'It's very personal to me' Treasury chief on his £500m plan to fight child poverty

Treasury chief on his £500m plan to fight child poverty

- Heather Stewart

Darren Jones has spent much of the past few months doing the traditional, hard-nosed job of a Treasury chief secretary - fighting line-by-line budget battles with ministers. But with last month's fraught spending review over, he has turned his attention to an issue closer to his heart for his latest policy.

"The council estate I grew up on was one of the neighbourhoods that was picked by the New Labour government because it was so deprived, essentially, in terms of income and educational outcomes," he says.

The 38-year-old MP for Bristol North West grew up in a flat on the Lawrence Weston estate. His mother was a hospital administrator and his father a security guard, and he has previously spoken about how money was sometimes tight. In his maiden speech in the House of Commons, he proudly mentioned being the first Darren to be an MP.

Jones cites Labour support for the community group Ambition Lawrence Weston - still thriving today - as well as a taxpayer-funded "gifted and talented" scheme, as crucial in helping to signpost him towards university, as the first in his family to go. He went on to qualify as a solicitor, and was an in-house lawyer for BT before being elected in 2017.

With projects like these in mind, he is now announcing that the Treasury will invest £500m over a decade, alongside private backers, in a new "social outcome partnership" to fund grassroots projects tackling child poverty.

He says he made it a personal mission since arriving in the Treasury last summer to dramatically expand this form of "social impact investment".

Pioneered by Gordon Brown's Treasury, it is an approach that involves private investors matching taxpayer funding for neighbourhood-level projects.