Edinburgh Napier University

  Many of us will remember, albeit with varying degrees of clarity and happiness, those
days at school when we received the yearly ‘report card’ to take home for inspection.
While the format of these varied between schools and different areas of the country,
nonetheless in general the school report card could be relied up on to say what we
were doing well and what areas of school life required more attention and effort.
Taking the idea of a report card, in this booklet we want to assess how well the UK
Government has done in addressing poverty since coming to power in 1997. From
the outset Tony Blair and his New Labour colleagues identified addressing poverty, in
particular child poverty, as a key objective of the New Labour government. As we
approach the 2005 General Election, this is an opportune moment to stand back and
consider just how well the Government has done in addressing the multiple problems
of poverty that affect the lives of millions of people in different groups across the
length and breadth of the country today.
This booklet does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of all aspects of
Government policy. Nor does it detail each and every area of life that is affected by
poverty. What it does do, however, taking the school report card format, is offer a
brief overview of what the Government says it is doing in relation to a particular area
of poverty, for example, fuel poverty or poverty among minority ethnic groups, and
then, in the style of a teacher or lecturer providing feedback on an ‘essay’ or piece of
school or college assessment, is offer a critical feedback and (as we often dreaded
receiving) a ‘grade’!
In a school or college report card each of our subjects would normally be assessed
and a grade offered for overall performance; for example, in English, five out of ten,
in maths, 1 out of ten (for at least one of the editors anyway!), in history 8 out of ten
and so on. In this booklet the authors consider how well the Government has
performed since 1997 in relation to particular, for want of a better term, poverty
‘subjects’ or topics. The subjects considered here are: