Call to raise minimum wage to aid families in poverty

After a decade of wages lagging behind inflation, some two-thirds of the country’s poor children were now living in families where at least one parent is in employment and the Government was “in all likelihood” set to miss its 2020 target to eliminate child poverty by a large margin, said the report by social mobility tsar Alan Milburn.

In comments which put him at odds with Prime Minister David Cameron’s oft-repeated mantra that “the best way out of poverty is work”, Mr Milburn said that child poverty was now “overwhelmingly” an issue for the working poor, rather than the “workless or work-shy”.

He called for action to raise the value of the £6.31-an-hour national minimum wage, but also said there was an onus on business to provide higher minimum levels of pay and better career prospects for the working poor, who he described as “the forgotten people of Britain”.

The first annual report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission also called for pensioners to bear a greater share of the burden of austerity.

The Government’s deficit reduction programme had resulted in an “intergenerational injustice” as better-off pensioners’ benefits are protected while families with children bear two-thirds of spending cuts, it said.

“Today, child poverty is overwhelmingly a problem facing working families, not the workless or the work-shy,” said Mr Milburn. “Two-thirds of Britain’s poor children are now in families where an adult works. In three-quarters of those households someone already works full-time. The principal problem seems to be that those working parents simply do not earn enough to escape poverty.

“These are the people that heed the urgings of politicians of all hues to do the right thing, to stand on their own two feet, to strive not shirk. Yet all too often the working poor are the forgotten people of Britain. They desperately need a new deal.”