22-05-2025
Child poverty is Britain's ongoing, forgotten crisis
Photo by Oli Scarff / Getty Images
Mary remembers when she became homeless. She was in year four at school and her family 'hopped' around different friends' houses for a year. During that time, she stopped going to class for months, which led to the school stepping in. Mary is one of the millions of young people in the UK who grew up in poverty, a number that has now grown to 4.5 million.
Living in a low-income family meant Mary could never afford school trips or school meals – even her school uniform required months of saving up. 'I remember it being more isolating,' she said. 'I guess I was old enough to know what was going on, and so I just wanted to get out of that situation.'
Public policy can, and often is, a dry retelling of statistics and figures that struggle to convey the magnitude and impact of an issue such as child poverty, let alone what that means to an individual. Early attempts to quantify poverty by social reformers such as Seebohm Rowntree set an amount of money within a family below which they would be in poverty.
A figure for child poverty was not attempted until 1965, when Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend estimated that 2.25 million children met the definition in their book The Poor and the Poorest. These figures were based on a family having an income that was below 140 per cent of the 'National Assistance' payments made by the state.
Nowadays, poverty is calculated using a threshold of 60 per cent of the median income and, in the UK since 1996, subtracting housing costs, given the particularly high cost of housing here. There is a good degree of consensus across those working on child poverty that this is a decent threshold. It is not, however, without its weaknesses.
'I do think that is a useful measure, but it's just one specific measure. It's based on a line which is fairly arbitrarily drawn, and you know, it will sometimes miss important subtleties,' said Tom Wernham, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
For example, he continued, a policy such as removing the benefit cap would seem to have little effect on the number of children in poverty. However, that is because its impact would mainly be on those children living in deep poverty (which is defined as 40 per cent of median income). It would not by itself lift them over the poverty line, but it would get them much closer than they were. 'One solution to this is, when we're thinking about evaluating specific policies, trying to think how they will affect incomes across the distribution,' Wernham said.
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Another challenge is place. Housing costs in a city such as London are very high and have a big impact on the number of children in poverty. However, public services in London, such as transport, schools and parks, are more available than in parts of the UK with lower housing costs, or rural areas. To an extent, housing costs act as a proxy to the quality of local services, but that brings its own challenges. '[It] comes back to this question of, what do you want? What do you want the measure to do?' Wernham said.
The success of New Labour in bringing down the level of child poverty was, in part, due to setting legally binding targets based on the 60 per cent median income measure. '[It] really focused both minds and government departments to ensure that they were pulling together across Whitehall,' said Rachel Walters, coalition manager at End Child Poverty. However, those targets were dropped after Labour lost the 2010 general election.
Walters and the 130 organisations that comprise the End Child Poverty coalition argue that the promised Child Poverty Strategy from the government must include legally binding targets again. 'We think that a government should be able to have less than 10 per cent of children living in poverty,' said Walters, adding that this is 'a long way off' at present. 'The need to reduce child poverty came directly from the PM and the Chancellor. So, it was really considered a top priority for the whole of government, and that's what we want to see this time around,' said Walters.
Wernham points out that there are other statistics published that are connected with poverty, and child poverty, that are useful in of themselves, but are not as good for evaluating the impact of policies. There are indicators for deprivation and food insecurity that are released alongside the official poverty statistics. There is also a new measure of what the Department for Work and Pensions is calling 'below average resources', similar to the poverty measure but taking account of other factors, such as childcare and disability costs.
It is possible that, over time, extra costs will be added to the measure of poverty, akin to the 1996 addition of housing. This should bring greater attention to those components of the costs that drag families down into poverty. The solution, however, is not just to cut costs but also to raise incomes.
Mary's family were eventually placed in temporary accommodation, where they stayed for another two years. 'It was a very, very slight relief, because at least we had our own space,' she said. But the space was limited, and the living situation had an impact on her parents. 'All their emotions just spilled out, and it would be arguments and arguments after each other,' she said. While they were in temporary accommodation, Mary's dad suffered a health crisis and nearly died.
These are experiences that are impossible to quantify, but the broad measures of child poverty are good enough to make public policy interventions. The question is whether policymakers are good enough to act on them.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight on Child Poverty supplement, of 23 May 2025, guest edited by Gordon Brown.
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