe e-news.
Child Poverty Solutions website launched, 18/09/08
A new website designed to help councils and their partners develop local responses to reducing child poverty has been launched. The website offers support and advice services to local practitioners, policy makers, managers and strategists, ranging from a self assessment toolkit for monitoring success in tackling child poverty to guidance in developing statutory children and young people plans.
Training modules for elected members will help them understand the causes and effects of child poverty and how local authorities can work with other organisations to tackle the issues.
The website has been developed by Save the Children in Wales and the Welsh Local Government Association and funded by the Welsh Assembly Government.Visit for more information.
How to Halve Child Poverty
Barnardo's and business advisory firm Deloitte have launched a report highlighting how the UK Government can meet its commitment to halving child poverty by 2010.
The report, How to Halve Child Poverty, suggests three policy options that would enable the UK Government to meet its target by changing the way in which child tax credits are paid so that they are reduced as income increases:
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Option one would lift 600,000 children out of poverty by increasing the child tax credit
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Option two would lift 700,000 children out of poverty by focusing the increases in tax credits on families with three or more children
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Option three would lift 500,000 children out of poverty by giving extra support to families with new babies and those in work
The report is available to download from www.deloitte.com|.
Useful Websites
Citizens Advice - This is child poverty
The government has made some progress in lifting children in Britain out of poverty and has promised to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. Yet, one in three children in the UK now live in poverty, and the figures are rising again.
Since Citizens Advice was founded in 1939, we have taken part in numerous significant campaigns to improve the lives for children and families. Today we are partners in the Campaign to End Child Poverty and are working with other organisations to encourage government to find new ways to eradicate child poverty in our country.
In June and July 2008, Citizens Advice asked parents across England and Wales to tell us their experiences of struggling to make ends meet, and to show how this impacts on their children.
We have presented some of these stories in this report, in order to provide an insight into the financial, emotional and physical impact of poverty on children. All children deserve to grow up in an environment where they can prosper, where their family can afford the essentials that many of us take for granted, with access to a free education, good housing and work that pays.
We hope this report will give children and families who live in poverty a voice, to tell the government that more must be done to keep their promise to end child poverty. www.citizensadvice.org|
David Harker
Chief Executive of Citizens Advice