5 May session Child protection Ed Balls moved to improve child protection procedures in the wake of the death of Baby P. The children's secretary introduced new statutory targets for safeguarding young people. Balls told the Commons the changes would also require local safeguarding children boards to appoint two lay members from the local community and publish an annual "effectiveness" report...

Most astonishing statistic so far in a bizarre week is the finding that 43% of adults think that something must be done to protect them from children. Not any particular child: Any child. All children. I wonder how many of...

Patrick Wintour Political editor The recession will make it more difficult for the government to meet its pledge to end child poverty, ministers admitted yesterday as they issued details of plans to place a legal duty on them to eradicate child poverty by 2020. Until now ministers have primarily defined the abolition of child poverty as ensuring that no households with children earn less than 60% ...

How many of the 5.5m children "living in, or on the brink of poverty" have parents who can afford to drink and smoke!?! Who is responsible for "lifting" Karen Matthews' family out of poverty when she has had seven children by five different fathers. Government targets for reducing child poverty should focus on discouraging the feckless and work shy from having more and more children rather th...

Along with "paedophilia", the term "child" has become so expanded as to risk losing coherent meaning. In terms of child protection legislation, a child is anyone below the age of 18 years. That you can drive, have sex, get married and go to war whilst still a "child" is just to highlight our decidedly convoluted views on these matters.

Welsh targets to eradicate child poverty will not be met without more money from Westminster, a leading children's charity has warned. Labour has pledged to wipe out child poverty by 2020, but Barnardos Cymru said it had serious doubts. Figures show over a quarter of children in Wales live below the poverty line.

British taxpayers are funding child benefit payments for 37900 children who live in Poland Treasury figures show.

A higher proportion of children in Wales live in severe poverty compared to the rest of the UK, according to Save the Children. It said 90,000 children (14%) live in low income homes which are often poorly heated and where it is a struggle to pay for basics like food and clothes. This compares to 13% in England and 9% in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Labour have pledged to eradicate all child pov...

The governments’s record on policies for children is a very mixed one. Current government policies and initiatives under the umbrella of Every Child Matters and the Children’s Plan do include some very good measures such as the Sure Start Children’s Centres Programme, Parents Early Years and Learning initiative and the commitment to the improvement of

The UK is the most eeeevilest place ever in the whole wide universe to be a child. The research carried out at the University of York for the Child Poverty Action Group, echoed a report two years ago from UNICEF that put British children at the wrong end of a list of the 21 most advanced