The British government has breached its commitments to the United Nations by slashing support for poor working families, the children's ombudsman warned Monday. As Chancellor George Osborne prepares to release his mid-term budget, known as the Autumn Statement, the government's Children's Commissioner for England published a report criticizing Prime Minister David Cameron's austerity policies which have reduced the incomes of the poorest families by up to 10 percent since 2010.
“Nobody is saying that there isn’t a deficit to close,” the commissioner, Dr Maggie Atkinson, told The Independent. “Our issue is that at the moment, it is the poorest in society who have least to fall back on that are paying the greatest price for trying to close that deficit. It is patently unfair. It is patently against the rights of the child.” According to Atkinson, this means that the UK has broken the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which each country is obliged to protect children from the detrimental consequences of economic policies. The Commissioner hit out at the undue pressures that the Government has put on parents, despite being one of the most developed countries in the world.
“The basic fact is that there are families living in the fifth-biggest economy in the Western world who are making choices about whether they can afford to heat their house or feed their children,” she said. However, the government has rejected the “partial, selective and misleading” report. “The Government’s long-term economic plan is tackling the root causes of child poverty by putting more people in work than ever before and reducing the number of children in workless families by around 390,000 since 2010,” a spokesman said to The Independent.