Iain Duncan Smith has been criticised for saying some poor parents will spend money on alcohol and drugs rather than their children.
In a keynote speech, Mr Duncan Smith called for a new "multidimensional measure" of child poverty to operate alongside the existing income-based measure, to better reflect the reality of children's lives.
Speaking at the Kids Company charity in London, he argued that there was too much focus on moving families over an "arbitrary poverty line" without a proper understanding of the real problems they were facing.
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