Avellon Williams
PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD – According to figures released by Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer, black African and Caribbean children are twice as likely to live in poverty.
The Child Poverty Action Group and the Social Metrics Commission have reported similar data in previous reports to The Guardian.
Labour reiterated its commitment to introduce a Race Equality Act to tackle structural racism, following Starmer’s pledge in October 2020, on a review into disproportionate deaths led by Baroness Doreen Lawrence that year.
So far, little detail has been provided in the proposal for a Race Equality Act.
According to an interview with The Voice last November, Labour’s race equality Shadow Minister Taiwo Owatemi plans to examine ethnicity pay monitoring, school exclusions, and workplace practices.
Policy experts will be watching closely to see whether these proposals are accomplished in a way that achieves the party’s stated goal of eradicating structural racism.
Black children are at least twice as likely to grow up poor as white children, according to Labour’s analysis showing the number of black children in poor families has more than doubled in 10 years.
Approximately 10 per cent of the poverty-stricken children are black, according to the party. According to the latest census, black African and Caribbean children make up 3.3 per cent of the population, which means that black children are over three times more likely to live in poverty.
To arrive at its figures, the party correlated data from the Department for Work and Pensions’ reports on below-average income households with population data.
Labour said this was evidence of “Conservative incompetence and denialism about the existence of structural racism”.
According to Dr. Halima Begum, Chief Executive at the Runnymede Trust, the race equality Thinktank, told The Guardian:
“These are not cyclical inequalities that are being flagged, but systemic shortcomings that must be reversed quickly.
“But the problems are nuanced. Black children face racism and poverty. But poverty is not defined exclusively by race. So, for more than a decade, the Runnymede Trust has argued that you can’t simply solve the issue of racial inequality without also addressing socio-economic disparities.”
A government spokesperson claimed that 300,000 fewer children are living in abject poverty, after housing costs, than there were in 2010.
The government’s figures, however, tend to show that housing costs add to child poverty rather than reduce it, so policy wonks will be keen to drill down into how these figures were determined.
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