Ending child poverty requires financial backing
The funding proposals that the European Commission will launch in the coming days should help deliver on the high-level political commitment to the European Pillar of Social Rights. Unfortunately, the drafts we have seen fall short of that ambition, in particular with respect to Principle 11, which aims to protect children from poverty, euractiv. com wrote.
One in four children in the European Union is growing up at risk of poverty and social exclusion — some 26 million children. For many, the experience of poverty in childhood will compromise their full development, and lock them into a cycle of poverty and deprivation. Investing in children is both a moral imperative and economic necessity.
The European Commission issued excellent guidance on the policy reforms needed to break the cycle of disadvantage in its 2013 Recommendation on Investing in Children. However, implementation has been patchy and the EU’S cohesion policy has not been used to its full potential. There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between the agenda-setting policy work of the EU and its funding priorities.
Ahead of the release of the financial instrument regulations in the last week of May, we have written an open letter to Marianne Thyssen, commissioner for employment, social affairs, skills and labor mobility, Corina Cretu, commissioner for regional policy and Martin Selmayr, secretary general of the European Commission to make the following key demands.
We are calling for explicit mention of tackling child poverty within the investment priorities of the
European Science Foundation (ESF) regulations. We believe this will make a significant difference to the take-up by Member States of EU funding for this purpose and can catalyze much needed reforms.
We must also build on the positive experiences of this funding round. For example under the current thematic objective of “promoting social inclusion, combating poverty and any discrimination”, Member States ‘with an identified need’ are required to include the transition from institutional to community-based care in their poverty reduction strategies.
This has allowed countries such as Romania, Bulgaria or Latvia to prioritize deinstitutionalization reforms and to invest heavily in child protection and welfare reforms to prevent the unnecessary separation of children from their families and to develop family-based, highquality care alternatives.
The next round of funding should support development of community-based services in all countries, not only those with ‘an identified need’.
Also in this funding period, ESF and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) regulations prioritize the transition from institutional to community based care and explicitly mention that investments should not contribute to the segregation, social exclusion or isolation from the community. It is very worrying that these positive developments appear to have been dropped from the upcoming new proposals.
It seems that the regulations will still ensure that spending in the inclusion policy area is conditional on Member States having poverty reduction strategies that include a focus on child poverty. This is to be welcomed.
But it is essential that the investment priority to which this conditionality is linked has a broad focus on poverty reduction and social inclusion, and not a narrow employment focus. For too many member states, the European Social Fund is still solely associated with employment and training initiatives. It is essential that this funding round breaks that narrow interpretation, and ties funding to the broader approach supported by the European Pillar of Social Rights.
Renewal of the structural and investment funds coupled with the high-level political commitment to social protection and inclusion represents a historical opportunity that we can ill-afford to miss. Civil society wants to ensure EU funding instruments have a maximum positive impact on the lives of disadvantaged children and families. But careful and purposeful design at the outset will be critical to their success.
*By Jana Hainsworth is the secretary general of Eurochild.
remained.
“We therefore recommended that Police Scotland used legislative searches only. Only these can truly be targeted at ‘the right people, right place and right time’ thereby enhancing accountability and public confidence, two key aims of the pilot.”
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data on their use of stop and search in two areas of Fife, and compared that to data from another division of Police Scotland. They also conducted 11 observations of stop and search and interviewed 42 police officers and 13 members of the public.
Elements introduced as part of the pilot included sending letters to the parents of children who have been stopped to make them aware of the event, providing enhanced information leaflets to every person stopped, and increasing opportunities for the public to provide feedback after a search.
The systematic recording of all stop searches, compliance recording checks, engagement with external stakeholders, provision of advice slips and aide memoires, and enhanced staff training were held up as successes in the report, which also found: More stop and search, even with good practice identified in the pilot, will not stop crime or anti-social behavior on its own.
While police respondents perceived stop and search to be effective in terms of crime prevention the current evidence base does not support this.
Stop and search should be used as a last resort in contact with the public, especially with young people and vulnerable groups.
The stop and search database should flag up whether the same individuals are being stopped and searched on multiple occasions and alternative interventions used in these instances.
Local knowledge is essential for the success of stop and search.
Increased and improved face-to-face training on stop and search should be provided for officers.
the national tobacco-free month.
According the survey, in 2017 26.9 percent of 18- to 75-year-olds smoked every day, compared with 29.4percent a year earlier. This amounts to a drop from 13.2 million smokers to 12.2 million over the period.
France’s Health Minister Agnès Buzyn in particular welcomed the decline in smoking among those on low incomes, saying that “tobacco is a trajectory of inequality, it weighs particularly on the most disadvantaged and it gets worse”. A study last year found that despite decades of tobacco control
policies, population growth had meant there was an increased number of smokers.
Worldwide, smoking causes one in 10 deaths, half of them in just four countries — China, India, the US and Russia, according to the Lancet.
A country-by-country analysis warns that “the smoking epidemic is being exported from the rich world to low-income and middle-income countries”.
The World Health Organization said picture warnings in particular are proven to help people quit, and said that 78 countries making up almost half the world’s population currently meet best practices.