We write as two paediatricians deeply alarmed by the scale of child poverty in the UK. It is unconscionable that any child should go to bed hungry – least of all in the world’s fifth largest economy.
As the children’s commissioner wrote in her July 2025 report, “This report should not have to exist.” Nor, indeed, should this letter, nor Stephen Cottrell’s excoriating piece (I have seen the extent of child poverty in the UK and I say this: the two-child benefit cap must go, 1 September), nor Gordon Brown’s powerful warning (Nothing prepared me for the child poverty I see in Britain. November’s budget can and must halt its inexorable rise, 15 September). And yet here we are – still needing to remind our leaders that poverty blights childhood, shortens lives, and scars futures.
