Gordon Brown, the chancellor, will today announce plans to lift a further one million UK children out of poverty by 2004-5.

One quarter of the four million children on the breadline in 1999 have already been taken out of poverty.

The commitment is part of a key policy area for Labour whose manifesto says: "Our aim is to make the goal of ending child poverty in Britain a political litmus test."

Brown is expected to tell an audience in Newcastle today: "The most important investment we can make as a country is in developing the potential of all our country's children".