WHILE I fully support the calls for deprived children to be provided with meals during the school holidays, there are other causative factors to child poverty that need to be urgently addressed.

Firstly, the majority of children in poverty are from single parent families – in most cases the mother.

Secondly, where are the men who father these children and then abrogate their responsibilities?

Thirdly, our welfare system has fostered (pun intended) the realisation among young women, that the easiest way for them to be provided with affordable (and often free) housing is to get pregnant – without any intention of marrying, or remaining with, the father.

Providing free meals is just putting a sticking plaster on a problem that, in most cases, owes its origins to a lack of morality, responsibility and basic common sense on the part of young people who fail to comprehend, or choose to deliberately ignore, what having children involves.

I fully accept that there are hard-pressed single parents who are trapped in ‘poverty’ through no fault of their own – but they are in the minority.

ROBERT READMAN

Norwich Avenue West, Bournemouth