Child Poverty Strategy

With permission, I will make a statement on the Government’s child poverty strategy.

Tackling child poverty is a proud Labour tradition. It goes to the heart of the values we have and the beliefs we share—above all, that background must be no barrier to success, that opportunity is for every child and that the freedoms that for too long few of our children enjoyed must today be extended to them all. This Government see child poverty not simply as the absence of material goods from the lives of our young people, but as the absence of their agency—their freedom—in the decisions that shape their world.

As Labour Members know well, it is not merely wealth and opportunity, but power that must be in the hands of the many, not the few. That clear political principle lay behind not merely the determination, but the success of the last Labour Government in lifting 600,000 children out of poverty between 1997 and 2010. However, after Gordon Brown left office, that progress was reversed by a combination of deliberate cuts to public services, economic stagnation and a deep cost of living crisis.

There are now 4.5 million children in poverty—900,000 more than in 2010. This means that, in a typical classroom of 30 children, about 10 are experiencing poverty. Two million children are in deep material poverty, lacking even the basic essentials, such as a warm home and healthy food, which no child should grow up without. We know that growing up in poverty has enormous consequences for children’s health, their education and, more broadly, their life chances. It is equally damaging for our country—not merely for our public services, social cohesion and the chances of economic growth, but for the sort of society we wish to build and the sort of future we can promise our people.

That is why we made a manifesto commitment to develop an ambitious child poverty strategy. Shortly after the election, the Prime Minister announced a child poverty taskforce to deliver this, which I have been proud to co-chair. This has been a cross-Government taskforce, recognising that the causes of child poverty are wide-ranging and deep-rooted. The taskforce has visited towns and cities across the UK; talked to over 180 stakeholders, including charities, academics and think-tanks; and, most importantly, listened directly to the experiences of children and families living in poverty, putting them at the heart of our work.

I am proud that the reduction in the number of children living in poverty because of this strategy will be the biggest ever reduction in child poverty recorded by any Government in a single Parliament. Our strategy sets out the action that we are taking and will take to help families by boosting incomes, saving money on essentials and strengthening local support.

This will build on the urgent action we have already taken since entering Government to tackle both the root causes and the symptoms of child poverty, including the best start for every child through our Best Start family hubs that will deliver the early intervention and support that new parents need to set up their children for future success in life, along with our extension of the holiday activities and food programme. Our expansion of free school meals, announced in July, will lift 100,000 children out of poverty by the end of this Parliament, reaching half a million families who receive universal credit. Our new crisis and resilience fund, worth £842 million a year, will reform crisis support by enabling local authorities to provide immediate support to those on low incomes who encounter a financial shock. Those commitments come on top of the wider change our Government are bringing to the lives of families in this country, which includes expanding free breakfast clubs, boosting the national minimum wage for those on the lowest incomes, and supporting 700,000 of the poorest families through our new fair repayment rate on universal credit deductions.

But we had to go further. On the Labour Benches, we believe that the social security system should be at once a springboard for opportunity and a safety net when times are tough. Any of us can fall on hard times. Any of us can become unwell, fall out of work or lose a loved one. The security for working people of knowing that when things go wrong, the state will be there for you and your family is one of the greatest achievements of the labour movement, not just here in Britain but around the world. That belief, which motivates that struggle against insecurity, applies above all to our children. Our system of support for families should never penalise children for the actions—not even necessarily the choices—of their parents. The third child in a family has just the same value and worth as the second and the first. What we believe is the right support for the first in the family is right for her sisters and her brothers, unto this last. None of us, none of our children, should lose out simply for the number of our siblings.

Failing to act on child poverty will cost Britain far more than investing now. Every pound we spend lifting children out of poverty saves much more in future health, education and welfare costs—and builds a stronger economy. We cannot afford to sit on our hands and pick up the greater costs of failure further down the line. Poorer children are more likely to have serious mental health difficulties. They are more likely to have poorer employment outcomes and to earn less. By age five, children eligible for free school meals are already five months behind. By age 16, that gap has widened to over 19 months.

