Thank you very much for those intelligent questions.
First, I want to deal with the late teens. The government has done much less for this group and for working-age adults than it has done for younger children and the elderly. To a certain extent, the ideology of the poor law still prevails, in that it is easier politically to consider the young and the old as deserving and maybe late teenagers and young people as undeserving, and therefore the government is much more cautious about investing more money in that group.
However, it has made some investment in improving training, particularly for the group it calls “NETE” in British terms--not in education training or employment. It has a minimum wage policy that is very important for this group, but unfortunately for the age group under 25 the minimum wage is less than it is for over 25, so again, there's a limit to the effectiveness of that policy.
One idea it is thinking of pursuing is to raise the school leaving age from 16 to 18, so there are not 16-year-olds or 17-year-olds who are not in school but not in jobs, and are not even in training. Those are the kinds of policies it's pursuing, but there is a whole range of policies under which they tend to have only limited investment compared with the policies for younger children.
One of the reasons the government is optimistic that it can eradicate child poverty is that if you look at the costs of eradicating child poverty in terms of the amount of income that would need to be transferred from people who aren't below the poverty income line to those who are below the low income line, it's a little less than 1% of gross national product.
The U.K. has a very large economy, so that means that relatively small income transfers in terms of the size of the economy would effectively eradicate child poverty, if you can pursue policies that allow these income transfers. That's not an insignificant amount, 1% of GNP, but nevertheless it is a feasible amount. It does not mean restructuring the whole of society as we know it.
The government's policies for the working poor, as Peter rightly points out, have not been as effective as the government hoped. Again, minimum wage is on tax credits that support people on low incomes. There have been problems with integrating the tax benefits systems. Tax authorities are used to taking money; they are not always effective, especially at first, at giving money back to people, so there has been a lot of confusion with those policies. They are working a bit better now, but more needs to be done.
The policies the government has pursued have been effective, but they haven't been effective enough, particularly for the working poor. There have been other trends in society, such as a declining family wage. In the 1950s, one person worked, usually the man, and could afford to support his family. Now you have a big working rich and working poor household divide, in which you have families where two people are working, and that tends to protect against poverty almost universally. But if only one person is working, particularly in a low-wage job, then that family falls beneath the poverty threshold. It may not be a long way beneath it, but nevertheless, even with the benefits available, they tend to fall below the poverty threshold.
There are policies in place that, if invested in more and if they were more effectively delivered, could deal with the problem of the working poor and still relieve those who have so much care and responsibility that it's not really feasible for both parents to go to work. It would not necessarily even be desirable from other policy objective points of view, and certainly not desirable from that family's point of view, for both adults to go to work. That problem the government hasn't really tackled yet.