No pre-school, no child benefit, Tory thinktank says in report on poverty
The Guardian | Patrick Wintour | Political editor | Sunday 18 October 2015
Parents should be denied child benefit if they do not send their children to pre-school education from the age of three, according to an increasingly influential Conservative pressure group.
The penalty should apply to a parent in the case of a child aged two if the toddler comes from a disadvantaged background, the new counter-poverty strategy suggests.
The proposed loss of child benefit is set out in a pamphlet by Bright Blue, a liberal Conservative pressure group and thinktank, and is designed to ensure disadvantaged children go to Sure Start centres to make them ready for school.
Abstract: But Conservative policymakers acknowledge that since worklessness is in sharp decline, and many life opportunities are settled very early in a child’s life, the government should be looking at an additional anti-poverty target covering a child’s readiness for school at the age of five.
Ministers may yet table amendments to the welfare bill, currently in the Commons, to incorporate school-readiness targets.
