Child poverty is appalling and discriminatory – no party unwilling to commit to fixing it is fit to govern
By Claudia Webbe MP
Years of neoliberal capitalism have poisoned our societies since the 1980s, driving down pay and causing misery for families up and down Britain, says CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
TO THE UK’s deep shame, 4.3 million children are now living in poverty. This is a record figure — and an increase of 100,000 children in just the last 12 months. Inequality is hard-baked into the British economy and is becoming ever more entrenched.
According to the latest figures from the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), in an average class of around 30 children, nine will be living in poverty — and more than two-thirds of those children will be in families with at least one working parent. The government presents work as a “route out of poverty” — and the Labour “opposition” agrees, as recent statements by frontbenchers have shown.
But it is clear that in a nation of increasingly insecure and low-paid jobs, work represents drudgery and struggle — and, for millions of working people and their children, it means continuing in poverty.
As CPAG notes, this poverty is perpetuated by government policy. Ending the two-child benefit cap would immediately lift 300,000 children out of poverty and massively improve the situation of 1.2 million more, in over 400,000 families. A mere £20 a week increase in child benefit would lift another half a million children out of poverty.
The conscious cruelty of the two-child cap is fundamentally perverse, because it costs Britain many times more to keep it in place than to scrap it. Getting rid of the cap would cost around £1.3 billion annually, but keeping it is estimated to cost the economy £39-40 billion a year. We are spending billions every month to keep children and their parents in grinding poverty.
The wider impact on the economy of child poverty also appears substantial. The European countries with the lowest rates of child poverty also rank highly for both economic performance and economic stability. Denmark, Sweden and Norway, for example, which have for decades kept child poverty percentages down to low single digits, all rank in the top 10 for economic stability. Finland, which has similar child poverty statistics, ranks at number 15 globally.
However, while child poverty is cruel, unjust and deeply destructive to our society and economy, it serves the narrow interests of capital and of political elites as part of the structure of poverty that keeps wages down and maintains a pool of cheap and easily exploited labour, just as the Bank of England monetary policy committee openly advocates the maintenance of a pool of unemployed people to depress wages. The appalling impact of poverty and hunger on children’s education also serves these interests, propagating inequality and exploitation into the future, while providing an easy target when the government requires a scapegoat.
This phenomenon is most closely linked to the particular US/British neoliberal capitalism that has poisoned our societies since the 1980s. While child poverty in most industrial nations has stayed broadly stable since the 1990s, in Britain — where even in the 1990s after years of Thatcherism it was already far higher than in most comparable countries — it has soared.
Shamefully, Keir Starmer and his front bench have repeatedly said they will not abolish the two-child cap under a Labour government, even though they say they want economic growth but face a shortage of cash. Ending the cap would save far more than the yearly £28bn of the green investment plan that Labour promised to invest — a promise that Starmer has now scrapped, implying it’s unaffordable. Ending poverty is not only morally right, it would allow Labour to create a green economy, yet Starmer refuses it.
Both the current and prospective governments plan to maintain a system of appalling and needless cruelty. But even inequality is unequal. In every region and country of Britain, children from African, African-Caribbean, Asian and other racialised groups are at far greater risk of poverty than their white counterparts. Children of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and black (African and African-Caribbean) families are especially likely to live in poverty. A recent survey by the Runnymede Trust shows that more than six in 10 Bangladeshi British children are in poverty, almost matched by children of Pakistani heritage at six out of 10. Well over half of black children face the same bleak situation. In all of these groups, children’s risk of poverty is well over double that of white children.
Children from black communities and other racialised groups are exposed to an array of risk factors that create a greater likelihood of poverty, for example living in a family with only one working parent, in a single-parent family or in private rented housing.
But beyond these, black and Asian children face old and deep-rooted disadvantage. Black and Asian workers face systemic low pay, insecure work and poorer promotion prospects than white workers, as the TUC’s latest labour force survey again confirmed.
Barriers and discrimination at work inevitably compound child poverty. Black and Asian people in Britain generally have far lower levels of savings or assets than white British people: Indian households have 90-95 pence for every £1 of white British wealth, Pakistani homes 50 pence, black Caribbean households 20 pence and black African and Bangladeshi households around 10 pence.
These inequalities make black and Asian families more likely to have to rely on social security top-ups, meaning that government cuts and freezes to benefits are also discriminatory, hitting those families hardest. On average, white families receive £454 less a year in cash benefits than 10 years ago — but black families receive an average of £1,635 a year less.
If nothing changes, the TUC estimates that these gaps in opportunity will take at least another 20 years to close.
These issues are not theoretical. According to the latest household income statistics published last week, 18 per cent overall of people living in the UK and 30 per cent of children were in absolute poverty in 2022/23 — defined as receiving less than 60 per cent of the 2010/11 UK median household income, uprated for inflation. This is a huge rise of 600,000 people, to 12 million — the biggest year-on-year increase in 30 years.
Eighteen per cent, almost one in five people, and almost a third of children living in poverty is horrific and a national scandal. But in my constituency of Leicester East, where two-thirds of residents belong to Asian and other racialised groups, 43 per cent of children are living in absolute poverty.
What can be done to improve the situation for children and their parents? An array of measures could be implemented — and almost none of them are, by a government that seems to have no regard for the suffering its policies inflict on millions of British children.
Balancing work and care through properly paid maternity and paternity leave and access to affordable and flexible childcare is essential, as is the restoration of secure work. A real living wage and guaranteed hours would go a long way toward alleviating the worst of child poverty. So would a government commitment to measurable performance on child poverty. The Scottish government unanimously passed the 2017 Child Poverty (Scotland) Act putting in place legally binding targets for reducing poverty among children — Britain used to have a similar act, but the Tories were quick to abolish it when they entered government in 2010, to obscure the impact of their policies.
But as CPAG notes, the most urgent policy need is to restore an adequate social security system to ensure that families receive proper financial support. We need a social security system that’s fit for the 21st century. Many countries with low child poverty rates pay universal child benefit for all children — and those countries have healthier economies than that of Britain, as well as greater pools of skilled and educated workers: hungry children do not thrive educationally.
No party that is unwilling to commit to eliminating child poverty — and to making itself legally accountable for doing so in office — is fit to govern.
Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe
