Brexit is least of our worries

Hard though it may be for politicians to grasp ... but there are more important issues in our country than Brexit.

One huge problem shouts out from the pages of the Echo today - child poverty.

Two decades ago Tony Blair told the country he wanted to end child poverty within a generation.

With successive governments fiddling at the edges, we are nowhere near achieving that goal.

What is perhaps most alarming is the fact that child poverty is on the up once again.

The slow erosion of the child poverty figures has stopped and, instead, it’s beginning to rise again.

According to government figures, 34% of children were living in poverty 20 years ago.

It’s now down to about 30%. That’s 4.1million children. But what good work has been done could soon be wasted. The study was carried out on behalf of the End Child Poverty Coalition carried out by Prof Donald Hirsh at the University of Loughborough who revealed the disturbing upturn in figures.

He said: “What’s shocking rather than surprising is that over the previous 12 to 15 years, we had a period when it was going down.

“We are now getting close to the time when we will have lost the gains we have made - half of those gains in reductions of child poverty have already been lost.”

The Resolution Foundation, which is a research company studying poverty, has recently predicted that child poverty will rise to 37% by 2023-24 unless changes are made.

Politicians need to wake up and act.

Forget Brexit! Getting the UK out of Europe is not as important as getting our children out of poverty.