According to a report in The Mirror this morning, which is based on government data sorted by council ward:
According to the latest figures from the DWP, a record-high 4.5 million children across the country were found to have been living in poverty in the year ending March 2024 - the last full year under the Conservative government. That's an extra 121,000 children compared to the year prior
They add:
Some parts of the country are faring much worse than others. Local level figures, which are calculated slightly differently to the national ones, show that in over 130 neighbourhoods, the majority of children are living in poverty.
For example, they note:
In the Newport ward of Middlesbrough, six out of every seven children - that's 85% of them - are living below the breadline. That's the highest proportion of any electoral ward in the UK. The Manningham area of Bradford has the next highest proportion, with nearly three quarters (72%) of children living in poverty. That's followed by Bordesley Green in Birmingham (71%), Heartlands in Birmingham (70%), Daneshouse with Stoneyholme in Burnley (69%), Bradford Moor in Bradford (69%), and Gipton & Harehills in Leeds (69%).
As they point out:
The figures show a stark regional divide when it comes to child poverty, with the 20 worst affected areas all in the North of England and Birmingham.
Just 1% of children in Godalming Holloway in Waverley and Oatlands and Burwood Park in Elmbridge were living in poverty last year.
Do children in poverty and their parents care about fiscal rules?
Do they think balancing budgets is the highest priority of the government?
Do they vote for parties that promise prudence?
Of course, they do not.
They care about jobs, pay, benefits, public services, the creation of opportunities, and the availability of decent housing. They want hope.
Labour does not offer any of those things. Its policies are, however, no doubt going down quite well in Godalming and Elmbridge.
A party that does not put people first does not deserve to govern this country.
The troubling fact is that for many people, Farage looks to be the only person who cares. He doesn't. He cares as much about people in the Northeast and Birmingham as he does those in Johannesburg and Jakarta, by which I mean, he really does not care at all. But that is not the point: like Trump, he can persuade people he does, even if he has no intention of delivering on any promise, except to himself.
Labour can ignore this issue of child poverty, and it will lose.
It can address it, and it may survive.
But even if it doesn't, children, the families they live in, and whole communities might benefit if they do the right thing. Right now, they are not.
And it is that last point that is crucial. Politics should not be all about the electoral equation of winning and losing. It should be about doing he right thing, for the people in need, whose lives the government can improve the most.
Labour has forgotten that. If and when they ever recall it, they might have a chance again. Right now, they have none and do not deserve it.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Absolutely shocking isn’t it. But I’m not surprised most of this is in the north and Birmingham. Leveling up was always a joke in those places.
I really hope that what Trump ISN’T doing for poorer people in the US gets through to people who might vote for Farage’s party and his cronies in the local elections. But I don’t think it will as it’s just a non news item compared to what he’s doing with tariffs and so on. But I also think turnout will be abysmal. After all, why vote again when in less than a year we’ve seen a party that supposedly promised so much deliver so little – and what it has done is mostly to the benefit of the already wealthy. Why have any faith in democracy!
That last point is the subject of a post that has not yet been finished. Too much to do this morning….
As I said recently here, what happened to all that stuff about social exclusion in the 1990s? It was an idea that could have saved capitalism and taken it away from the focus on materialism.
Instead what we have is society dominated by virtue signalling wealth and independence and which tolerates market failure, blaming individuals for their choices and ignoring fundamental issues with the problems of badly distributed wealth.
Having turned us all into well informed consumers, now the system lies to us at scale, and we get the blame for that too. We are living in a an extreme capitalist utopia at the moment. We are all so vulnerable.
Excellent!
The really tough bit is going to be effectively, dare I say, “forensically” demolishing Farage, not in the eyes of the comfortable, but in the eyes of his potential supporters in those deprived wards, because he isn’t in power and isn’t accountable for that child poverty, and he can and will, convincingly blame all the usual scapegoats and about 30% of what he says will be true.
We have to out-Fa***e the Reform candidates, not by the LINO method of moving right, but by REALLY showing we understand the grievances of left-behind communities, and being able to shift their anger from “the usual scapegoats” to the real causes of their misery.
(I have Arron Banks standing for Reform in the WECA Mayoralty – who wants a disgusting smirking multi-millionaire bully deciding the fate of our buses? When was HE ever on a bus? Is he even fit for public office? I personally don’t think so.)
The other problem is that the families most affected by child (or any other sort of) poverty won’t be voting at all. Why should they? Who would they vote for? Maybe some wards might choose a pro-Palestine independent, but not many.
