This is the Commission’s first piece of advice to Ministers and follows a formal request to respond to the child poverty measurement consultation.Evidence was gathered to inform the Commission’s response from a combination of desk research, meetings and roundtable sessions with academics, charities and other experts, and three focus groups with children and young people. The Commission also spoke with officials in the Scottish government, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Welsh government.The Commission welcomes the government’s commitment to ending child poverty. We agree with the government that “income is a key part of child poverty and who it affects” and that household income must be central to any measure of child poverty. We also agree that poverty is about more than just income. It is important that the framework through which we understand poverty both captures the central place of income and its wider multidimensional nature. Getting the measure right is important not only to allow what is happening to poverty to be accurately tracked: how we measure poverty drives the nature of the public policy effort to eradicate it
