Video: Government child poverty targets unincentivising work, says think tank Policy Exchange's Head of Economics and Social Policy, Matthew Oakley, said: "The problem is that the current way we measure child poverty - looking just at incomes - doesn't cover things like whether parents can afford to buy a coat for winter or shoes for their children to go to school. It doesn't cover things like education, it doesn't cover things like the quality of housing that children are living in. All of these things, we know, really matter to children. "That means that people who aren't in work are receiving far larger increases in income than those who are actually in work and this has led to quite poor work incentives in some cases, which means that people who are actually in working families can be worse off, which doesn't seem to be right," he said. The report recommended the introduction of a new Child Poverty Bill to replace the Child Poverty Act 2010, which commits the Government to ending child poverty. The new Bill would measure social poverty as well as household income.