How the UK is falling behind on tackling child poverty

For Melloney Grant, a single mother with two boys who works part-time, it is the school holidays that fill her with foreboding. That’s when the free school meals and breakfast club that help stretch her household budget during term-time are no longer available. It’s then she battles just to keep food on the table. “I have two boys, they’re eating all the time, and I dread it,” she says.

Her two sons, Ethan, 11, and seven-year-old Isaac, are part of a growing slice of the UK population living in what the UK government calls “relative” child poverty — defined as living on less than £360 a week for a single parent with two children after housing costs, which is 60 per cent of the UK’s median household income. It is a broad measure, but in practice it is an indicator of a family’s ability to get by and “participate in the society in which they live”, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, which campaigns to eradicate child poverty.

Child poverty conjures images of kids in rags on Victorian streets and in some cases it still means households choosing between food and electricity, but it also includes families where the relentless struggle to get by is slowly throttling opportunities. Or in the view of Chloe Russell, the deputy head of Monksdown Primary School in Liverpool where Isaac attends, it is the difference between a child “thriving or just surviving”.

As well as going hungry sometimes in the school holidays, for Ethan it also means not having a phone, like most of his contemporaries, excluding him from social interactions. For younger children like those at Monksdown Primary, where nearly half the children qualify for free school meals, it can mean struggling to afford to participate in school activities. Recently the school held a “rock star day” and some of the children stayed away. “They didn’t want to come because they didn’t have the right clothes,” says Maria Bernia, the school’s welfare officer.

Such stories have increasingly become the unremarkable stuff of modern British life, with almost a third of children in the UK living in relative income poverty in 2021-22, the latest available data. Poverty rates remain two-thirds higher for children than for pensioners thanks to a combination of cuts to non-pension welfare benefits since 2010 and the recent cost of living crisis, which is not fully reflected in the data. 

Other countries have faced similar headwinds, but the UK has experienced the largest increase in relative child poverty between 2014 and 2021 of any advanced economy, according to estimates by Unicef, the UN children’s organisation. At the same time, 3.3mn children in the UK still live in “absolute” poverty, according to official data — defined as living on less than £324 a week after housing costs for a single parent with two children. 

In 2018, the UN infuriated the UK’s ruling Conservative party when its rapporteur on extreme poverty published a report which accused the government of having “grievously undermined” the prospects of future generations by the “systematic dismantling of social protection policies since 2010”.

Nearly six years later, the current rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter, wrote in an email to the Financial Times that the UK’s current rates of child poverty are still “particularly troubling” and that the UK’s response to his predecessor’s report “remains insufficient”.

The Department for Work and Pensions said there are 400,000 fewer children living in absolute poverty than in 2010, adding that the government had recently done a lot to help poorer families, raising benefits in line with inflation and providing additional cost of living support worth on average £3,800 per household from 2022 to 2025. In recognition that many families were still struggling, the government last month announced a six-month extension of the Household Support Fund which was set up in 2021 to provide cash grants to vulnerable families. 

Still, for Russell the current poverty levels mean Monksdown Primary now has a community pantry, handing out free food to parents from a garden shed in the playground, and a breakfast club that uses donations from the Magic Breakfast charity, without which some of her children would start the day hungry.

Russell sees tell-tale signs, like when a child in winter comes to school four weeks in a row with flapping soles; “shoes that talk as they walk”, as she says, miming a snapping crocodile. “For the kids that are in houses where they have to choose between electricity or food, that can be a very stressful start to the day, and we try to remove that with the breakfast club, which we couldn’t run without Magic Breakfast’s support.”

Russell qualified as a teacher in 2007 but says the past five or 10 years have seen an explosion in need. “Our older children are aware now; they understand that poverty isn’t something that just happens to kids in other countries.” 

The UK’s record on reducing child poverty since 2017 has been poor by international standards, but it is set to get even worse, according to projections from the Resolution Foundation. By 2029, the think-tank projects that more than half of children in large families will be living in relative poverty, a higher rate than in 1997.

This looming increase stems directly from two policy choices made by coalition and Conservative governments after 2010 as they sought to rein in welfare spending in the decade of so-called austerity that followed the global financial crisis. The first, in April 2013, was to cap the benefits of out-of-work households, and the second, in April 2017, was to limit child support to the first two children in a family. The result is that low-income families are £3,200 a year worse off for each additional child above the limit.

More and more families will be dragged into relative poverty as increasing numbers of children born after April 2017 are affected by the policy change. Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, estimates the figure will rise from 70,000 families in 2018 to about 750,000 by the time the policy has fully taken effect in 2035. “Working-age and children’s benefits do not go up in line with earnings, unlike the state pension, so families will tend to fall behind,” he adds.

A DWP spokesperson says the two-child policy was designed so that families on benefits faced the same financial choices as those supporting themselves solely through work. “Children are five times less likely to experience poverty living in a household where all adults work compared to those in workless households,” they add.

