Tests for the Government’s Child Poverty Strategy

As an organisation we care passionately about ending child poverty, and welcome the government’s commitment to an ambitious Child Poverty Strategy due to be published in Spring 2025. However, there are certain areas of focus the strategy must include if it is to deliver on ending child poverty in this country.

As part of the End Child Poverty Coalition, we are setting out eight key areas which we will test the strategy against when it is published. The tests are deliberately ambitious and represent the shared view of all 120 members of the coalition.

We have developed these tests based on our collective insights from the children and families we work with every day who are living in poverty – not only into the heart-breaking impacts of poverty on children, but also the complex interaction of different factors that can help families break out of cycles of poverty. We have also drawn on many conversations with frontline professionals exhausted and frustrated at having to manage the symptoms of poverty, without the levers to address the root issue.

The strategy must:

• Put in place legally binding targets to eradicate child poverty in 20 years
• Make views of babies, children, young people and their families central to both development and implementation
• Include specific support for children most likely to experience poverty
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability from the top
• Be able to operate both regionally and locally as well as across the four nations
• