THE pre-election budget in March, like its predecessors, favoured the poor. The overall impact of Gordon Brown's nine budgets since 1997, especially in Labour's second term, has been strongly redistributive. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, terms Mr Brown the most redistributionist chancellor since the Liberals' David Lloyd George, a century ago.

Yet new figures for the “Gini coefficient”, a measure of inequality in income distribution, shows it essentially unchanged in 2003-04, after Mr Brown's first seven budgets. The figure is based on net income, including benefits and tax credits. A slight rise in inequality since 1996-97, the last year that the Conservatives were in power, is statistically insignificant.

One reason for Labour's puzzling ineffectiveness in combating inequality is that incomes at the very top of the income distribution rose quite rapidly over the seven years to 2003-04. Another is that Mr Brown has focused on reducing poverty among children and pensioners but has done relatively little for people of working age without children. Among this group, which comprises two-fifths of the population, poverty has remained broadly unchanged since 1996-97.

Labour can certainly point to progress. Pensioners are now less likely to be poor than the rest of the population. There was a particularly sharp fall in their poverty rate—usually defined as the proportion of people living on income below 60% of the typical household's—in 2003-04, when the pension credit was introduced.

But child poverty has not fallen as much as the government had hoped. Labour set itself an ambitious target to reduce the number of poor children by a quarter between 1998-99 and 2004-05. There was only disappointing progress in 2003-04, especially since this was the year when the child tax credit was introduced. That may be a blip: there were administrative hold-ups in paying it. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that Labour is now likely to miss the child poverty target if housing costs are taken into account in measuring it.

A third-term Labour government will have less spare cash to combat poverty and a big tax-raising budget looks inevitable. This week, the IFS reported that average incomes in 2003-04 had fallen for the first time since the early 1990s, as a result of tax increases after the last election. The chancellor can once again direct the fiscal pain towards the better off, but the political costs of redistribution are rising.