Brown told he will have to raise taxes

2.21.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Thu 8th Sep 2005

Gordon Brown [© Crown Copyright 2005]

The United Nations have told Gordon Brown that he will have to raise taxes if the government is to meet its ambitious goal of halving child poverty by 2010. In its annual study charting progress in tackling poverty, the UN highlights Britain as a country where inequality has put a brake on development, and says there would need to be a complete reversal of the pro-rich bias of the taxation system.

The report singles out the UK and US as two wealthy countries where a growing gap between rich and poor has emerged in recent decades, leading to more child poverty and big discrepancies in health outcomes. Its said Gordon Brown needs to go further in his coming budgets and contemplate politically sensitive tax rises to maintain the progress made in the past eight years. "If the next 10 years did for the poor what the 1980s did for the rich, that would bring the UK within touching distance of the child poverty goals," the UN says.

The UN, using data provided by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the UK's leading independent thinktank on taxes and benefits, said there was a limit to what Mr Brown could do in budgets to meet the goal established by Tony Blair of cutting child poverty in half by 2010 and eradicating it within a generation. "Meeting the 2010 target (of halving child poverty) will require more redistribution, a change in working and employment patterns among parents and more fundamental changes to the underlying distribution of earnings and incomes."