In all the sound and fury of the election, annual statistics land unnoticed. Yet these grim Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures are the best benchmark for what has happened to the country during the Conservative years. Infant mortality has risen: more babies are dying, and more older children are dying, too, from causes including abuse, neglect and suicide. The long-term trend in infant deaths has been downwards, as you would expect. But not recently in the UK. The Nuffield Foundation reported in 2021 that Britain’s rate of infant deaths was 30% above the median across EU countries.
According to OECD data, the UK ranks 30th out of 48 countries for infant deaths. The risk rises for mothers who are poor, black, young or living in deprived areas. Last year, child deaths in England rose by 8%, and more than a third of these were officially judged “avoidable”, bringing an outburst from Camilla Kingdon, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She explained: “The clear driver is rising child poverty. Figures such as these in a nation as rich as ours are unforgivable.”
These latest figures tell the same old story, but it is worse than before. According to the ONS: “In 2022 in England, the mortality rate for infants living in the 10% most deprived areas was almost three times higher than for infants living in the 10% least deprived areas. This was a wider difference than seen during any of the previous 12 years.” Measuring a country’s improvement on infant deaths has long been an economic barometer, a “key indicator of social and economic progress”, says Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics. But the country appears to be going backwards. On almost every measure of Conservative policies, this has been an era of official child neglect and, yes, child cruelty. This is no country for children.
Start with the parents denied the choice to have the children they want. The birthrate, which rose in Labour’s years, is plummeting. It fell by 12% between 2012 and 2019. Would-be parents are not on strike: they tell pollsters they want more children but can’t afford them. Economists across the west are alarmed by falling birthrates, which makes the two-child benefits limit peculiarly vindictive.
Rents, mortgages, student debt and wages lower than a decade ago have all made this generation of would-be parents far worse off than their parents were at the same age. Abortions have surged to unprecedented levels during the cost of living crisis, reaching a record high in 2022, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). Why? A majority of women opting for abortion said it was for financial reasons. “The stories women have shared with us are heartbreaking,” said Heidi Stewart, the chief executive of BPAS. “The cost of living crisis has placed immense strain on women and families, with too many having to choose between financial stability and having a baby.”
The dangerous state of maternity services is another reflection of this government’s anti-mother and anti-child priorities. The CQC reported that two-thirds of maternity units were unsafe by the end of 2023. The number of those posing a high risk of avoidable harm to mother or baby more than doubled in the previous year, and the shortage of midwives was partly to blame. Children growing up poor bear the scars for life. Britain ranks 37th out of 39 for child poverty in the EU and OECD; only Turkey and Colombia rank lower.
Private schools outraged at Labour’s proposal to end their VAT relief should peruse dismal figures published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies this week on spending for children in English state schools. These come as absolutely no surprise to state school teachers or parents. Spending on each child has fallen, deeply damaging cohorts of pupils, and it has only recently been restored to 2010 levels. Worse still, school costs are expected to rise by 4% this year, so maintaining spending at those levels amounts to a real terms cut. In the Blair and Brown years, pupils enjoyed 5-6% real terms annual growth in spending. Now schools are stricken by a 60% rise in the number of special-needs children, and a near-doubling in the numbers of pupils with autism and speech and language needs, with no funding to cover the added costs.
It’s no mystery as to why we have such a shortage of teachers when they are still paid at 2001 rates, and the schools they work in are falling apart. Spending on school buildings is about 25% lower than in the mid 2000s, and about 40% below what is needed to ensure school buildings are in a good state of repair, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Death is the most extreme manifestation of neglect, and rising infant and child mortality is the most concrete statistic showing how children have been neglected throughout the Tory era. None of this was accidental. Children were the primary victims of George Osborne’s first austerity budget, as benefits for families were cut by billions, then frozen for years, with a punishing benefit cap and the two-child benefit limit.
Labour has said little on child poverty, although the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, has pledged a “strategy for not just reducing child poverty but ending child poverty”. It’s worth remembering that nothing was said about eradicating child poverty in the run-up to 1997, but by 2010 Labour had almost reached the halfway mark in achieving that Blair-Brown 20-year goal. This election needs a pro-child manifesto, but most of all children need the permanent removal of the regime that has done them so much harm.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
