Former prime minister Gordon Brown has described a new report on child poverty as evidence of the “urgent need to act” on an issue facing millions.
His comments come ahead of the expected publication of the Government’s child poverty strategy this autumn – having been delayed from spring.
A report by the independent cross-party poverty strategy commission, published on Thursday, makes a series of calls including to scrap the controversial two-child benefit limit.
The commission states that it is “clearly a concern that more than one in three of the UK’s future citizens are growing up in poverty, with all of the damage to educational outcomes and future health and employment prospects that comes with it”.
The most recent official statistics showed there were 4.45 million children estimated to be in UK households in relative low income, after housing costs, in the year to March 2024 – the highest number since comparable records for the UK began in 2002/03.
The independent commission’s report calls for the two-child limit to be done away with as part of a group of wider measures to introduce a so-called “benefits floor” to ensure no-one has to live in deep poverty – where their total resources fall below 50% below the poverty line.
They also called for the standard allowance in universal credit to be raised to provide “at least the level of support needed for different families to avoid deep poverty” and for an assurance that any deductions from benefits such as debt repayments do not push families below the deep poverty line.
They also called for a new social contract, where efforts to tackle poverty “are shared between actors from across society”, including everyone working as much as they can reasonably be expected to, employers providing decent wages and support for workplace health and wellbeing, and Government structuring markets to ensure housing and childcare costs are reasonable.
The group estimated that their recommended measures “could reduce poverty by 4.2 million and deep poverty by 2.2 million”.
Mr Brown, a former Labour prime minister, said: “This report reveals the deep, abject and worsening poverty faced by millions of children and the urgent need to act.”
His comments follow a call he made recently for a rise in gambling taxes to cover the cost of scrapping the two-child benefit limit.
The two-child cap was first announced in 2015 by the Conservatives and came into effect in 2017. It restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in most households.
One of the commissioners before Labour got into power last year was Sir Stephen Timms, who is currently a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions – although the Government is not bound by any of the independent commission’s recommendations.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, who is co-chairwoman of the Government’s child poverty taskforce, recently said she was “ashamed” of the levels of child poverty and hinted at benefits changes to help address the issue.
She spoke after faith leaders put pressure on the Government to scrap the two-child benefit limit, adding to repeated calls from child poverty campaigners on the issue.
A Government spokesperson said: “This Government is determined to drive down poverty and ensure that every child gets the best start in life.
“We are overhauling Jobcentres and reforming the broken welfare system to support people into good, secure jobs, while always protecting those who need it most.
“In addition to extending free school meals and ensuring the poorest children don’t go hungry in the holidays through a new £1 billion crisis support package, our Child Poverty Taskforce will publish an ambitious strategy to tackle the structural and root causes of child poverty across the country.”
