I had an interesting meeting I wanted to tell you about. I had the opportunity to meet with the Minister for Employment and the Secretary of State for Education at 10 Downing Street.
Raising a child costs £260,000 for couples, £290,000 for a lone parent. The two-child limit leaves three-child, working families with huge income gaps. The PM’s milestones must bring concrete improvements for struggling families.
CPAG’s annual Cost of a Child report looks at how much it costs families to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children. It is calculated using the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research, carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The cost of child poverty extends beyond the physical and emotional hardship felt by children growing up in low-income families. In 2008, the total financial cost was estimated to be at least £25 billion a year. In 2023, it has risen to over £39 billion a year.
Families in 2022 are facing the greatest threat to their living standards in living memory. Much has been written about these pressures, but to put them into context, we need to understand what has been happening to children’s and families’ costs in recent years. The Cost of a Child reports have been produced annually for a decade, and this 2022 edition presents the latest evidence of what families need as a minimum, and how this compares to the actual incomes of low-income families.
Child Poverty Action Group’s annual cost of a child report looks at how much it costs families to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children. Since 2012, this report series has systematically monitored the minimum cost of a child. This report updates those calculations for 2021 and outlines the factors affecting the latest figures. The total cost of raising a child to the age of 18 now stands at £160,692 for a couple and £193,801 for a lone parent.
The year 2020 has put unprecedented pressures on families bringing up children. Parents across the world have taken on new challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic in keeping their children healthy and safe as well as properly fed, educated and entertained at a time when they have been required to stay at home, and when many families’ livelihoods have been threatened. Our cost of a child report looks at what items families need to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children in 2020.
Our annual Cost of a Child report this year finds that the overall cost of a child up to age 18 (including rent and childcare) is £185,000 for lone parents (up 19% since 2012) and £151,000 for couples (up 5.5% since 2012). The gap between lone parents’ actual income and what they need to meet family needs has grown sharply: lone parents working full time for the so-called national living wage ('NLW') are 21% (£80 a week) short of what they need – after paying for rent, childcare and council tax - a gap that has more than doubled from 10% since 2012.
The overall cost of a child over 18 years (including rent and childcare) is £150, 753 for a couple and £183,335 for a lone parent. But work doesn’t pay low-income families enough to meet a no-frills standard of living, new research from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows.