No one has felt those consequences more than the children themselves. That is why we announced that we will remove the two-child limit in universal credit from April 2026. Reinstating support for every child will alone lift 450,000 children out of poverty by the end of the Parliament and end the cruel policy that is currently affecting 1.6 million children. It is estimated that in 2029-30, there will be 550,000 fewer children in relative poverty as a result of the whole set of measures set out in our child poverty strategy.

With the decisive action the Government are taking today, we are investing in the future of our children and investing in the future of our country. It is sometimes put to Ministers, not least by Members on the Opposition Benches, that removing the two-child limit rewards parents for staying out of work. We reject that, because the evidence rejects that. Almost 60% of households affected by the two-child limit are in work. Almost 50% of the households affected were not claiming universal credit when any of their children were born. Parents are doing what they can to keep a roof over their children’s heads. Parental employment rates are already high. But with almost three quarters of children in poverty being in a working family, too many parents find themselves in jobs where they still struggle to support their families, while those not in work face extra barriers to entering the labour market at all.

One of the biggest barriers is childcare. That is why we have expanded the 30 hours of funded childcare for working parents, saving eligible families using all 30 hours up to £7,500 per eligible child per year; why we are extending eligibility for universal credit up-front childcare costs to parents returning from parental leave to ease the difficult transition back to work; and why we are providing universal credit childcare support to help with the childcare costs for all children, instead of limiting this to two children, to help parents who have larger families, too. We know that there is much more to do, which is why we are committing to a Department for Education-led, cross-Government review of access to early education and childcare support to deliver a simpler system that is better for children and parents alike.

Too many children are spending years in temporary accommodation at a point in their lives when they need space to play and develop, nutritious food to thrive and access to education. We are putting in place specific interventions to mitigate the harm living in temporary accommodation can inflict on children’s health, development and educational outcomes, which includes a commitment to ending the practice of discharging newborn babies into B&Bs or other unsuitable shared accommodation. Together, all this represents a strong start, but we do not underestimate the scale of the challenge to build a society where every child grows up in a family filled with love and is safe, warm and well fed—not held back by poverty, but helped forward by Government.

We will monitor our progress using two main metrics. First, we will use the internationally recognised and well-established relative low income after housing costs metric to monitor overall child poverty. Secondly, we have developed a new measure of deep material poverty to assess families’ abilities to afford everyday essentials, taking account of more than just income by including the cost of essentials, a family’s overall financial situation and the support they receive locally. It is not only the number of children in poverty that matters, but the depth of that poverty. We will continue to have a dedicated team in Government that works with the wider public, private sector and civil society to keep focus on tackling the stain of child poverty with oversight from Ministers across Government.

For over a century, Labour Governments have worked to deliver opportunity and security. This strategy will build on those proud foundations, delivering on our opportunity mission to break the link between background and success. We will continue to work nationally, locally and across all four nations of the UK and we will continue to be ambitious—to match the ambition of our children—to build a Britain where no child goes hungry, every child has opportunities and every family has power and choices in life. I commend this statement to the House.

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

I will start with something we can all agree on: none of us wants to see children grow up in poverty. We all know something of what that looks like: some hon. Members have lived it themselves; for others, it is part of the bread and butter of constituency work. Even in the wealthiest constituencies there are pockets of poverty, where children spend months living in bed and breakfasts, their meals coming from the local food bank, not knowing when they will have a bed in a room they can call their own and worrying about their mum—and it is usually their mum—and how she will pay the bills. None of that helps kids to succeed in life. Of course this Government should be working on how to improve the lives of children, as we did before them, but nothing I have heard from the Secretary of State today—however well intentioned—gives me any confidence that they are going to fix the problem.

Last week, the Prime Minister grabbed the headlines by saying that the Government will change how supermarkets display baby formula and give customers loyalty points—hardly the groundbreaking fix for child poverty that we have been promised. At the Budget, the Government crowed about how they will lift so many children out of relative poverty by lifting the two-child cap, and that will, of course, help with the stats on that one metric, just like the free taxpayer-funded breakfasts. However, ditching the two-child benefit cap will raise taxes on working people, including those on the poverty line, and disincentivise work.

