John

Reading through the attachment, I can't possibly see how this could ever be anything other than bad for the people of Easington District. There is no such thing as child poverty in the UK, ok, so there may be some children who don't have the latest Playstation, or don't have two of three foreign holidays per year, but none of them are in poverty, there are no children in the UK starving to death.

All these new targets are doing is to provide yet another perverse incentive for the unemployed of Easington to make no attempt to get themselves into work and work their own way out of 'poverty', why work 37.5hrs a week for the minimum wage when instead, you can churn out another kid, and be handsomely rewarded by the state for it. It's the reason why we have one of (the?) highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the country, these very perverse incentives of all of these 'initiatives' (this isn't speculation, I've grown up in Easington district and seen it in action more than a handful of occasions).

Someone always has to be in the "10% of children living in qualifying households live in households that have an equivalised net income below 60%", and as fewer and fewer people with children are in this bracket, those without children are incentivised to have children for economic reasons of simply give up working as they're being taxed so harshly that working really isn't worth the effort.

Of course, Labour is never going to do anything than come up with policies that enslave people to the state, because, you know what, a lot of them will be grateful for their handouts but it does nothing to help future generations, I never got to go on school ski trips when I was growing up, has it done me any harm? No, it's just made me more determined to be able to provide what I missed out on for my children by working damn hard only to watch my salary be chipped away at to give the cash to an underclass, and hell, maybe I'll just be at the border of the "Child Poverty Act" criteria that means that my income tax is being paid to send the spawn of the lazy and the work shy on school trips and given free meals whilst my own children have to stay at home. Hell, maybe I should give up work tomorrow and suckle on the welfare state instead.

Of course, a new quango such as the "Child Poverty Commission" is going to be a vote winner in areas like Easington, but it's nothing but elastaplast over a modern day tragedy of the commons, it'll keep people voting Labour, throw in a good dose of "Blame Thatcher" and you may just capture 99% of the electorate, but you won't be helping the people of Easington until you learn that the only real way to help the people of Easington is to help them to help themselves.