Tackling child poverty in the UK

Child poverty in the UK persists at historically high levels, with an estimated 4.5 million children living in relative poverty, 1 with literature consistently demonstrating the wide-ranging impacts of poverty across health, development and future life chances. Historically, child poverty declined under the Labour Governments of 1997–2010, underpinned by an explicit mission to eradicate child poverty by 2020, but rose sharply following the introduction of austerity agenda in 2010. Over the decade between 2013 and 2023, UK child poverty increased by more than 20%; in contrast, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, Romania and Slovenia all reduced child poverty by more than a quarter, highlighting child poverty in the UK as a politically manufactured exposure rather than socioeconomic inevitability.2