Poverty of ambition - Telegraph Just before leaving office in 2010, Labour pushed legislation through Parliament, with Conservative support, committing the incoming government to the halving of child poverty by 2020. This was never going to happen, not because the poor cannot be helped, but because the official definition of what constitutes poverty - a household on less than 60 per cent of median earnings - made its achievement impossible. Despite spending £150 billion on tax credits and benefits in recent years, the target was missed. Relative deprivation is a perverse concept on which to base public policy because when incomes drop, the number of people in poverty falls. Sensibly, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, wants to introduce a more sophisticated measure that is not based only on money. It would include whether children live in a broken home and whether their parents have a job, or are in debt, or are drug users - factors, in other words, that are as responsible for impoverishment as benefit levels. Since the Sixties, this debate has not really been about alleviating poverty at all, but about inequality. A term that most people understood to mean the desperate privation seen in Third World cities was hijacked for political ends, to support a case for massive income redistribution. As Mr Duncan Smith observed in a speech to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation yesterday, the current measure serves only to "rotate" people across an arbitrary "poverty line," rather than change their lives in the long term. In changing policy, he is somewhat hamstrung by statutory targets that can only be scrapped by repealing the Child Poverty Act, a political battle the Coalition does not wish to fight. But if a real difference is to be made to the lives of children in low-income households, then a new approach is needed.