Only a Labour government will end child poverty. Let’s make it happen

Child poverty in Britain is rising. It was rising before the pandemic and it is set to rise further still. Today, the end child poverty commission reveals that there are 408,000 more children living in poverty than there were five years ago. After housing costs are taken into account, around 3.8 million children – nearly a third of all children in the UK – are growing up in poverty. For one of the richest countries in the world, this is nothing short of a national disgrace. That’s why the fight against child poverty is a going to be a major front in our battle with Boris Johnson’s government and a central mission for the next Labour government under Keir Starmer.

As someone with first-hand experience of what child poverty is like, having grown up on a council estate on free school meals, under the Tories in the 1980s, it breaks my heart that so many children are growing up today in even worse circumstances than I experienced back then. My casework is full of children growing up in temporary accommodation, pushed from pillar to post in bed and breakfasts, families forced to rely on help from food banks, even where they’re in work, and kids turning up to school too hungry to learn.

Today’s figures should bring shame on the Prime Minister and his government. For all of Boris Johnson’s bluster about ‘levelling up the country’, the data shows that every region in England has experienced a rise in child poverty except the South East, with the highest rise in the North East of England. The government’s own social mobility commission has previously warned that the government’s own policies are pushing children into poverty.

It is increasingly clear that Boris Johnson would rather stick his head in the sand about the problem than do anything about it. He’s falsely claimed on multiple occasions that child poverty has fallen by 400,000 since 2010. A Prime Minister who will not even acknowledge the problem will inevitably make it worse.

Shamefully, even when forced to reckon with the scale of child poverty in this country, the Tories are not inclined to lift a finger to help. They did everything they could to avoid providing meals for children outside the school term, even in the midst of a pandemic. One Conservative MP claimed that free school meal vouchers were effectively “£20 cash direct to a crack den and brothel“. More recently, the government changed the way pupil premium is calculated, clawing back hundreds of millions of pounds of school funding from the kids who need it most.

Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, had to fight tooth and nail to stop the Tories from cancelling the £20 uplift to Universal Credit. Even now, the Chancellor is still insisting that the £20 uplift to Universal Credit will be scrapped in the autumn, despite the evidence that this will plunge hundreds of thousands into poverty.

The last Labour government lifted millions of children out of poverty and put our country on course to end child poverty by 2020. 11 years of Tory government have thrown that progress into reverse. That’s why I’ve been asked by Keir Starmer to lead Labour’s work on child poverty in the shadow cabinet. I will be working with colleagues across the shadow cabinet, local government, the Labour movement, business and civil society to make sure we have a Labour government elected with a plan to give every child the best start in life.

Today, along with other Labour MPs, I’m throwing my support behind the No Child Left Behind campaign by the National Education Union and The Mirror to shame the government into action on child poverty. I hope that LabourList readers will join us.

I’d like to thank LabourList and Labour members for the messages of support I’ve had in recent days since the news that I’m about to undergo treatment for kidney cancer. You can rest assured that once I’ve beaten cancer, I’ll be back, fighting fit, to help Keir beat the Tories. Only a Labour government will lift millions of children out of poverty. Let’s make it happen.