Child Poverty as a Government Priority: Child Benefit Packages for Working Families, 1992–2009

Abstract

In this chapter the focus is on the child benefit package for working families and its contribution to tackling in-work child poverty. Tackling child poverty is high on the European Union’s political agenda. It was a priority in the March 2006 European Council, a focus of many of the National Reports on Social Protection and Social Inclusion 2006–8, and the main work of the EU experts on the National Action Plans in 2007. An influential report by the Social Protection Committee (2008) reflected much of this effort and contained detailed comparative analysis of child poverty using the new European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2005. The report drew attention to the fact that in the majority of the EU member states, children are at a higher risk of poverty than the population as a whole. More recent analyses of the EU-SILC (Atkinson and Marlier, 2010; Tarki, 2010, 2011) confirmed this finding. As a part of its ten-year economic plan, the June 2010 European Council set the target to reduce poverty and social exclusion in the EU by 20 million (European Council, 2010). If this objective is to be achieved, parents and their children will need to be a key focus of anti-poverty policies.