This report comes at a time when the UK government has outlined its main policy intentions and its strategy to reduce poverty. Although the statistics presented in this report still almost entirely reflect the policies of the previous government, the Labour record is the Coalition inheritance.
This commentary discusses the implications of that record for the current government in the light of its commitments on child poverty and social mobility set out in strategy documents published in 2011.
The main conclusion is that in two key respects, the Coalition is repeating Labour’s mistakes with adverse consequences both for people experiencing poverty and for the climate of political and public opinion that makes action on poverty possible.