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“Labour launches long-awaited child poverty strategy” trumpeted the ticker-tape on the BBC News channel – but all the coverage seemed… well, piecemeal.

The report on the BBC News website concentrated on just one aspect, with mention of a few others, and the Guardian ran a “live blog”, which is a “bitty” way of reporting – you get small fragments.

Fortunately, that same blog published a link to the full, 116-page strategy – so I got hold of it, read it… and this is what I found:

Reporting of it is piecemeal because the strategy itself is piecemeal.

What the government has produced is more substantial than anything any administration has offered for more than a decade – but it still falls well short of a genuinely comprehensive anti-poverty strategy.

It pulls together a set of policies that were mostly announced already, and that gives the impression of coherence, but coherence is not the same as being complete or capable of solving the crisis at hand.

And how can this be a strategy to eliminate child poverty when it promises to lift only 550,000 out of poverty and leaves nearly four million to struggle?

To read the full analysis, head over to The Whip Line.

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