But I like the focus on Fa***e. Effectively dealing with his disgusting but highly effective populism is, like explaining QE, “hard”, and a long slow ground level, grass-roots job. It will be helped probably in those short form videos rather than here but we need to learn how to deal with him too. Remember, he’s not in power, he hasn’t “failed” yet. So it’s much much harder to destroy him in the eyes of his fans.
The other task is appealing to the consciences of >400 Labour MPs. That will require supernatural intervention. I’m working on it, every day. 😉
Child poverty is an insufferable blight on any society. As ever, the Mirror’s Anglo-centric report makes no mention of the Scottish Child Payment. This allowance of £ 27.15 per week is made for every child up to age 16 when the main carer is in receipt of a range of other benefits and has had a significant effect on reducing child poverty. That the Westminster Government chooses to do nothing to alleviate this terrible situation is, well – choose your own epithet!
Accepted
Good Morning,
It seems to me that timing in these situations is everything, and the instability we are looking at now presents a unique opportunity for the implementation of the changes needed to bury the Neoliberalism that started with Thatcher and Regan and has infected every government that we have had since then.
Trump has created the nearest thing we are likely to experience to wartime than we are likely to see without actually firing any bullets. So all we need to do now is convert our current Labour Government into something that resembles the Labour Government that pulled the country up by the bootstraps after WWII. The big question is how do we do that.
I believe it is important that we find an answer to this question as a matter of urgency.
If we wait another 10 years anyone who can remember a world that worked well before neoliberalism will either be dead or in a care home and those left behind will only have a Neoliberal life experience to draw upon. So how do we start a grey revolution to turn the Labour Party around ??
This blog exists to help find that answer
This is the next generation. The idiots Starmer and Reeves fail to comprehend what damage this does to their development as they become adults.
Thank you, Tom.
The evidence of malnutrition and stunted growth are already in evidence.
It’s criminal.
Rickets is making a heroic comeback, despite the efforts of woke doctors, & nutritionists to stop it. Proof positive of the genetic inferiority of the untermenschen in rented property up north.
“Let the bodies pile high!”
“If you don’t want your children to get rickets, then why don’t you go and live somewhere sunny?”
Here, let me make some splints for you, out of my “cast iron fiscal rules”. There you are, that’s better, now you can do agile manouevering for Uncle Keir and Auntie Rachel and cousin Wes.
Anyone for Ozempic? (We have a new supply just in, sponsored by the national sugar consumption corporation.)
Remember, Labour promised change, and they are delivering change.
Child poverty UP
Rents UP
Mortgages UP
Energy bills UP
Sewage spills UP
Train fares UP
NHS redundancies UP
Child poverty UP
Unreported and unsolved crime UP
PIP payments DOWN
Sorry, got a bit angry there…
But most of those fuel:
GDP UP
What are you complaining about (irony alert)?
https://endchildpoverty.org.uk/two_child_limit-2025/
Says it all really.
There is a lot that could be done with no more than a stroke of a pen but wont be
So, we are letting the youngest members of society down right, agreed?
I bet a fair few of these kids now find themselves in temporary accommodation (TA) or worse.
We know that TA is bankrupting councils general fund accounts as it is not paid out of the HRA (housing revenue account).
Here is another example of Thatcher’s chickens coming home to roost………….LSVT.
In the early 2000’s my then employer – a district council no less – sold its council housing to a Local Housing Company (LHC) under an LSVT (Large Scale Voluntary Transfer). The LHC was basically a small housing association (HA).
The ‘voluntary’ bit was about getting tenants to vote for it, on the promise of ‘more investment’ in the homes free of the government dilly-dallying over what to spend or not) and a truly ‘local service’ that was responsive (local offices and all that). The receipt for the stock – which I felt was undervalued since a lot of it was in rural locations – was used for ‘other projects’ that were non-housing. Let’s leave that at that.
But what happened was that the LHC went the way of all small HAs – in order to meet its costs it had to get swallowed up in a bigger structure and merge with other larger HAs, in a ‘group’.
So, if people living in this rural part of the East Midlands now want a service, the service provider is based in………………Birmingham. The West Midlands.
Where I live is mixed tenure. Since last year, there has one HA 3 bed house standing empty on the corner of my street for as long as I can remember that could house a family; two OAP bungalows at the back of my house have lain empty for at last 7 months.
The whole thing has proven to be bullshit. The banks have their loans for the stock, various other corporations have flogged services to what were council provided services, everyone is making money and the tenants get what exactly? And housing lists grow and councils go bankrupt when compelled to find people TA under the law that is underfunded by the highest law maker in the land – Parliament.
And what do we hear here in the East Midlands? Why the creation of group structures for councils with the creation of new ‘joint authorities’ and ‘super councils’.
