Ending child poverty

A child poverty strategy

The UK government has committed to a UK-wide cross-government child poverty strategy. It will be published later in 2025. The strategy must contain binding targets to reduce and eliminate child poverty over the short, medium and long term. And it must include investment in the social security system, scrapping the two-child limit and the benefit cap as the first step.

Read our research on how to deliver a child poverty strategy.

In 2017 the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act setting child poverty targets and requiring:

• the Scottish government to produce child poverty delivery plans and annual reports, and
• local and health boards to jointly publish annual reports on what they are doing to reduce child poverty in the local area.

In Northern Ireland, there is a commitment to publish an anti-poverty strategy in 2025, with a key focus on children. The Welsh government published a child poverty strategy in 2024.

Read more about different nations' approaches in State of the Nations. 

Four steps that would help right now

These four steps would immediately lift a million children out of poverty:

Scrap the two-child limit

The two-child limit restricts support in universal credit and tax credits to two children in a family. The two-child limit breaks the link between what children need and the support they receive.

Removing the two-child limit would lift 300,000 children out of poverty and mean 700,000 children are in less deep poverty.

The Scottish government is planning to mitigate the two-child limit from 2026.

Our position on the two-child limit.

Abolish the benefit cap

The benefit cap restricts the amount of support a working-age household can receive from the social security system. Those most likely to be capped are lone parents, large families and families with young children.

Abolishing the cap would mean that about 300,000 children would be living in less deep poverty.

The Scottish government is mitigating the benefit cap as fully as possible through discretionary housing payments.

Our position on the benefit cap.

Make free school meals available to all pupils

Free school meals (FSMs) are school lunches provided to some children. Who is eligible for FSMs varies across the UK. The current eligibility for means-tested FSMs is stringent, meaning 900,000 children in poverty in England alone miss out.

Free school meals should be available to all children at all stages of schooling.

Increase child benefit by £20 a week for all children

Since 2010 child benefit has lost 20 per cent of its value and the higher-income charge has undermined the universal principle of support for all children. An increasing number of families and children are falling out of the system.

Child benefit should be increased by £20 per child a week. The higher-income charge should be removed to make child benefit universal again. Increasing child benefit would further reduce child poverty while also supporting the low and middle income families who aren't eligible for means tested benefits but still struggle financially.

Increasing child benefit by £20 a week would pull 600,000 children out of poverty, at a cost of £12 billion.

Changes to benefits and payments

Our social security system was set up to support everyone when they need it.

Remove the five-week wait at the start of a claim for universal credit

When someone starts a new claim for universal credit, they have to wait at least five weeks for their first regular payment. They can get an advance loan, but they'll have to pay this back out of their benefits in the future, so then they'll have less money coming in regularly. A lot of people don't have enough money, get into debt and feel very anxious because they have had to wait over a month for their first payment.

We want the DWP to remove the five week wait. People should be able to get an advance when they first claim universal credit which they don't have to pay back.

Review the support for housing costs in universal credit

For a lot of people housing is their biggest expense. At the moment, the benefits system does not always cover the full costs of housing for people on low incomes. There is a local housing allowance, but in many areas it doesn't actually cover the cost of renting a home in that area.

We want the local housing allowance in each area to be increased every year in line with how much it actually costs to rent a home there. This would mean that families could pay their rent without having to worry about making up the difference from very squeezed budgets. Fewer children would grow up homeless and in temporary accommodation as a result.

Remove 'no recourse to public funds' for families  

Lots of people who are migrants are not eligible to claim most benefits. This is called 'no recourse to public funds' and is a condition of many migrants' entry to the UK. Many families with no recourse to public funds struggle to make ends meet.

We want the 'no recourse to public funds' condition for families with children to be removed, which would help 175,000 children.

Regularly uprate benefits for children

Since 2010, as costs have increased, children's benefits have only risen with inflation five times. They do not reflect the needs of children and families today.  

We want the government to make it compulsory to increase all benefits at the same rate as prices or earnings, whichever is higher. This would mean that children's benefits would provide more support.

Increase child maintenance payments for lone parents

Child maintenance can be an important source of income for lone-parent families and help to reduce poverty. It is estimated that if all maintenance due was paid in full, 60 per cent of UK children currently not benefiting from maintenance would be lifted out of poverty.

There should be a review of the Child Maintenance Service, including charges and enforcement measures, explicitly focusing on reducing child poverty in lone-parent families. 

Changes to work and childcare

More rights to care for children

Many families find it very difficult to balance work and caring for their children or finding good, affordable childcare.

We want the government to make policies that let parents choose the right balance of work and care for their family.

This includes:

• adequately paid maternity, paternity and parental leave
• rights to flexible and part-time working
• affordable, easy to access childcare that parents trust, including after-school and holiday clubs.

Better work

Many parents struggle to find work that pays well, uses all their skills and fits in with what their family needs.

We want the government to make policies which improve the quality and pay of work.

These include:

• minimum wages
• guaranteed hours
• employment security
• pathways that allow progression in work
• access to education, training and employment support.

Simpler, better childcare

At the moment the system parents have to use to get help with paying for childcare is complicated and time consuming. Families claiming universal credit only get support with up to 85 per cent of their costs.

We want the government to make the system more straightforward. This would mean that parents could start working or could work more hours, so they were better off and were less likely to be in poverty.

We also want the government to commit to reforming childcare. We think that a universal, publicly funded system would make childcare cheaper and improve quality, which would be better for families and children.

Raise the minimum wage

Many families are trapped in poverty through low wages and insecure work. If only one parent works it can be impossible to get out of poverty because there just isn't enough money coming in.

The minimum wage for 2024 is £11.44 per hour for people aged 21 and above, with lower rates for younger people.

We want the government to set the national minimum wage at £15 per hour, in line with what the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has proposed. This would help to raise wages generally, which would benefit all employees and workers. If families had more money coming in they would be less likely to be in poverty and they might not need to claim benefits to try to make ends meet.

Reduce costs for families

Families have lots of extra things to pay for, for example travel for children and young people, school costs and higher energy bills from heating homes with more people in.

We want to see other schemes set up and extended to support families with these extra costs, for example:

• free travel for young people, such as London’s Zip Oyster scheme and free bus travel for under-22s in Scotland
• making housing costs cheaper
• making the cost of utilities like energy and water cheaper.