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More news on poverty comes today, with the New Policy Institute's analysis for Save the Children showing an increase in the number of the poorest children - although the position is expected to improve again as more recent budget measures begin to feed through. Which reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about high levels of poverty: policy can and has made a difference. A reduction of half a million children in poverty since 1999 hasn't come about by accident.

The description of the terrible death of baby P in Haringey might leave you with the assumption that failures in services designed to protect vulnerable children were unique to this part of London with its acute social problems. This is not the case.

There has long been a moral case for tackling child poverty: it makes children's lives more brutal and it makes them shorter. Because of its impact on people, on communities and on the services which support them, we have also known there is a corrosive economic, not just a social, cost of deprivation.

Sometimes a march feels like it is ahead of its times. The End Child Poverty march on 4th October, which 10,000 people are estimated to have attended, may be such a march.

"I am not a statistic, I never wanted to have a life on benefits, I used to work and I really enjoyed it. When I worked I was a real grafter I loved being financially independent. Now when I work it's for cash-in-hand and it's at times when things are really tight. Living in fear of being caught is a terrible way to live but what is scarier is giving up benefits altogether and having no safety net."