A record 4.5 million children in the UK were growing up in poverty in the year to April 2024, according to figures released on Thursday, which provide a chilling backdrop to the government’s newly announced benefit cuts. Staff at a Blackpool charity, Disability First, have received “terrified phone calls” as claimants struggle to understand how the disability benefit reductions in the chancellor’s spring statement will affect them.
About a third of children live in deprivation. Those with lone parents, or two or more siblings, or in families where someone is disabled are overrepresented among the poorest households. This is hardship of a scale and severity that can be hard to comprehend for those who have not experienced or seen it. Recent research from the Trades Union Congress revealed that 17% of workers surveyed had skipped a meal to save money over a three-month period. As well as shortages of food, the poorest families face problems with housing and essentials such as clothing, toiletries and furniture. Headteachers have reported pupils being exhausted due to lack of sleep, and distressed by feelings of shame, among poverty’s detrimental effects.
Speculation that the two-child benefit limit introduced by George Osborne could soon be abolished, or made more generous to families with pre-school-age children, evaporated in the run-up to Wednesday’s speech. The government’s child poverty strategy is not now expected for months – perhaps around the time of June’s spending review. But these figures are the shocking baseline from which Sir Keir Starmer’s government must advance.
Some experts had anticipated less bleak data from the final year of Rishi Sunak’s government, due to the boost from cost of living payments. The combination of the 2023-24 figures with the anticipated effect of Rachel Reeves’s £4.8bn cuts to social security means that the outlook for the poorest households is bleak. The government’s own assessment is that 250,000 more people, including 50,000 children, will be in relative poverty by the end of the decade as a result of the squeeze on welfare. Critics argue that the true number could be 100,000 higher.
Ms Reeves’s insistence in a round of media appearances that she wants people to be richer, not poorer, rang hollow. Investment in job centres should help some benefits claimants into work in due course, if done well. The small uplift in the basic rate of universal credit is welcome. But the chancellor’s decision to prioritise arbitrary fiscal rules above the livelihoods of the poorest people was the wrong one. Any suggestion that cuts on this scale will not hit the living standards of vulnerable families, including children, must be dismissed as nonsense.
Only in Scotland is there any relief from grim predictions. There, child poverty fell to 22% in 2023‑24 – the lowest figure of the UK’s four nations – mainly due to the introduction of the Scottish child payment. The UK government should demonstrate a similar – if belated – commitment to protecting the youngest citizens when its child poverty strategy appears.
A change of direction and a restatement of what ought to be among Labour’s first principles – that millions of children in one of the world’s richest countries should not be going hungry – is needed. But the signs are that ministers, backbenchers and campaigners who want it will have to fight for it.
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