Right.
You've asked some very key questions there. The U.K. government's focus on child poverty was in part due to an ideological shift within the Labour Party from a socialist focus on equality of outcome based on need to one more concerned with equality of opportunity.
If you're interested in equality of opportunity, you have to invest heavily in children from year zero in order to try to level the playing field and increase the chances of social mobility. The government invested a large amount of money and is still investing a large amount of money into children from the very earliest ages. It made free nursery places available to four-year-olds in school. It introduced vouchers for children for nursery care under three for two and a half days a week and introduced a whole range of new benefits in order to try to raise the incomes of families with very young children.
This was based on good scientific research as well. The families who had the deepest poverty were those with the youngest children. This was in contrast to what the statistics showed at the time. They showed it was older children, but that was an artifact of those statistics. So the government responded to the idea that you need to start at zero, and maybe those policies will work in 10 to 20 years' time, but they are long-term policies.
There is also a crucial need to deal with the problems of today, and the government, as I said, tried to do that through active labour market intervention. It needed, really, to try also to raise the benefits that are available to families with children. Britain is half-way in the European league in the generosity of the tax and benefits system to families with children. Britain does not have as much redistribution across individuals' life forces as, say, the French system or the Swedish system, where money is taken from people when they're middle-aged and given to them when they're children or when they're pensioners, in terms of family benefit or pension benefit. In Sweden, 80% of the redistribution is like that, not from rich to poor. That is a very effective way of ending child poverty.
The system in the U.K. and Ireland is a much more means-tested one, where money is targeted at the poor, the pensioners, and children. It means it spends less, is able to spend less because it has more specific targeting. But if you want to eradicate child poverty forever, there's a limit to the effectiveness of means-testing.