It was once wisdom to see smaller orgs’ as better and more responsive. These children you speak of could become even more invisible in the ‘care’ of larger organisations. My local authority (current employer) is just about solvent; the one it would join up with is much larger and has already declared itself bankrupt after making some bad decisions and mis-using its HRA. How an earth can amalgamating a small just-surviving LA with a larger one be the answer to anything?
This is England – spelt ‘FUBAR’ or ‘SNAFU’. Shane Meadows needs to make some more TV films – he has lots of material as our society breaks down.
Thanks
“4.5 million children across the country were found to have been living in poverty in the year ending March 2024 ” and in related news, Uk bankers will continue to recieve a £20 billion GIFT from the government for holding government money, given to them by the government..
Mrs Reeves from UK gov accounts noted that unlike starving children, bankers work hard and create wealth for the country, when asked how, exactly, she promised to get back to the questioner with a detailed response. In other related news, Mr Farage said that large numbers of chimenys in the country needed sweeping and any government he led would put children in poverty to work cleaning them., thereby taking them out of poverty. When asked would he put his children doing such work he accused the questioner of being a pinko-marxist-liberal hand wringer.
Down in the South of England the 4.5 million figure was greeted with a shrug.
Sadly, not far removed from the truth.
‘Just come home to find a Reform leaflet on my door mat.
Said leaflet has become the doormat.
‘Nuff said.
Keir and Rachel have to stick to the fiscal rules come hell or high water! They do not care about people in poverty.
Thank you for this RM so well said.
What we are witnessing particularly in England is unprecedented in post war history. We are going backwards.
75% of children living in poverty have one working parent. Work doesn’t pay anymore, certainly doesn’t pay the costs of private rents.
I recently discussed this very issue with a senior English DoE Whitehall civil servant, a decent hardworking public servant; I asked, do Westminster politicians understand how damaging poverty is to children’s learning and development? The reply was yes they have the data and yes they understand, but they choose to ignore this, due to their political views.
This is state-backed child abuse.
Poverty significantly increases child abuse and poverty, in turn this increases long term impacts of childhood trauma, which is like having and trying to recover from a brain injury.
https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/cacs/projects/the-relationship-between-poverty-and-child-abuse/
Unsurprisingly the numbers of children referred to children’s services in England are rising both in SEND and Children’s Social Care, whilst cuts continue as I write. Preventative services are pulled as impoverished councils struggle to meet even statutory services. So this reactive vicious cycle spins faster. The morale of frontline workers is low, 30% agency frontline workers not unusual. It’s not a recipe to create positive change when the workforce is exhausted, overwhelmed and transient.
Children coming into care are rising, Their needs are more complex, more risky, in England council residential homes sold in the name of ‘efficiency’, forcing English councils to use private care homes, charging £15,000 a week a new normal.
I struggled to comprehend how politicians live with this predation and profiteering of parentless children who have survived horror. See Monbiot
Our prisons, criminal justice system,
hospitals pick up the tab because childhood trauma has a long legacy causing mental illness, cancer, diabetes. Study showed it was 2.2 billion a year in Wales and that was pre Covid, see Bangor Uni study.
Note Scotland and Wales have a national Adverse Childhood Experiences/ Trauma strategy. England has none. Why not?
Meanwhile since 1948 Finland has fed its children every day, a healthy school dinner, thus their children are happier and better educated.
Politcians appear to have no comprehension of the cost to councils either – which they want to go bust to avoid their obligations, it would seem. This is callousness. There is no other description for it.
With regard to child poverty, I am baffled.
I do not understand how can a substantial majority of the 650 MPs repeatedly act as if they don’t know or don’t care.
Is basic economics beyond so many of them? Do they leave analysis of neoliberalism to a minority that dare not speak out in case it might damage their careers?
Is it the whips and their tried and tested system?
Is it the promises they have been required to make?
And Gaza!
Morality? Conscience? Truth? Responsibility?
My MP is kind and a thoughtful parent. He appears to be pretty intelligent.
I’ll send this to him together with a ‘Why won’t Rachel Reeves save £20 billion a year?’ note.
Thanks
This is a blistering attack on neoliberalism and what it’s doing to us as a society:
https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/its-time-to-clear-out-neoliberalism-the-uks-dark-underbelly-that-dooms-us-to-failure
Thank you Hannah. A very informative link.
I was struck by the info. about nursing in Crimea which reminded me of my thoughts during a stay in hospital recently.
In 2006, when Nicola was Health Secretary, hospital cleaning services were brought back “in-house”, reversing the previous contracting -out. The rate of Hospital Acquired Infections has fallen dramatically since then. Prof. John Robertson has a number of posts on his blog at Talking Up Scotland –
https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2025/02/22/how-the-snp-government-tackled-a-crisis-in-hospital-acquired-infections-inherited-from-scottish-labour-by-halving-them-in-5-years-and-then-reducing-them-to-one-tenth/
– is one example. Another illustration of how NHS Scotland do things differently within the constraints set by Westminster.
