Ministers rarely talk about the growing number of children living in poverty in Britain. That is because it is a symptom of political failure. Progress made on tackling child poverty during the first decade of this century is being reversed. In 2021, an additional 350,000 children were living in relative poverty, defined as households that have 50% less than the average income. By 2027, child poverty is expected to be the highest since 1998. This should sound alarm bells in government.
Recent research from the Child Poverty Action Group confirms the scale of destruction caused by Conservative policies. George Osborne led the charge with his two-child limit on benefits, which came into effect in 2017. This introduced a cap which meant that anyone with a larger family would go without child tax credit or universal credit for a third child or subsequent children. It was less a coherent reform than an assault on the perceived generosity of a system exploited by “scroungers”. “Quite simply, we have been encouraging working-age people to have children and not work,” David Cameron said in 2012.
On all counts, it has failed. The cap had minimal effect on the number of children born (a good thing, given Britain’s dwindling fertility rate and the murky ethics of punishing the poor for having children). It has pushed larger families, more than half of whom are in work, into deeper poverty, affecting 1.5 million children. Mr Osborne’s policy was premised on the notion that people who use benefits are a static group who respond to narrow financial incentives. Yet having a child is not a cost-benefit calculation, and the number of people who claim benefits is not fixed. Parents who were previously secure may need to apply for benefits after a redundancy, as happened during the pandemic. Moreover, so long as wages remain low, working additional hours won’t plug the hole that this cap has blown in family budgets.
There is no reason to retain the cruel two-child policy. A related problem is the absence of any national strategy for tackling child poverty. The 2016 Welfare Reform Act, another brainchild of Mr Osborne’s, repealed the earlier Child Poverty Act, including its goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020. As a result, the issue has drifted further from the minds of ministers, while euphemistic subcategories have taken the place of coherent definitions. Politicians and the media talk about “food poverty”, “fuel poverty” and “period poverty”, obscuring the structural nature of the problem and inspiring a piecemeal response. The Conservatives’ cost of living package for struggling households – including the energy price guarantee, one-off payments and emergency grants for councils – was a patchwork solution to a crisis caused further upstream.
New Labour lifted about 800,000 children out of relative poverty, an admirable achievement that is now being eroded. The gains made on child poverty during the early 2000s were fragile because they relied on large increases in cash transfers that were swept away after the Conservatives took power. A more generous benefits system is urgently needed, but any future Labour government should also look to insulate it from political caprice. That would mean raising wages in low-paid sectors, building an affordable childcare system so that parents can access employment, and providing a sustainable solution to escalating housing costs that are pushing renters into poverty. Poor children live in poor families – fixing this must take priority.
