THE former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged the Government to fund a “war against child poverty” by taxing the gambling industry. His intervention has been supported by religious leaders, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams.
In The Guardian, Mr Brown writes: “In the 1970s, facing an oil shock and rising deficits, Labour introduced child benefit for 7 million families. By 2010, despite a global financial crisis, the government had raised tax credits from zero in 1997 to £30bn, taking millions of pensioners and children out of poverty.”
He commends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, for setting up a review aimed at reducing child poverty during the current Parliament. “Now, for a fraction of that £30bn spent in 2010, they can resume Labour’s historic role and immediately take the first 50,000 children out of poverty without dropping manifesto commitments.”
The first step, Mr Brown writes, should be “raising billions by taxing the extraordinarily profitable gambling and betting industry, without affecting lotteries or bingo”.
The need to act to combat child poverty is “urgent”, he writes. “I have not seen such deep poverty since I grew up in a mining and textiles town where unemployment was starting to bite hard. Now, each night, 1 million children in the UK try to sleep without a bed of their own. Two million households live without cookers, fridges or washing machines, and without toothpaste, soap or shampoo. It is heartbreaking that 3 million children skip meals because their families run out of food.
“The decisions of previous Tory governments have pushed 4.5 million children into poverty. This is a national scandal and a stain on our country’s soul. Britain is now enduring the worst levels of child poverty since modern records began, even worse than in the Thatcher-Major years, and far worse than in most European countries.
“Yet without action to improve family incomes, the numbers will, on the government’s own definition of poverty, rise to a wholly unacceptable 4.8 million children by 2029 and a shocking five millions by the early 2030s.”
Measures such as more free school lunches, breakfast clubs, and better-paid jobs will help, Mr Brown argues, but they will not prevent a continuing rise in child poverty.
Mr Brown’s intervention was supported by Lord Williams in an article published in the Financial Times. “If a child should not be made to carry the consequences of decisions they have not made, what does this say about economic policies whose effect is to treat the impoverishment of children as mere collateral damage?” he writes.
Regarding Mr Brown’s gambling-tax proposal, Lord Williams writes: “It is an absurdity that high-risk and socially corrosive behaviour should escape demands to contribute to the care of the most vulnerable.
“There are other suggestions in the air, including increased incentives both for constructive investment and private charitable giving. But the message is clear: there is nothing necessary or automatic about child poverty, even at a time of acute financial pressure. And if that is so, failing to act represents a choice that leads to a more fundamental bankruptcy, a bankruptcy of vision and morality.”
In an article to be published in the Church Times this week, the Revd Helen Cameron, President of the Methodist Conference 2024-25, also supports Mr Brown’s intervention: “Child poverty has not gone away; rather, it is on the rise.
“Sir Keir Starmer has said that lifting the two-child limit on benefits cannot be afforded ‘at present’; but a fair levy on the unacceptably high profits from gambling would release considerable resources.”
James Macintyre, author of Gordon Brown: Power with purpose, which is due to be published by Bloomsbury in February, said this week: “Tackling child poverty is, alongside international development, the predominant cause of Gordon Brown’s life.
“As Chancellor for ten years from 1997, and then Prime Minister for three, he almost halved child poverty — partly by using tax credits — reducing it from 1.6 million in 1998 to 1.6 million in 2010, according to the Resolution Foundation.
“Very active today as he approaches 75, Brown is still campaigning for much more to be done, and he enjoys considerable support from friends and allies in faith leader positions.”
The Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown recently published a report, The Child Poverty Emergency.
