It contained a number of good ideas and some bad ones. Unfortunately, the Government looks set to pick up on both.
Tackling child poverty means tackling the myths peddled about it. Britain's child poverty targets are not a political invention. The most widely quoted UK child poverty target, that of the number of children living in families below 60 per cent of the median income, is a well established international measure, used by UNICEF and most OECD countries.
Nor is a relative child poverty target a measure of inequality, rather than poverty, as some argue. The target measures the distance from the median, not the mean or the top, and poverty is not just about lacking the basics, but about exclusion from the everyday activities most people take for granted. This can only be judged by reference to the standards experienced by the wider society. Poverty must be measured on a relative basis.
Lots of the commentary on child poverty also assumes that if families move off welfare and into work, they escape poverty. But IPPR research shows that the proportion of poor children living in working households increased to 61 per cent in 2008/09, up from 50 per cent in 2005/06.
Commentators who stress the role of parenting over income deny that the two are connected. But good parenting is easier if you have a decent income. Labour's child poverty strategy was also about more than tax credits and benefits: it integrated improved nursery education, schooling and child health, better housing for children and help for parents to get back into work, with raising family incomes.
Today, a progressive way forward must focus on the under-fives, as Frank Field argues, and allow new, free childcare and nursery education services to count against the target. Poverty is about more than money. But peddling myths about poverty targets and income transfers will take us backwards, not forwards.