‘Social security isn’t the answer to everything, but on child poverty it goes a long way’

In among the public and private conversations about social security this week, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has asked an important question of his department: how do we help people to improve their lives?  

The SoS’s brief is wide, but on child poverty the need to make progress is stark. There are 4 million children in the UK living in poverty, a figure expected to drop next year before starting to rise again. Opportunity is rightly a government watchword, and all the evidence shows that growing up in poverty damages a child’s physical and mental health, their educational outcomes, their career prospects. It causes increased infant mortality and shorter life expectancies. Alan Milburn’s recent report on young people and work found that half of the instances of a person not being in employment, education or training at the age of 17 are attributable to growing up in poverty. There is little opportunity to be had in growing up hungry, cold and isolated.  

READ MORE: ‘No young person should be locked out of participation’

This government’s decisions to abolish the two-child limit and expand free school meals are vital first steps and will protect around half a million children from poverty. They sit alongside the establishment of breakfast clubs and the commitment to family hubs that signal this government takes children and their futures seriously.  

But improving the lives of the millions of children who will remain in poverty must mean investing more in them and their futures. The social security system is the most effective way to do this. It’s essential both to lift children out of poverty and to turbo-charge other government initiatives that risk falling short if child poverty stays high.  

You don’t have to take my word for it. The government has already done the work of understanding this in its Child Poverty Strategy, published in December. It sets out that cuts to social security over the previous decade of austerity had been a driver of the rise in child poverty, stunting childhoods and opportunity. And despite the ongoing narrative around the social security bill, it shows that the value of support provided for children in the social security system has in fact been significantly eroded over time.  

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It highlighted too that the majority of children living in poverty are in a working household. Parental employment levels are high, but a lack of secure and flexible jobs means that being in work is not enough to lift families out of poverty. Living in a household where a parent or child has a disability is flagged as a barrier to working or to working more, as is having young children.  

Lots of this equation comes down to care – all parents want and need to be able to look after their kids. But the ability of lower-income parents to escape poverty by earning enough through work is limited by the very fact that they must look after and care for their children. 

It’s also about costs. All children cost money – they always have and they always will. But as the strategy shows, the cost of living continues to put significant and particular pressure on families with kids at a time when the parts of our social security system that are specifically designed to help with those costs, whether through child benefit or universal credit, have faced sustained and damaging cuts. A system that should protect families is, instead, exposing them to poverty.  

It’s clear there’s no one measure that would eliminate child poverty in one go, and the available measures don’t all rest with DWP.  Over time, government will need to fix childcare, improve the jobs market, reduce housing costs while increasing the quality and availability of homes – all issues flagged in the strategy too. But improving children’s lives means we cannot let the social security system continue to cause the devastating levels of child poverty we’re facing as a country. Austerity tested to destruction any idea that slashing family incomes will do anything other than force more children into poverty.  

And on the question about how to improve lives, the role of the DWP isn’t just to come up with policy, it’s to deliver it too. That does sometimes mean asking what benefits people are entitled to, and helping them to access them.  For example, it doesn’t make sense to make more children eligible for free school meals but not take proactive steps to let parents know they qualify and how to register for them.  

The prize for government is that it knows investing in social security works, that it helps makes lives better. It’s what its own evidence shows. It’s why it scrapped the two-child limit. It’s how the previous labour administration lifted one million children out of poverty. And it’s what parents tell us every day.  

“I think we’re going to have a lot less stress. I think I’ll be able to buy things new every now and then. Hopefully, we won’t have to go to food banks or get in more debt. You try to live so frugally, I’ve had holes in my shoes and stuff, go without. But it’s still never enough. And no, I won’t be able to suddenly move to a huge house, but I’d just be able to be a bit less worried about every penny.” 

A mum of three a mum of three reflecting on abolition of the two child limit.

Social security isn’t the answer to everything, but on child poverty it goes a long way. To build a country where every child does get the best start in life, we need to keep going. 

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