In 2020, the additional basic cost of a child, from birth to age 18, was £71,611 for a couple family and £97,862 for a lone-parent family. If housing and childcare costs are added these rise to £152,747 and £185,413 respectively.
Parents working full time on the ‘national living wage’ (NLW) are significantly short of the income needed to give children an acceptable minimum living standard – as defined by the public – and the shortfall will grow as inflation combines with the current freeze on benefits to put family budgets under new strain, CPAG's new report warns.
Parents working full time on the ‘national living wage’ (NLW) are significantly short of the income needed to give children an acceptable minimum living standard – as defined by the public – and the shortfall will grow as inflation combines with the current freeze on benefits to put family budgets under new strain.
The mood around welfare cuts may finally be shifting. The new work and pensions secretary Damian Green has explicitly sought to distance himself from the stance of the past six years by stating that there "will be no new search for cuts in individual welfare benefits".
Parents working on the ‘national living wage’ still can’t earn enough to provide an acceptable minimum living standard for their children despite flat (and now falling) inflation and a drop in core household costs like food and energy – even if they both work full-time, warns a new report.
Our annual cost of a child research finds that two parents working full-time on the minimum wage are still £50 a week short of what they need to raise their children at a minimum standard of living.
How much does it cost to raise a child in 2016? This annual research from CPAG and Professor Donald Hirsch, Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University, finds that parents working on the new higher minimum wage still cannot earn enough to provide an acceptable minimum standard of living for their children.
Since 2012, Child Poverty Action Group and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have been measuring the cost of a child and the adequacy of family incomes and benefit levels. This year, for the first time, the project also assessed the additional costs facing families in London.
The basic cost of bringing up a child is getting harder to meet. New CPAG research updating our annual 'Cost of a child' report has found that while the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 remains high, at £149,805, state support for meeting those costs is diminishing sharply.
Parents working on the minimum wage are on the brink of a new crisis in family finances that will leave many stranded when it comes to meeting no-frills family costs, warns a new report produced by Loughborough University’s Donald Hirsch for Child Poverty Action Group.