And yet both the UN and campaigners argue that current levels of UK welfare benefits are not sufficient to keep large numbers of children out of poverty. Katie Schmuecker, policy adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, says: “There are choices involved and we need to prioritise this issue. This many children experiencing poverty in a country as wealthy as ours is morally wrong, but also damaging to children’s prospects and our economy and puts pressure on to public services.”

Child poverty has both emotional and economic costs, according to experts. A 2019 study of UK children from 2000-2014 by the department of social policy at York university, found that children who had experienced persistent poverty were more than twice as likely to suffer emotional and behavioural difficulties.

In terms of economic costs, a study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2008 put a cautious estimate of the cost of child poverty at £25bn a year, a result of adults that grew up in poverty having lower earnings potential and creating an additional burden on public services. That figure had risen to £39bn a year by 2023, according to the Child Poverty Action Group, which warns that the true costs could be “substantially higher”.

The effects of child poverty do not end when a child turns 18, according to Sophie Balmer, a student studying for a social policy degree at Leeds university who grew up in a low-income household on free school meals. “It never leaves you, the stress. That sense of exclusion,” she says. “I know I’m lucky to be where I am, but when my student loan runs out, that’s the end of it. I can’t go home and ask for money like some others can. So sometimes that does limit your participation.”

Jonathan Bradshaw, a child poverty specialist at the University of York, says that although the UK has greater public spending on families than many other developed economies, its outcomes are still worse because of the higher rate of inequality. A lack of second earners in households caused by the high cost of childcare also contributes to deepening inequalities and rising in-work poverty. Almost three-quarters of child poverty in the UK occurs in households with at least one working adult, up from half two decades ago.

Bradshaw adds that he had “never known a period of deprivation as awful as this”, with public spending on families in 2022 only 60 per cent of what it was in 2010. “It is a huge extra cost to the NHS and it’s responsible for the terrible burden of mental health and for school absences and lower attainment. It costs the public finances billions and billions of pounds,” he says.

Reducing child poverty rates in the UK will cost money, but experts, charities and campaign groups argue that relatively small amounts can have a significant impact. The Resolution Foundation calculates that abolishing both the two-child limit and benefit cap in 2024-25 would cost up to £3bn. 

However, Professor David Gordon, director of the Bristol Poverty Institute, says the situation in the UK has become so bad that some researchers have begun using measures of food insecurity and severe hardship designed to measure extreme poverty in Africa and Asia.

“We know what needs to be done to reduce poverty and this was achieved between 2000 and 2010,” he says. “Reducing poverty in the UK is affordable; what is lacking is the political will to fund the kinds of policies that we know will work.”

De Schutter, the UN Rapporteur, says the “single most important” investment would be to remove the two-child benefit cap, adding that universal credit, the UK’s main monthly benefit payment for low-income households, should rise “at least 50 per cent” to guarantee a decent standard of living.

Charities have also repeatedly called for the two-child limit to be scrapped since it lands so hard on children who were not responsible for their parents’ decision to have a third or fourth child. Analysis by academics at the London School of Economics has also shown that the policy has not materially reduced the number of children in low-income families, as its authors intended.

Despite pressure from progressive think-tanks and campaign groups, the UK’s opposition Labour party has said that it will maintain the two-child cap if it wins office at this year’s general election, as opinion polls suggest is likely. The party says that it will “focus on reducing child poverty” as one of its key “five missions” for government.

Alison McGovern, Labour’s shadow minister for employment and social security, blames the Conservatives for exacerbating child poverty and says her party would look to tackle the problem by “growing the economy”, creating more affordable housing, reducing school uniform costs and providing breakfast clubs in every primary school.

However, Jon Sparkes, chief executive of Unicef UK, says that removing the two-child limit is essential if a future government wants to “shift the dial” significantly on child poverty. “The benefit system drivers are the things that either move hundreds of thousands of children into poverty or out of poverty,” he says. “Other policies may have more indirect benefits [but] decisions made about social protection by governments have a very predictable and direct impact.”

Other countries have made different choices. In Scotland, the devolved government estimates that 90,000 children were lifted out of relative and absolute poverty in 2023 as a result of its £25 weekly child payment to low-income families, first introduced at £10 in 2021. The result was that in 2022, Scotland’s child poverty rate was 24 per cent, according to the devolved government, which is lower than that of the south-east of England, the most affluent part of the UK. 

Canada has also taken determined steps to reduce child poverty, introducing generous benefit payments for the poorest families without limits on the numbers of children. Analysis by Unicef found that Canada, a country with almost identical income per capita to the UK in 2014, had managed to cut its child poverty rate from 22 per cent to 17 per cent by 2021, while the UK’s poverty rate moved in the opposite direction over the same period — from 17 per cent to nearly 21 per cent.

Such payments would make a massive difference to working single parents like Melloney Grant, who also takes a shift staffing the Monksdown Primary School food pantry. She’s often shocked by who comes in to pick up some free items, but she says appearances can be deceptive, including her own. “People look at me — because I put my make-up on and try to dress well — and they think that I don’t struggle, but I do. It’s so hard when there is nothing in the cupboards and the kids are crying.” 

Additional reporting by Anna Gross

Source: Economy - ft.com