I recently followed a debate on Teletext Letters. One writer pointed out that the figures for 'child poverty' in the UK are laughably debased. They argued that there is little or no child poverty by any fairminded definition.This was followed by a letter stating that the writer had been of a similar view until becoming a social worker and actually visiting these terrible homes. The conditions for some children are genuinely horrific.
A third writer then appeared to say that this was not poverty at all but NEGLECT. [Money spent on drugs, alcohol, designer clothes and trainers, Sky and cigarettes must not be used for carving out a decent standard of living for the children, must it?]
If you look at the first figures in my posting of the 16th June you will see a level of net income which the salary of my wife as a headteacher in a charitable enterprise combined with my own two part time jobs cannot match.
One must suspect that the third writer's statement was somewhat sweeping but certainly by far the most accurate of the three.
