Ten policies for the new child poverty strategy

The Prime Minister has announced the formation of a Child Poverty Unit to begin work on an “ambitious” child poverty strategy. This work will be overseen by a ministerial taskforce headed by the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, and Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. We look forward to supporting this work and ensuring the voices of families we help are heard by decision makers.

As a starting point, we recently wrote to ministers to argue the strategy should have a strong focus on two broad goals:

We also make the case for ten policy changes that could be implemented quickly to start delivering on these goals.

1. Too many families are experiencing severe hardship

Poverty and extreme hardship is increasingly commonplace in our communities, particularly for families with children. The day-to-day reality for families and children struggling on low-incomes could not be starker:

• Three in 10 children – 4.3 million – are now growing up in poverty. In the ten years between 2012/13 and 2022/23, the number of children in poverty rose by 700,000.
• The number of children experiencing destitution – the most extreme form of poverty – almost tripled in five years. According to research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1 million children experienced destitution in 2022, an increase of 186% since 2017.
• Child homelessness has never been higher. 146,000 children were living in temporary accommodation in December 2023, the highest number since records began. Compared to a decade ago, child homelessness numbers are up by 80%.
• Food insecurity and demand for food banks is at record levels. The Trussell Trust food bank network gave out over a million food parcels for children last year – a 133% increase since 2017/18. Data from the Food Foundation shows a fifth of families with children experienced food insecurity this year.
• Since 2020, the Action for Children Crisis Fund has distributed £2.2 million in emergency grants for food, appliances, utilities, and other essentials to 16,000 families and 38,000 children.

2. The social security system isn’t protecting children from poverty

These alarming trends are a clear sign that the state is failing to adequately protect children from poverty. Two major features of the social security system in recent years help to explain this:

1. Benefits are too low to meet even basic needs. Benefits were frozen for much of the last decade, losing almost 10% of their value in real terms. The basic rate of Universal Credit falls significantly below what's needed to afford a basic basket of essentials.
2. Policies like the Benefit Cap, Two-Child Limit, and freezes to housing support have hit children the hardest. Families with children have borne the brunt of tax and benefit reforms since 2010. The overall Benefit Cap overwhelmingly affects families with children, and mostly single parents. Much of the rise in child poverty is happening within larger families. This is due to the impact of the Two-Child Limit which limits benefit payments to only the first two children in the family.

The new child poverty strategy offers a once in a generation opportunity to transform the life chances of millions of children.

A good strategy will set ambitious, achievable targets and a blueprint for how to get there in a realistic timeframe (say 10 years, or two parliamentary terms). In developing it, the government should engage campaigners, charities, academic experts, and most importantly, families with lived experience of poverty.

It should learn from what worked and what didn’t in previous attempts to consign child poverty to history. Crucially, it must recognise that poverty is about a lack of money. But it should approach the task in a multi-dimensional way, utilising all possible levers to lift family incomes.

Here are 10 immediate actions (broken into five categories) the government could take to start delivering on its ambitions:

To learn more about these proposals, read our full policy briefing: