Reeves' 'growth promise' won't help children in poverty - it could make it worse

29 January 2025, 08:20

Reeves' 'growth promise' won't help children in poverty - it could make it worse
Reeves' 'growth promise' won't help children in poverty - it could make it worse. Picture: Alamy
Paul Kissack

By Paul Kissack

As the nation went to the polls last year for a General Election, one in five people in the UK were living in poverty, including nearly one in three children.

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest UK Poverty report – published today – lays out the scale and nature of this poverty.

The numbers in the report should shock us, but they tend not to. In many ways they are wearily familiar. But behind the raw statistics are millions of individual human stories, and the challenging reality for people who can’t reach a life of dignity or progress.

For too many, each day is a grinding battle just to afford the most basic items that many of us take for granted.

Today, the Chancellor will promise to kickstart the economy, to get it growing again. But the scale and depth of the poverty and insecurity we see in our country is acting as a tightening brake on economic growth and opportunity, driving up poor health and adding pressures on the NHS, reducing children’s readiness for school and ability to learn.

And while poverty acts as a brake on growth, increased growth itself will not automatically reduce poverty. 

Our research shows that, on the current trajectory, the rest of this decade will not see progress on any form of poverty, even under the best economic growth scenario.

The reality is that poverty will only be driven down through focused, deliberate and determined policy action.  That policy action must start with the system designed to help people meet their costs of living – social security.

At the moment that system is not only failing to do its job but, worse, actively pushing some people into deeper poverty, through cruel limits and caps.

The good news is that change – meaningful change to people’s lives – is possible and can be achieved quickly. We know this from our recent history, and from different approaches across the UK.

The British public believes that everyone should be able to afford the essentials. With its child poverty strategy later this year, the Government has the opportunity to show it agrees.

Any credible child poverty strategy must include policies that rebuild the tattered social security system. The wellbeing of millions of children depends on that.

And so do the Government’s wider ambitions for economic growth, improved living standards and opportunity.

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Paul Kissack is the Group Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT).

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