IT is seventy years since the National Insurance Act was placed on the statute book, as Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour Government set about establishing a welfare state to act as a safety net and tackle extreme poverty. These are principles which need our commitment today more than ever as figures published by the IFS show that the Tory Government is set to almost fully reverse the progress on child poverty which was made under the last Labour government.

No post-war politician would have believed that so many children would be growing up in poverty in 2016. The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission 2015 Annual Report found 2.3 million children living below the child poverty line. The Resolution Foundation have estimated that in 2016 alone, a further 200,000 children will fall into poverty.

That means one million more children could be in poverty by the end of the decade. One charity estimated that an extra 300,000 children across Britain could be in poverty by 2020 as a result of welfare cuts alone. That’s enough children to fill the Millennium Stadium nearly four times over being brought up at a massive disadvantage, through no fault of their own.

The fact is that under this Government work alone is no longer a route out of poverty. Two thirds of children in poverty are in working households, as the blight of low pay increases all the time. Surely as a society, we must offer people a future where work is a path out of poverty, not a route into a poverty trap of low pay and insecurity.

It’s no surprise then that the Government have tried to obscure their shameful record on child poverty by attempting to end the use of household income measures in child poverty reduction targets. Before a defeat in the Lords forced Iain Duncan Smith into a u-turn, the Government’s plan was heavily criticised by their own social mobility tsar Alan Milburn and condemned by charities from the End Poverty Coalition. Sam Royston, chair of the coalition, said children’s life chances could not be “fully understood without reference to low income. Removing the legally binding requirement to measure and report on children in families like these doesn’t end child poverty – but it does hide it from view.”

The Government’s attempts to hide child poverty do not make it any less real and do nothing to tackle the root causes of the problem. But, as Aneurin Bevan once put it in his book, In Place of Fear, “Silent pain evokes no response,”. That is why we must never be silent about the children who live in poverty and why I will continue to raise the plight of children living in poverty in my role as an MP.