It is much more than a flip rhetorical cliche to say that if a nation thinks that fighting child poverty is costly, then it should try the alternative.
It really should not be a matter of great controversy. The broadly warm welcome given to the government’s expansion of the free school meals programme has been marred only by some noisy mumblings about how the policy will be funded. Of course, any item of public spending must be accounted for – but in the case of this and similar measures to alleviate child poverty, both sides of the ledger should be taken into account.
