The government will fail to halve child poverty in Britain by 2010 unless it spends another £3.8bn, a children’s charity has warned. Barnardo’s said ministers were a long way from honouring the pledge Tony Blair made eight years ago. The charity’s research shows one million children who should have been lifted out of deprivation by the end of the decade will still be in poverty.

{mosimage}Ministers say they have made progress in reaching the target. Barnardo’s warns that while the number of children living in poor families fell slowly but steadily in the late 1990s, progress has now stalled. To meet the 2010 target, the charity says the government needs to invest a lump sum in addition to the £1bn already earmarked for tax credits in the 2007 budget.

The charity said the required figure was less than half the cost of staging the Olympics and represented less than half the £9bn paid in City bonuses last year. But the report did congratulate Mr Blair for his original “historic and ambitious” target of halving child poverty from 3.4 million to 1.7 million by the end of the decade.

Some 600,000 children have so far been lifted out of deprivation since the pledge was made, the charity says. Martin Narey, Barnardo’s chief executive and chairman of End Child Poverty, said the future prime minister, Gordon Brown, still had a chance to continue the battle against child poverty started by Mr Blair.

Capacitybuilders have announced details of a new grant to support the Development Trusts Association (DTA) Community Asset Programme.

A restrictive drinking culture at work curbs an individual’s overall alcohol intake, including outside of work, suggests research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The UK’s ageing population is providing a multi-billion pound boost to the country’s economy each year as older people work later in life, a  report has revealed.

Worcestershire County Council has continued to improve its fostering services, according to a new report by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI).