Brown: Action needed now for millions of children in poverty
The former Prime Minister Gordon Brown says millions of British children have only known life in poverty - and he's called for a Government rescue plan to help them. Brown has warned that food banks are increasingly taking over from the welfare state and called for urgent action by the current government. Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 Austerity's children are the four and a half million children who are in poverty, a figure
00:06 that has gone up dramatically over the last few years.
00:10 And I think it's sometimes forgotten that 70% of the children in poverty are in families
00:14 where someone is working.
00:16 This is not the work-shy or the indolent.
00:19 These are families where people are working, but they just cannot make ends meet.
00:23 And that's what's got to change.
00:24 And I want urgent action from the chancellor in the September budget that he's planning.
00:29 Since the Conservative government came in, the figures for 2010-11 to now, our child
00:35 poverty has not fallen on any measure.
00:38 Absolute poverty, relative poverty, on measures that have been introduced subsequently that
00:43 talk about adequacy or destitution, child poverty is not falling.
00:48 Child poverty is rising.
00:50 And it's rising probably at the rate of about 100,000 children a year at the moment.
00:54 And that's because of a number of things.
00:56 The emergency support has stopped.
00:58 The household support fund is about to go in October.
01:02 You've already got charities saying that summer hunger, because there's not enough provision
01:06 for kids when they're out of school, and about 800,000 kids who are in poverty don't get
01:12 free school meals.
01:13 You just need to look at the whole pattern of the last few years and what is likely to
01:17 happen if nothing is done.
01:20 And we have got the worst levels of child poverty in living memory on the way as a result
01:25 of these changes that are being made.