For a measure that the Prime Minister now speaks about with such pride, I am surprised that it took the Government 18 months to bring it in. In that time, the Prime Minister and Chancellor rejected many demands from their Back Benchers to lift the cap, arguing that the policy was unaffordable; in fact, the Prime Minister was so committed to the cap that he removed the Whip from the brave Labour rebels who voted to lift it. But then, as rivals for the Labour leadership circled, the cap indeed went. Chopping and changing policy based on political pressure is no way to govern, and it is certainly no way to solve child poverty.

Order. The shadow Secretary of State has taken even longer than the Secretary of State and is well over her time limit. I call the Secretary of State.

The shadow Secretary of State started by saying that none of us wants children to grow up in poverty. We, as the party in Government, will lift children out of poverty. The Conservatives pushed nearly a million children into poverty. That is the difference between our parties.

The Conservatives knew when they introduced the two-child limit that it was a political dividing line. They sought to create an artificial divide between families in work and families not in work, yet all the evidence shows us that the children and families who have suffered are working families. That is what the evidence shows, and that is why we have acted.

In suggesting, that they will bring back the two-child limit, as the Conservatives have done in the media over many days, the shadow Secretary of State is showing that she is committed to pushing 450,000 children back into poverty and reintroducing the repulsive and dehumanising rape clause that saw women forced to talk about sexual violence in order to have enough money to support their children. They should be deeply ashamed of such a punishing and dehumanising regime that saw women and children suffer.

We will never stand for it. We will not allow for children to be punished because of the circumstances of their birth. The Conservatives’ record is a shameful and abhorrent one. We will heal the scars that they inflicted on children across our country, and we will heal it once and for all.

We are also a party that believes in the power of education to spread opportunity. Speak to any teacher across the country and they will say that poverty limits our children’s learning and the life chances. In ending the two-child limit, we are investing in education, raising standards, and giving children a better start right across our country. That is not the limit of our ambition, because we know that there is much more to do, but we have so far achieved an enormous amount. We are acting to raise the minimum wage for the lowest earners and bringing back Sure Start for a new generation through our Best Start family hubs with more support for parents. We are opening new breakfast clubs and expanding Government-funded childcare, and we are introducing new school-based nurseries to give parents work choices and children life chances.

I call the Chair of the Education Committee.

I warmly welcome the publication of the child poverty strategy, which builds on the steps that the Government have already taken, including expanding access to free school meals and introducing free breakfast clubs. I particularly welcome the removal of the two-child benefit cap. All the evidence is clear that that has been one of the biggest contributors to the shameful increase in child poverty that we have seen in recent years. My Committee, along with the Work and Pensions Committee, will undertake detailed scrutiny of the strategy and play our part in ensuring that its implementation is as effective as it can be.

I welcome the focus on temporary accommodation. Where children sleep and the safety and security of their home environment have a huge impact on their life chances. However, I note that the measures in the strategy are limited to pilots. This work is badly needed across the country, so when does the Secretary of State expect to roll out the work to eliminate the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for families everywhere, so that no child’s life needs to be scarred by the trauma of living in temporary accommodation?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that temporary accommodation is linked to worse outcomes for children and that there are deep consequences for those who are forced to endure living in B&Bs and other unsuitable accommodation. We are working with the 20 local authorities with the highest usage of B&Bs to bring those numbers down, and we are backing up this work with investment. That runs alongside the £39 billion investment we are putting into social and affordable housing. We also have our homelessness strategy coming forward in due course, which will set out the further steps that the Government will take. I look forward to discussing this further with my hon. Friend’s Committee next time I am before it.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

Every child, no matter their background, deserves the opportunity to flourish and fulfil their potential. The Liberal Democrats welcome any and all efforts to reduce the number of children in poverty, because we believe that investing in our children and young people is one of the most important investments a Government can make. That is why we welcomed the Chancellor’s announcement at the Budget that the Government will lift the cap on universal credit for families with more than two children. It was a cruel policy put in place by George Osborne and the Conservatives when they were left to their own devices in government.

