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Blair pledges to eradicate child poverty by 2020

Paul Waugh
Wednesday 18 September 2002 00:00 BST
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Tony Blair will pledge today to redistribute power and wealth to the poor when he commits the Government to eradicating child poverty by 2020.

As figures are published on the extent of poverty across the country, the Prime Minister will announce the creation of 800 SureStart children's centres offering cash and advice to parents in deprived areas.

In an attempt to galvanise support among Labour MPs worried about action against Iraq, Mr Blair will promise that reducing the number of children on the breadline will be a "key test" of his second term.

Anti-poverty campaigners are likely to seize on the fact that the Government has taken only 500,000 children out of poverty in its first five years, well short of the one million target it had set. The Prime Minister will explicitly refer for the first time in his tenure to Labour's policy of redistributing wealth from rich to poor. The policy, known as "the R-word" by many Blairites, has been avoided by Downing Street until now because of its connotations with higher taxes, which have traditionally deterred voters.

Senior government sources said Mr Blair had been emboldened by the public reaction to the Budget's tax rises to pay for an improved NHS.

Speaking at a SureStart Centre in north London, he will announce that 1.4 million children have been taken out of absolute poverty by Labour since 1997 and teenage pregnancies have dropped by 6 per cent.

Mr Blair will admit that truancy figures and qualifications for the worst-off remain poor and emphasise that poverty is influenced by ill-health and not just income.

SureStart, a scheme set up to help poor parents, has been a "hidden success" of the Government. It will be expanded so that the most deprived 20 per cent of wards in Britain will have a children's centre by 2006.

Some 650,000 children should benefit from the service. Mr Blair will say that he wants "a Britain in which nobody is left behind and people go as far as their talent allows". Such a society meant "equal status and opportunity, not equal outcomes".

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