During my stay, I was able to observe the efficient and thorough job being done by them. I was also struck by the tonic effect of the gossipy, cheery “wee wummin”, the regular cleaner on our ward. She lifted the spirits of we inmates simply by being so cheerful. Worth her weight!
Thanks
Appreciatec
Thank you for a most important article!
Not only does it demonstrate that our present and recent governments come somewhere between callous and cruel, might it also raises serious concerns about the realities of our current [alleged] democracy?
Might we assess our “democracy” against these criteria?
1) Legitimacy?
2) Acceptability?
3) Reasonable equity of service across the whole of our/their society?
Might we use these criteria against, at least, three phases of democratic function?
a) Input?
b) Processes?
c) Outcomes/outputs?
Might “Input” fail because our elections only concern one House of Parliament, voting has been made more complex by voter validity rules, “first past the post” effectively disenfranchises many voters and an appropriate wider range of political policies?
Might process be affected by the following – large donations, the enticements of lucrative post political careers, a lout-like House of Commons, a questionable set relationships between politicians and journalists etc.?
The extreme inequity of service to the subsets which comprise our [alleged] national community/nation is demonstrated beyond doubt by your article and the Food Bank data below.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users/
P. S. “Output evaluations are the most important driver for citizens’ choice of a government arrangement;”
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/152187/
Thanks
I started a job with a children’s centre in the midlands in 2008 and the statistics were alarming then, with Wales worse off then England around that time. Despite the County Council ring-fencing funding for a year or so early in the next decade, the next round of cuts reduced the number of centres leaving ‘hubs’ out of reach of many, and cutting relationships built up between staff and local families. It was heartbreaking.
I hear this too often
I cannot comprehend those who do not care.
Is it so much to ask of our politicians that they address the needs of the country’s children and any adults who struggle to get by? I don’t believe there have to be so many in poverty in this wealthy country. Let’s have people’s assemblies all over the country to come up with solutions. As many people as possible need to be actively engaged in addressing this national scandal and putting pressure on those who hold the levers of power to do something. How hard can it be?
The numbers from Middlesbrough and Bradford are heartbreaking. If Labour wants to stand for fairness, tackling this should be a top priority—not just with words, but with targeted investment in these communities.
I live near the two areas in Birmingham mentioned, Bordesley and Heartlands. They have majority Asian populations, who have very little hope.
They won’t vote for Farage, many don’t vote at all, those that voted in the last General Election either voted Labour or for Independent or pro-Palestine candidates.
A couple of Labour MPs had their majorities significantly reduced.
Where do you start with Birmingham at the moment?
Outside of the city centre, much investment is needed, both time and money. The council is having to make hundreds of people redundant – it’s all very depressing and Labour has no answers apart from ‘growth’
Thanks
Richard, just to let you know, the current Government’s policies and their impact on children is not going down well in Godalming and the local CLP expressed its discontent at our last meeting. It is a market town in Surrey but it is not a Tory town and most people I know here are pretty outraged by the Government’s lack of imagination and compassion.
I used to know Godalming. I know it’s nit all big houses, but some is. Good luck.
Poverty is not a natural phenomenon. It’s created and maintained by economic systems that prioritise the needs of a few against the needs of many. The ‘deficit’ is a meaningless concept, behind which those who pretend / believe (?) a country’s economy is akin to a household economy can hide.
Labour are shameful.
Poverty is a political choice. Normalising the existance of food banks is a political choice. You kind of expect it from the tories, but we all thought if Labour got in, things would improve. Not so. They’ve gone after the meagre benefits of the most vulnerable, accepted the existence of child poverty in one of the richest countries on earth as normal and have continued the process of making the rich richer. Never have I felt more betrayed by politicians. Labour will never get my vote again.
Thanks
They are LINO
I’m being contrary here, but no, not “ALL” of us thought Labour would make things better. Anyone watching Starmer from around 2016 onwards was very afraid of what was coming, and not at all surprised at what we ended up with.
I think the only thing I underestimated was their incompetence.
For example only a complete fool would have missed the opportunity of Trump’s “Liberation Day” to disguise a complete U turn on “cast iron fiscal rules” having been assured of the Guardian editorial team’s support, but no, they even missed that opportunity.
I’m surprised by their stupidity but not their duplicity or callousness – that’s all been on public display for several years especially to anyone with a party card.
Still, maybe it’s a good thing that not everyone is as hard-bitten a cynic as me…