Is Frank Field back? The Labour MP has spent much of his life talking about the poor.
Judging by reports today, he might be offered a job chairing a commission on child poverty.
This is good news but, as Mr Field has already said, there is not much point in him debating the finer points of poverty definitions. He would need to be given remit to suggest policy. What should those suggestions be?
First, he should argue that we need to be a lot less self-indulgent about how we think about child poverty. It may be great to think of ourselves as tackling a major social ill, but the past government’s approach was not nearly as successful as it or its supporters liked to think. Between 1997 and 2007 the percentage of the population with less than 60 percent of the nation’s median income (i.e.
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