IT WAS one of the prime minister's briefest answers. Asked last week about the second successive rise of 100,000 in the numbers of children living in poverty in the UK - destroying any expectation that Labour's flagship policy of halving child poverty by 2010 will be met - he simply dismissed the implied criticism. On "absolute" poverty there was success, adding it was on "relative" poverty where improvement was needed.

It was a strange excuse, coming in the same press conference where the PM advocated telling the truth. I assumed he was referring to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, not the "relative" "there was no DUP deal" truth.

When Labour first addressed child poverty in 1997, they centred on a definition by the London School of Economics's professor of social policy, Peter Townsend. Relative poverty was crucial because no-one should live with "resources that are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are in effect excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities".

Absolute poverty is of a different magnitude. This is the global income threshold, typically $1 or $2 a day, that can be the minimum requirement for survival, an issue dominating the daily lives of much of the third world. As many economists will testify, absolute poverty has little importance in the UK. No-one here survives on less than $2 a day. In 1995, a UN summit in Copenhagen described "absolute poverty" as characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs: food, safe drinking water, sanitation, health, shelter, education. On this UN definition, Brown is telling the truth. The numbers of the UK's mud-floored housing and those without any education is now apparently a reason for being optimistic about the PM's poverty targets.

Labour's self-declared convention in 1997 was to describe poverty as being those households with less than half the average income. But a decade after Labour promised to halve child poverty, the government's own figures showed 3.8 million children living in poverty. And a year after Brown entered No. 10, despite a re-commitment to the target, the numbers are up and increasing. The head of Barnardo's calls it "demoralising and shameful".

Why the failure? Substitute "inequality" for relative poverty and the picture is clearer. Britain is an unequal society and inequality is a growing trend, getting worse in the p ast decade and leaving one in six children living in poverty. To describe that as an improving and prudent economy is a scandal, an absolute scandal.