 Last week at Tory party conference saw the chance the Exchequer's Sagit Javid announced that the national minimum wage would rise to £10.50 an hour. At first glance, that looks like a smart attempt to park Tory tanks on Labour's lawn, with Jeremy Corbyn himself having promised to increase the minimum wage to only £10 an hour. The Tory's outdoing Labour on a massive issue of social justice, I hear you say. Well, not quite. The first point is to notice that this proposed increase to £10.50 won't be until 2024. Labour, on the other hand, are promising to increase it to £10 now. The London living wage in London, right now, is £10.55. That's the figure calculated by the Living Wage Foundation. For the rest of the country, it's presently £9 an hour, which means that the present, quote, national living wage is in fact a poverty one. The result of a rebranding exercise done under the stewardship of investment banker slash failing newspaper editor slash failed chance to the Exchequer, George Osborne. At present, the national minimum wage changes as to how old you are, with workers only entitled to the full amount at 25, which is obviously absurd as things don't cost less if you're younger and in full-time employment. By 2021, Javid wants to change that, with it falling to 23 and by 2024 to 21 years old, which is clearly an improvement, but unlike Labour, doesn't include those below 21. Nor does it include apprentices who presently earn as little as £4.35 an hour if they're under 18 years old, so the next time someone asks why more young people don't choose to do apprenticeships, there's your answer. A few things. Today, the living wage after nine years of conservative government is £8.21. That, by the models the Tories are now using, is a poverty wage. So, after potentially 14 years in government by the middle of the next decade, they're going to rectify a problem they've overseen for a generation. This is from the party that promised to eliminate the deficit by 2015 and several times to reverse austerity. Oh, and who else remembers the promise to put workers on boards to not increase VAT and to end child poverty? As with them, I'd bet on these new measures either never seeing the light of day or actually more likely for in-work poverty to only get worse. The particularly interesting thing about all of this is that Sacha Javid, who reads Ayn Rand's his wife every year and is a fervent libertarian capitalist, has had to resort to a policy which, in normal times, he would detest. Why? Because in-work poverty in Britain is rampant and has massively intensified since the Tories came to power in 2010, first the Liberal Democrats, then by themselves, and more recently with the DUP. According to the Think Tank and the Institute of Fiscal Studies, in the mid-1990s, 37% of those in poverty lived in a working household. That has reached 58%, meaning the idea of being poor but in a job was until relatively recently and common, but it's increasingly the norm. This has a massive knock on effect to child poverty. Appallingly, 30% of all children in the UK live in a house below the poverty line and, as already mentioned, it is increasingly likely that such households will include someone in work. In London, that figure rises to 37% and after housing costs have faxed in, child poverty rises to more than 50% in Newham and Tower Hamlets with similar figures in Blackburn, Manchester and Luton. 50%, one every two kids you see walking on the streets of those places, will be raised in poverty. Remarkably, there are around 500,000 more kids in poverty today than there were in 2010, which is the population of the city of Manchester. Think about that for a second, you're walking around Manchester all day and every single person you see is a child who's in poverty now who wouldn't have been in 2010. The thing is it's only getting worse, so the figure expected to rise to 5.1 million by 2022. All in all, 8 million people who live in poverty are in families where at least one person is in work. So when people talk about Britain's high rate of employment, which is true, to be fair, remember this, it's built on the fact that it's increasingly normal to be poor despite slogging your guts out. That's increasing the issue that impacts children whose future is mapped out before they even have a chance. Will the party which has generated these problems and massively ramped them up over the last decade be the same one to solve them? I wouldn't count on it.