Why is Birmingham leading Britain's child poverty spiral?

New Statesman​

6 days ago

Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
To truly understand the impact of child poverty in Birmingham, the best place to go is Ladywood. Sitting to the west of the city centre, research from 2008 identified this area as having the highest percentage of children who live in poverty of any parliamentary constituency.
A newspaper report from the time depicts the situation on the ground for locals: 'I'd rather starve than let them go hungry,' a father who was out of work said of his girlfriend and their 12-month-old daughter. 'We might be short of money, but we're not short of love.' The headline of the piece, outlining the poverty the city's young people were growing up in, is simple and devastating: 'A poor start'.
More than 16 years later, children living in Ladywood are still experiencing a poor start to life. It remains the constituency with the highest levels of child poverty in Britain: 55 per cent of its youth live in deprivation (after housing costs are accounted for), according to a 2025 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). The situation in Ladywood is a microcosm of a wider crisis of child poverty across Birmingham. Ladywood and its neighbouring constituencies – Hall Green and Moseley, 55 per cent; Yardley, 53 per cent; Perry Barr, 53 per cent; and Hodge Hill and Solihull North, 51 per cent – account for five of the top ten areas affected by this issue. In excess of 100,000 children across the city are living in poverty.
Birmingham itself is at the apex of a wider trend of rising child poverty across the country in recent years. According to the same research by the JRF, around three in ten children growing up in the UK live in poverty.
As the scourge of child poverty has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, so has the need for third sector organisations to provide localised support. 'The pandemic hadn't helped the situation,' said Alice Bath, operational manager at the Family Action charity and a born-and-bred Brummie. Family Action runs an Early Help Programme for families in Ladywood and Perry Barr. 'Even though we're out of it, we're still facing the mop-up of the [underlying] issues that it presented,' Bath said.
Children in Birmingham, Bath told me, are contending with 'exponential' increases of food insecurity, decaying dental health, respiratory conditions, obesity and housing instability. Despite the best efforts of Bath and her colleagues across the third sector, there is now a quiet acceptance of a deprived status quo among the city's youth: 'It's become a way of life and a way of being.'
What isn't helping the fight against child poverty in Birmingham is the dire financial situation of its council. Birmingham City Council effectively declared itself bankrupt in September 2023. To claw back funding, government- appointed commissioners have pencilled in over £300m of cuts across the following two years in the Labour-controlled council. The cuts reportedly include up to £112m worth of spending reductions and savings in the council's early help and youth services. That includes axing £8m worth of funding that is paid by the Birmingham Voluntary Services Council to ten local charities – including Bath's Family Action – that put on vital services for children and families across the city.
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'Birmingham was massively hit by the decline in the manufacturing base of the city,' Martin Brooks, who has served on Birmingham City Council for 20 years, told me. The region was once famous for its production of cars, metals and Cadbury's chocolates. Brooks added: 'We were losing jobs in the Thatcher years not by the hundreds or thousands, but by the tens of thousands. Those years [of deindustrialisation] had a massive effect on poverty within the city.' When accounting for the exponential levels of child poverty today, the blame is largely placed on the effects of the 2008 financial crash and Conservative-induced austerity of the 2010s. 'The poor governance of the city has [also] had some effect on where we are today,' said Brooks, who quit the Labour Party last December. (He now stands as an independent councillor.)
Brooks resigned over the fresh cuts his former Labour council colleagues have approved, which will 'have a devastating effect on the life chances of our young people in this, the youngest of European cities,' he said at the time.
Locals are desperately searching for answers from their council. Upon visiting the local authority's HQ – a grand, Victorian era Grade II-listed building – on a bright spring morning, looking for a council cabinet member to interview, I was told they were unavailable. They were 'busy dealing with the bin situation,' a member of staff told me. The strikes have ensured the city stays top of the headlines – albeit for the wrong reasons.
The politicians representing Birmingham on a local and national level are all too aware of the challenges facing their younger constituents. 'We made good progress until austerity in addressing some of those issues,' Richard Parker, the Labour Mayor of the West Midlands, told me over tea when we met in the city. 'The Tory government took £1bn out of the spending power of the city council, and it's still living with the impact of those cuts. That £1bn is further damage to some of our poorest communities in the most vulnerable parts of the region.'
Parker's Conservative predecessor, Andy Street, who I met in the city centre a few weeks later, acknowledged that he and other political leaders 'did not change [the] map of deprivation'. There is broad political alignment on how the issue can be tackled in the medium-to-long term: increased housebuilding (with a particular focus on social housing), inward investment for better jobs in the region and improved education and skills pathways to help locals capitalise on them. But in the immediate term, hordes of children in the city will remain impoverished.
'I think the two-child benefit cap limit has to change,' Liam Byrne, the MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North, and a former cabinet minister during the last Labour government, told me when we met in Westminster recently. Should the cap (which prevents parents from claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit for a third, or any subsequent child, born after April 2017) be lifted, around 17,000 families in Birmingham would be able to receive additional financial support, which can currently cost a family household up to £3,455 a year.
'Family incomes need to go up,' Byrne added, 'that's why [lifting] the two-child limit is so important.'
Birmingham is facing a 'child poverty emergency'. A 2024 campaign by local outlet Birmingham Live outlines the severity of the situation.
No fewer than 46 per cent of the city's children are impoverished (up from 27 per cent in 2015); twice the national average. Two in three (66 per cent of) children living in poverty come from a working family. Over 10,000 children live in temporary accommodation – a record number. Healthwise, compared to the national average, children are: 1.8 times more likely to die in infancy, and as likely to be hospitalised for asthma; 1.3 times more likely to have a low birth weight, and as likely to die in childhood; and are 1.2 times more likely to be obese at ten years old.
Child poverty in Birmingham is also being particularly felt on the city's large south Asian cohort: in all but one of the ten most afflicted wards, the largest demographic of residents come from Asian and Asian-British backgrounds.
Although some feel optimistic about the government's upcoming Child Poverty Strategy– due to be outlined in the spring – the benefits it might bring to Birmingham remain unclear. The council cuts only exacerbate fears. As they were through austerity, the pandemic and now, those working in the third sector in Birmingham (and across the UK more widely) – largely made up of locals, many of whom are volunteers – will continue to be a vital safety net for society's most vulnerable. 'I could moan and groan, but it's not going to change things,' Family Action's Bath said of the council cuts, while looking towards the future of its service in Perry Barr and Ladywood.
'It's about having a positive mindset,' Bath added. 'It's about being solution-focused and saying, 'What can I control? And how can I make a difference to support children and families?' It's about keeping hold of why we come to work in the morning and what our core mission and values are about.'
This article first appeared in our Spotlight on Child Poverty supplement, of 23 May 2025, guest edited by Gordon Brown.
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