The abolition of child poverty is key to the UK government’s social policy strategy. In 1999 the Prime Minister’s Toynbee Hall speech promised ‘to eradicate child poverty within a generation’. Subsequently the Treasury set out further objectives: to eradicate child poverty by 2020, to halve it by 2010 and ‘to make substantial progress towards eliminating child poverty by reducing the number of children in poverty by at least a quarter by 2004’ (HM Treasury, 2000). The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) published this report as the result of a project on child poverty in large families.
