We simply must talk about child poverty in Britain. And I thank the New Statesman for this unique special edition bringing together policymakers, anti-poverty campaigners, concerned celebrities and children’s champions to form a new coalition of compassion to make Britain child-friendly again.
For the sad but true fact is that child poverty is the biggest cause of social division in Britain today, a scar on our national conscience, and a stain on the soul of the country. Seventy-five per cent of people, according to a new poll commissioned by me and the New Statesman, believe child poverty to be “morally wrong”.
But decisions taken ten years ago by past Conservative ministers still cast a long shadow from beyond their political grave. They have ensured that, by denying newborn third children £66 a week, child poverty – already at a record 4.5 million when they left office – is destined to rise to 4.8 million children by 2029. They have also made it impossible to achieve the most recently announced milestone for being “ready to learn”: the government’s target is to ensure that by 2028, 75 per cent of five-year-olds will be ready for primary school. This will not be met if only 65 per cent are poverty-free.
These statistics refer to relative poverty, but on every other measure – from the number of children in destitution or near destitution, to a definition of what is needed for a dignified life, to a wider definition including lack of wealth as well as lack of income – child poverty is on the rise. Nearly one million children try to sleep at night with no bed of their own. More than 2.7 million are in families that can’t afford to replace broken electrical goods such as a fridge or washing machine or are without adequate toiletries, soap or toothpaste. And three million children are regularly forced to do without meals through lack of money to buy food. The result is that, measured by the usual indicators, the gap between rich and poor is as wide and demeaning now as it was in the “loadsamoney”, “greed is good” Thatcherite 1980s.
It costs more not to invest in children than to invest in them, as articles by Ashley John-Baptiste and Emma Revie (in the Spotlight supplement that accompanies my guest edited issue of the New Statesman) show: for every 1,000 children forced into residential care because of their family’s poverty, we pay out up to £300m a year. And assessments of the Sure Start programme, killed by the Conservatives after 2010, show that the costs of intervening are covered more than twice over by savings on healthcare, special needs education and juvenile delinquency.
To their credit, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves set up the Child Poverty Review to redeem the Labour promise “to reduce child poverty this parliament” and to end the need for reliance on food banks. And the way forward is to offer a fairness guarantee, an anti-poverty lock, ensuring that no family that is working hard or doing the right things should end up trapped in poverty. The George Osborne argument – that middle-class families who cannot afford children are paying tax so that poorer parents can have more children and game the benefits system – does not hold. Indeed his portrayal of parents on benefits as feckless and workshy is unfair: more than 70 per cent of poor children and 60 per cent of families affected by the two-child rule have at least one working parent, and most of the rest are victims of sickness or recent but temporary redundancies, or lack access to childcare.
Of course, the Treasury could redeploy to children the savings that come from action against fraud. And, as Mike Brewer writes in Spotlight, breadwinners retraining for work could result in a £2bn reduction in the benefits bill and a reduction in child poverty of 130,000. But if that is to be redirected to other actions against poverty, an extra £9bn of investment can be sourced from public and private funds, none of which breaks the government’s fiscal rules or any manifesto commitment on taxation.
We could raise, as Harry Quilter-Pinner shows, £3bn from levying the hyper-profitable online gambling industry, now rightly subject to a Treasury consultation. Another £3bn could come from a tiered approach to paying interest on cash held by banks at the Bank of England, as recommended here by its former deputy governor Paul Tucker. Third-sector anti-poverty groups could benefit from another £3bn through Gift Aid changes (£740m alone by securing the full value of donations by top-rate taxpayers), from corporate philanthropy (donations have not risen at the same rates as profits: on this measure companies are giving £3bn less than they were in 2015) and from a new £1bn fund set out here by Sir Ronald Cohen for supporting children in the poorest areas.
The two-child rule is not well understood by those not affected by it, but according to polling I have commissioned with the New Statesman from Focaldata, 42 per cent already think it should be abolished, and more than three-quarters of those who currently support it say it should be removed if abolishing it is shown – as the evidence strongly suggests – to be a cost-effective way of reducing poverty.
The public sees the need for change in another survey conducted for my guest-edited edition of the NS by Hope Not Hate and Survation; 87 per cent of those who expressed an opinion said they believe that we should tax gambling to pay for action on child poverty. A levy on highly profitable banks was supported by 82 per cent of those who expressed an opinion for or against the policy. Around three-quarters (74 per cent) of respondents who answered for or against ring-fencing these levies to reduce child poverty said they would be more supportive of the policies if they knew they would raise funds to alleviate this problem. As the survey indicates, they believe children are our future, that all of us are affected by child poverty and all are better off if we reduce it.
Indeed, as the polling and the eloquent support given in these pages by David Tennant, Kit de Waal, Armando Iannucci and others show, we cannot be comfortable when so many people live in discomfort, at ease when so many people are ill at ease and content when there is so much discontent. The majority of our fellow citizens believe that as a society we are richer when we care for our poor, more secure when we come to the aid of the insecure, and that when the strong help the weak it makes us all stronger. So child poverty is not inevitable. A Labour government has taken millions of children out of poverty before. If we are to advance the prospects of a new generation of children languishing in poverty, now is the time to do so again.
[See also: Dickens’s Britain is still with us]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic