The UK has tolerated high levels of child poverty for decades. To my mind it is one of the most pressing threats to our society. Neoliberalism increases child poverty. Unlike most of Europe, neither the USA nor UK took action to protect children when neoliberal economic reforms were implemented in the 1980s.
In consequence, both countries saw huge rises in child poverty rates, increases not seen in most European countries. In 1975, the UK and Sweden had similar levels of child poverty – just under 10%. By 1990 ours was 22%, theirs was 4%.
High levels of child poverty explain our persistently poor ratings in the UNICEF monitor of child wellbeing in rich countries. The UK is consistently in the bottom half, with the USA generally scoring even lower. In 2022–2023, 4.3 million children – 30% of all UK children – were living in poverty, up from 3.6 million in 2010–2011. A full 69% of poor children live in working families. In Wales, 29% of children live in relative poverty, 22% in absolute poverty; 80% have at least one working parent. The figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland are 24% and 23% respectively. And things are getting worse.
The scars of child poverty
Loughborough University recently reported that the two-child benefit cap is the biggest single driver of child poverty in the UK. While 25% of children in one- or two-child households are in poverty, 46% of children in families with three or more are in poverty, up from 36% in 2011–2012. Child Poverty Action reports that 71% of households affected by the household benefit cap are lone parents with dependent children.
There are even higher rates for some groups in the UK: 67% of Bangladeshi and 58% of Pakistani children live below the poverty line, as do 51% of Black children. Poverty acts in concert with structural and institutional racism to compound their disadvantages.
Poverty is most harmful in childhood because children are growing, developing, and learning, so the harms are hard-wired into them. However successful a child who grew up poor becomes, they will not be the person they would have been without such hardship. Whether those scars manifest physically, emotionally, cognitively – or, more commonly, a mixture – depends on the child and their circumstances. But there will be scars and, the longer a child spends in poverty, the deeper and larger those scars will be.
What is the nature of these harms? This has filled whole books, so it’s challenging to fit them into an article. But try we must.
From birth to death
The harms start in utero, with children of families in the poorest fifth born earlier and smaller than those in the richest. The consequences are higher rates of infant death (currently our infant mortality rate is twice that of Sweden), disability, and developmental delay. Child poverty is associated with higher rates of a range of physical illnesses including asthma, infection, and epilepsy. There is a clear association between child death and level of deprivation for all categories of death except cancer.
Later in adolescence, we see more obesity, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and self-harm. Poverty after birth increases risks for injury, both accidental (such as pedestrian road accidents and fire) and non-accidental (physical and other abuse), with resultant physical and/or intellectual disability.
Crucially, poor children have considerably and significantly poorer mental health than wealthy peers, a consequence of childhoods riddled with fear, stress, and anxiety. This is because they’re more likely to be exposed to serious violence (directly or from being a witness to it, including domestic abuse and knife crime); neglect; parental mental illness; and parental drug or alcohol addiction.
Children in poverty are more stigmatised, and more likely to indulge in a range of self-harming behaviours, including attempted suicide; sadly, some succeed. Many who survive such childhood self-harm go on to take their own lives in adulthood.
All of these harms have serious implications for adult health. Austerity and deprivation are deadly.
Cognitively, poor children do not do well, with persistent poverty having a larger cumulative negative impact on children’s cognitive development than episodic poverty. On average, the richest children are already about one year ahead developmentally when starting nursery. Poor children thus enter school less ready. This is then exacerbated by their attending the least well-staffed and most financially pressed schools.
Child poverty and education
Through school, they’re more likely to be identified as having additional learning needs (ALNs in Wales, SENDs in England). In Wales, a child on free school meals is twice as likely to have ALNs. Child poverty increases the risk of a range of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the latter strongly linked to emotional and behavioural disorder.
SEND/ALN provision is woefully inadequate across the UK. County councils are cash-strapped. Although money is meant to follow a child, this doesn’t happen. Whenever services are inadequate, those parents able to advocate effectively tend to get the best of what’s available. So a double whammy here, with poor children more likely to have ALNs but less likely to get appropriate support.
Children in poverty are more likely to be excluded from school, including permanent exclusion. In England, ONS data finds exclusions at record highs. In 2023 there were 9,376 permanent exclusions, up from 6,495 in 2021–2022 – a rate of 0.11/100 pupils, up from 46% in 2021–2022. These are catastrophic figures.
The situation is less dire in Wales (by Welsh Government data), but still unacceptable. The rate of permanent exclusions increased to 0.05 per 100 pupils in 2021–2022, compared to 0.04 per 100 pupils in 2018–2019.
Factors associated with increased risk of exclusion include being male, ALNs, free school meals eligibility, poor mental health, and being in care. All factors other than male gender are strongly associated with growing up poor.
Thus, childhood poverty is associated with poorer educational outcomes. By 16, children on free school meals are two years behind those who aren’t. And the statistics don’t include children who attend private schools, so the actual attainment gap is even higher.
From appalling to awful
Linked to these poor outcomes are poorer employment prospects, engagement in low paid work, and adult poverty. Even children who get a degree are affected by this poverty gap – 58% of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, mostly working class graduates from the newer, lower-status universities.
Ensuing adult poverty brings its own health risks. There are good reasons why life expectancy and disease-free life expectancy are so much higher for the wealthy. And later in life, those who grew up poor are more likely to become involved in crime (including serious crime and incarceration), develop addiction problems, and end up homeless.
It’s easy to victim-blame and gaslight parents in poverty. Of course families, particularly in the early years, are most important in determining the development, health, and welfare of children. An increased focus on promoting wellbeing and on the impacts of early childhood trauma are welcome. But trauma and wellbeing are contextualised and systemic.
Families battling the anxiety and insecurity accompanying poverty, poor housing, high-crime neighbourhoods, poor social cohesion, long hours in two or more jobs, and little access to affordable childcare are in no position to provide the enriching early experiences babies and toddlers need to thrive..
Few of us could in such circumstances. Yet we expect parents whose own childhoods were blighted by the same disadvantages to do so. Teachers, paediatricians, and social workers, for all our commitment, often internalise the usual class biases and stereotypes in our subconscious. A study of poverty in Welsh children some years ago had the following response from an 11-year-old to the question, ‘What one thing would improve your life most?’.
“I wish the teachers would treat my mother with more respect.”
Enormous numbers of children have been thrown into poverty since 2010, to join those that Gordon Brown – for all his efforts – failed to take out of poverty. By Scandinavian standards, New Labour only reduced child poverty from appalling to awful.
Austerity and child poverty
Current politicians fail to appreciate that the poverty of the last 14 years has been substantially more damaging than under Thatcher, when the post-WW2 welfare state and its public services were still reasonably functional, mitigating against the malign impacts of child poverty. Schools had more money, class sizes were smaller, and health visitors had caseloads of 100, not 400.
Child mental health services were able to help children in a timely way before they got seriously unwell: no four-year waiting lists. Youth clubs thrived, and there was more social housing. I don’t pretend all was rosy then, but it is much, much worse now.
I hope it’s clear that the fallout from the rise in poverty rates and the collapse of our public services as a result of austerity will cost this country for decades – in health, educational, and social care costs, welfare spending, the criminal justice system, and low economic productivity. Analysis by Loughborough University shows child poverty costs us at least £38bn per annum.
But for me the human costs are more terrible. All those blighted childhoods – it’s unbearably sad. I know how sad, because I spent most of my career documenting the harms in the NHS notes of such children while, as time went on, being able to do less and less to protect them.
Child poverty not a priority
To those reading this and muttering, “Adversity never hurt anyone. Look how well [insert name of famous successful person from an impoverished childhood here] has done”, I will make two points. We should develop child policy based on the ordinary and not, as Westminster tends to do, on the exceptional. It’s an absurd approach. And adversity is not good for children, it’s bad for them. Challenges are okay, with support – adversity is not.
No nurturing parents of means choose to inflict adversity on their own children. So why are we so comfortable with inflicting hardship on those children least able to cope or recover from ensuing harms?
The ‘promoting resilience’ industry revolts me. We know what children need. We should be providing it, and stop responding to the blight of childhood poverty with mitigating interventions designed only to help poor children just about survive what our society throws at them.
We need a two-pronged approach to kickstart the task of tackling our grim record of child poverty. As well as rebuilding public services that benefit all children, we must lift children out of poverty, because that has by far the greatest impact. Currently, the most effective way to do this would be scrapping the two-child benefit cap, and restrict the amount benefit payments can be reduced by the household benefit cap.
The former would cost £3.5bn per annum and immediately lift many of the million-plus children affected by it out of poverty, protecting them right away from further harm.
Unfortunately, this government not only appears to have no immediate plans to do so, it actually suspended seven MPs for six months after they voted for an amendment to scrap it. The government justifies its position vis-a-vis the cap by saying it intends to pull it at some point, but it’s ‘not a priority’ now. There are apparently more important things to spend our limited funds on than child poverty.
Yet more austerity?
“If you think taking children out of poverty is a cost and not an investment in a happy and healthy society, you’ve got both your values and your understanding of accounting all wrong.”
James Schneider
So, we’ve normalised child poverty so much that even Labour politicians are cavalier about leaving millions of children in poverty, for however long they plan to continue with this performative welfare toughness.
The plans Labour so far admits to having are targeted poverty-mitigation policies, an approach with limited impact. Over the last 150 years the public service interventions with the most impact on the health and welfare of children in poverty have been universal: free education, school nursing, health visiting, vaccinations, free healthcare, child guidance clinics, youth clubs, and so on.
But the services charged with providing these, mostly within the NHS or local authorities, are apparently facing continuing austerity instead of receiving increased investment. Things look bleak for our children.
Rachel Reeves, Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, and others in the UK Government argue that scrapping the benefit cap and investing in public services for children are unaffordable measures. This is said to be ‘grown-up politics’. That’s utter garbage. As a society we cannot afford not to invest in our children. The long-term costs are extraordinary.
But to my mind, even more important than any economic considerations, is that all our children – not just well-off children – deserve the best possible childhoods we can give them.
We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow’, his name is today.
– Gabriela Mistral
