In one of her last initiatives before taking on her new duties as head of State, Social Solidarity Minister Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca launched a supplementary allowance scheme aimed to help raise some 22,000 children out of poverty.

The grant will consist of €400 a year per child for the first three children and €200 per year for each child after that. Couples who earn less than €11,000 or single parents who earn less than €9,000 a year qualify. The initiative is unrelated to the children’s allowance scheme and introduces an innovation to government social aid.

The estimated €9 million to be paid out through these supplementary allowances are subject to a number of conditions that the beneficiaries must meet. These include ensuring school attendance, regular health check-ups and sport or cultural participation for their children.

It is a well-known fact that poverty has many facets and it is not always a matter of financial deprivation. A recent Caritas’s report on child poverty in Malta lists “intangible factors” like vulnerability, inequality, discrimination and a feeling of powerlessness. Caritas believes there is not a single determinant problem that creates poverty.

The supplementary allowance launched by the Social Solidarity Minister goes to the root of one major contributor to child poverty – parental irresponsibility.

It may be argued that through the scheme, taxpayers’ money is being used to financially motivate parents to do what is after all their duty. But in the real world there are good and bad parents and this new policy has the children’s long-term interest in mind. Encouraging parents to be good parents will benefit society as a whole and is an investment in our children. That is why the scheme is commendable in principle.

It is where these incentives fail to motivate parents that weaknesses in the new scheme emerge. Government has admitted that parents who do not send their children to school also fail to pay the related fines. Parliamentary Secretary for Justice Owen Bonnici said his conscience would not let him order the issuance of warrants of seizures and garnishee orders because it would ‘take away money from children in need’. This terrible admission by the government that it is not willing to prosecute irresponsible parents will only encourage more careless parenthood. If the stick didn’t work, why should the carrot work now?

The Prime Minister put it very crudely, but accurately, when he said that he did not want the €400 supplementary allowance to be spent on cigarettes. Under the new scheme, when parents do not adhere to the conditions, the supplementary allowance will be stopped and instead placed in a fund to be used by the ‘children’ for educational purposes until they turn 23.

Here lie the main flaws in the scheme. Firstly, we are all adults at 18, responsible for our actions and able to act independently. It is incomprehensive that a government would choose to fund the education of an adult up to the age of 23 because he had a deprived childhood. With Malta’s early school leavers being double the European average, it is clear that ‘poverty’ is just one of the reasons why Malta lags so badly behind in the education sector.

The sad reality why the ‘education’ fund won’t work is that children neglected by their parents throughout their childhood and youth would have already joined the cycle of poverty by the time they reach adulthood. Any money coming their way would probably not go on education, but on other things.