The Government has been urged to scrap civil servant bonuses after it emerged staff failed to deliver half their targets, including a high profile pledge to end child poverty.
Questions were raised in the House of Lords after the latest report from the Department for Work and Pensions' revealed "slippage" in 10 out of its 20 legally required public sector agreement targets.
Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman in the Lords, told peers on Thursday: "I would not call that slippage - there is not so much as a snowball's chance in hell of meeting the Government's target."
He added: "No senior civil servant at the DWP should get a penny bonus this year while the whole department's performance is so weak - or in future while they keep failing a generation of poor children. There must be no rewards for failure."
As well as the pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020, which MPs have previously warned is way off track, the missed targets include a promise to reduce the number of children living in homes where parents do not work by this spring, and another to increase the employment rate of lone parents.
At Labour's spring conference last weekend, Gordon Brown described child poverty as a "scar" on Britain, and Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, is thought to be planning measures to tackle the issue in his Budget next week.
But campaigners are dismayed that the target, announced with much fanfare by Tony Blair in 1998 when Prime Minister, is slipping. The DWP was supposed to halve the number of children in low-income families, defined as living on less than 60 per cent of the average wage, by 2011, and eradicate child poverty by 2020.
But while the number of children in poverty fell from 3.4 million in 1998 to 2.8 million in 2006, the figure rose by 100,000 last year.
Kate Green, the chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group said: "It is a moral disgrace, with major social and economic costs, that so many more British children live in poverty than in other wealthy countries. It is not acceptable, affordable or in Britain's interests to continue failing millions of children."
It emerged yesterday that staff at another department, HR Revenue and Customs, had received above-inflation bonuses despite presiding over a series of failures including major mistakes with the tax credit system which, Lord Oakeshott said, had fuelled child poverty.
For the Government, Lord Davies of Oldham, the deputy chief whip, said: "We always said that the 2010 target was challenging. It is - there is not much point in having targets if they are not."
In his speech to the Labour conference, Mr Brown said that in the "next few weeks we will move further towards our goal" to eradicate child poverty, which sparked rumours that the Budget will include measures to help the poorest families with tax breaks.
Of the 20 PSA targets, the DWP's Autumn Performance Report, which was published this week, reveals just three have been "met early", one is "ahead" of schedule, six are "on course" and 10 are suffering from "slippage".
