THREAD: Is the Govt changing its cherrypicking strategy on child poverty claims?
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
1. What PM wrongly claimed on child poverty in 2019, earning @StatsRegulation rebuke
2. What PM claimed on child poverty at PMQs on 18 Nov 20
In the first statement, the PM used 2010 as a baseline. At the time, relative poverty was rising and absolute poverty was historically weak - we could not see where the 400,000 claim had come from.
Today, @EndChildPoverty coalition hosted by @CPAGUK & chaired by @AnnaFeuchtwang published estimates of child poverty broken down by LA, constituency and ward levels.
LETTER in the Times, in response to @jennirsl column on early intervention
Would be dangerously irresponsible to have an NHS with only A&E depts but no primary care or public health – yet this kind of short-sightedness is what we’re facing in children’s services.
We set up our crisis fund in direct response to frontline staff telling us our services were seeing families with children struggling to pay for their living needs.
The Emergency Fund was funded through generous donations from the pubic and by firms
CASE STUDIES
The report includes some examples of how the Emergency Fund helped families
1. *Anxiety has doubled*: Almost half (49.6%) of people in GB reported "high" anxiety 20-30 March; this was sharply elevated compared with the end of 2019 (21%), and equates to over 25 million people (out of the population aged 16 years and over).
This is especially worrying because the ONS today published polling showing that already 27% of people are using savings to cover living costs ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati… 2/8
We looked at how many children live in families with little or no savings.
We wanted to take a look at the regional picture, as well as the national, so we used 3 years of data from the Family Resources Survey which the @ONS@NatCen undertake for official poverty figs 3/8