This strategy includes a smorgasbord of existing proposals, but it is very light on any new measures that we urgently need to tackle the scourge of child poverty. Even the Government’s own numbers suggest that the strategy will leave nearly 4 million children stuck in poverty. The Government need to go further. The Secretary of State could start by properly funding the very welcome expansion in free school meals and, crucially, automatically enrolling children on to the scheme, so that no child slips through the cracks and misses out on a hot, healthy meal. The Education Secretary could also set a cap on the cost of branded school uniform, so that hard-pressed parents do not have to suffer over-inflated prices as a result of her short-sighted policy to cap the number of branded uniform items.

We know that one of the biggest determinants of outcomes is housing. Like many other London MPs, I regularly see families in my surgery who are suffering the devastating consequences of being shoved into temporary accommodation many miles away from their schools and wider family. If the Government are serious about ending the use of B&B accommodation, they must focus on building social housing. We need to build 150,000 social homes every year in order that local people can genuinely afford to live in their area, with local services to meet their needs.

This is an ambitious strategy, which will see the largest ever reduction in the number of children growing up in poverty in a single Parliament since records began. No one can accuse us of lacking ambition when it comes to driving down those numbers. While I note the hon. Lady’s reference to the introduction of the two-child limit, I would observe that it was after 2010—under the coalition Government—that we saw, for example, the mass closure programme of Sure Start centres right across our country, even though the evidence was clear about the outcomes that they delivered and the difference they made to families. That is why I am proud that this Labour Government are bringing back Sure Start for a new generation with Best Start family hubs to ensure that all families and children get the support they need.

Running alongside that, as I have set out, we are investing £39 billion in social and affordable housing, the single biggest uplift in support in a generation, to build the social and affordable homes that people in London and across our country desperately need. That runs alongside all the measures in the Employment Rights Bill, the changes around universal credit and the expansion of free school meals; we are putting an extra £1 billion into supporting families. This Labour Government are investing to deliver the brighter future that all our children deserve.

Official figures show that over 4,000 children in my constituency are living in poverty, and many of those families have one parent in work. I warmly welcome the Secretary of State’s child poverty strategy and all the work that she and her colleagues have done, as well as the lifting of the two-child limit, but would she agree that what we now need to see is children and families not needing to use food banks?

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for all the work that she did in the Department for Education and for all that she continues to do to champion the life chances of children in her community and across our country. She contributed a lot to the work that has gone into the strategy; I am grateful to her for that.

I agree with her: I want to live in a country where families have enough money to go to the shops to buy the food that they want for their children and to make the decisions that are right for them. I pay tribute to the amazing volunteers in our community organisations and churches who give their time freely to run the food banks, but I hope that in the years to come we can shut down those food banks and make sure that all families have a good level of income and do not have to depend on the good will of strangers to get by.

Last year, the Secretary of State, her Front-Bench colleagues and pretty much everyone behind her voted against lifting the two-child benefit cap—[Hon. Members: “No, we didn’t.”] Those who rebelled had the Whip withdrawn. What would she say to those rebels now? What has changed since that vote last year?

I have long campaigned on child poverty, and I have led this taskforce together with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and with the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who is now the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. We were always clear that we would look at all the evidence—at the most effective ways that we could lift the greatest numbers of children out of poverty—and we have done precisely that. The only people who have been playing politics with children’s lives and children’s futures are the Conservatives.

I thank the Secretary of State for her statement. I speak to teachers in Harlow on a weekly basis, and they tell me that poverty is a huge barrier to young people’s education, and as a former teacher myself, I can absolutely testify to that. Could the Secretary of State touch on how these policies will make a huge difference to young people in Harlow and to their educational outcomes, and on how they will support teachers to get the best outcomes for those young people?

I have heard from so many school leaders, teachers and staff across our country about the impact that child poverty has on their ability to do their jobs. They do amazing things to support the children and families in their care, whether by helping with temporary accommodation, washing clothes or even sometimes putting their hand in their own pocket to provide financial support for families who are struggling, but they should not have to do that; it is not sustainable. That is why the investment that we are making in lifting children out of poverty is also an investment in children and their life chances and in education. The evidence is clear not only that big gaps open up in attainment for children who are on free school meals but that those who have experienced child poverty are more likely to be unemployed or in low-skilled or lower-paid jobs as adults. This is about the difference we make for our children not just in the here and now; it is a long-term investment in our education system, our teachers and our staff, and it is an investment in making sure that we have a stronger and more resilient economy.