In 2012 the then Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, said “quite simply, we have been encouraging working-age people to have children and not work.”
He described his welfare changes as “very simply about backing those who work hard and do the right thing.”
Fast forward a decade and four prime ministers later, and we hear Rishi Sunak say “we do not want any child to grow up in poverty”.
Yet data published this week by the End Child Poverty Coalition shows that by bringing an end to the additional support made available during the pandemic, this government succeeded in driving up the number of children experiencing poverty to 4.2 million last year. It’s an increase of over half a million in just 12 months.
The Prime Minister’s answer to this problem is to argue that “the best way to ensure that children do not grow up in poverty is to ensure that they do not grow up in a workless household.".
Why then is the number of children in poverty living in working households on the rise again?
The research, carried out by Loughborough University, shows that last year the number of children living in working households rose from 65% to 71%.
In the North East, more than a fifth of children (21.5%) have two parents who ‘do the right thing’ and work hard yet go without the basics.
In a year of rising rents, food and energy bills, some 71% of children in poverty live in households with at least one adult in work - up from 65% last year.
Analysis for the End Child Poverty Coalition of the Department for Work and Pensions’ own data shows that children with two or more siblings are significantly more likely to be experiencing poverty in England and Wales.
Behind each of these statistics is a young person who should be growing up happy and healthy but whose life is being held back by welfare policies that the evidence shows us aren’t working. Children whose parents are working on low pay, with the pound in their pocket growing weaker and weaker. Children being punished and brought up in poverty simply because they have two or more siblings.
Solving this will take much more than families buying a cheaper tin of beans, as one Tory MP said last month. It will take fundamental, structural change to the way we look after those in need.
At a time when Conservative MPs are bemoaning declining birth rates, even on their own terms, the two-child limit for those claiming Universal Credit, in particular, strikes me as increasingly absurd.
I’ve seen no evidence that the limit achieves its already questionable aims. However, it has pushed children into poverty, punishing poor children for being poor before they’ve even been born.
As one of the End Child Poverty Coalition’s Young Ambassadors says: “I live in a large family, I have more than five siblings and many people assume we are financially well off because there are so many of us and both my parents’ work. But this isn't the case, we are in poverty, like many larger families across the UK. The two-child limit doesn't help, it feels like we are being punished for being alive, 'how dare you exist, only the eldest two are acceptable!’”
We saw during the pandemic that the political will to try and treat this problem exists during a time of crisis. That crisis era £20 uplift in Universal Credit saw child poverty drop by more than one per cent for the first time in a decade. But over four million children living in poverty today is, without a doubt, a crisis that will have knock-on effects for years to come as today’s children become tomorrow’s adults.
To leave millions of children without a warm home and without food to eat demonstrates how many holes exist in our nation’s safety net. We know the solutions, but now is the time to act.
* Follow Mirror Politics on Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter and Facebook.
