A TORY bid to evade blame for skyrocketing child poverty rates on their watch has provoked outrage.

Gordon Henderson, the Tory candidate for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in next month’s general election, said poverty in the constituency that he has represented since 2010 was nothing to do with him.

He told BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme that there was nothing “personally” he could do for the area’s children living in poverty – who account for half of the total child population.

Mr Henderson denied that successive Tory governments – which have systematically cut benefits across the board – bore any responsibility for the problem, saying: “Poverty hasn’t just happened over the last nine years.

“There are deep-rooted reasons why we have deprivation in certain areas of this constituency, including in Sheerness, and it goes back 50 years.

“It’s been under Labour and Conservative administrations. A lot of it goes back to when they closed the dockyard here many years ago and it has never improved. I can’t personally do anything about it.”

His comments followed an attempt by Home Secretary Priti Patel last week to absolve the government of responsibility for deprivation by blaming local authorities – most of which have had their central government funding cut by 60 per cent.

When questioned in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, about the fact that two in five children in some areas were born into poverty, she said: “It’s not the government, though, is it? Everybody just says ‘the government’ as if it is this sort of bland blob that, you know, you can just go and blame.”

She added: “Local authorities have a role to play, education, public services, which are locally led and locally run.”

Recent analysis by the TUC and public service union Unison shows that, overall, councils in England are spending £7.8 billion a year less on key services than they did in 2010 – equating to £150 million less a week.

The 20 councils with the biggest funding gaps are overwhelmingly boroughs in London and the north of England. Of these, 18 are controlled by Labour and only one by the Conservatives.

Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Margaret Greenwood said: “The impact of Conservative government policies on the lives of children in low-income families has been devastating and their failure to understand this is breathtaking.

“On December 12, people will have the opportunity to vote for a Labour government that will scrap universal credit, end the two-child limit and make tackling child poverty the priority it should be.”

Think tank the Resolution Foundation warned that child poverty would continue to rise under the Conservatives’ plans for welfare.

This is because the Tories’ general election manifesto, published on Sunday, makes no changes to existing policy on the universal credit system, which has been widely panned for causing suffering and destitution through sanctions, long waits for payments and caps on benefits.

The foundation’s report said that, under the Conservatives, child poverty could hit a 60-year high of 34 per cent.

It added that 550,000 fewer children would be in poverty under Labour’s plans to pump £9bn extra into social security spending while scrapping the Tories’ two-child limit for benefits.

A Conservative spokesman claimed: “We are committed to tackling child poverty and have made progress since we came into government, with 730,000 fewer children in workless households.

“But we know we must continue to make every effort on this issue and our manifesto sets out how we will use the tax and benefits system to do this.”