Child poverty statistics explainer
New child poverty statistics (for 2024/25) will be published on 26 March.
There will be three key changes to the poverty statistics:
- Poverty statistics will be based on the household incomes people have reported as usual, but additional information on what benefits people are receiving (admin data) will be added. This is because benefit income has been under-reported in the past.
- Absolute poverty statistics, where the poverty line stays the same over time, are being re-based. Until now they have shown poverty levels based on the 2010/11 poverty line, but will now use the 2024/25 poverty line (and therefore relative and absolute poverty rates will be the same this year).
- The government will produce local after housing cost poverty rates.
Addressing benefit under-reporting is sensible to capture more accurate household incomes.
In practice, this will mean some lower-income families will have a higher income in the data than previously reported, meaning fewer families in poverty and some families in less deep poverty. However, it is impossible to say how large this fall will be as we do not have access to the admin data.
The trends in poverty should remain the same. Child poverty is likely to be higher in 2023/24 than in 2022/23 and 2021/22, even if there were not 4.5 million children in poverty that year.
Periodically re-basing absolute poverty is necessary, but will mean that little can be said about absolute poverty this year.
The government producing local after housing cost poverty rates is welcome. The government has access to high quality admin data and it is important for local poverty analysis.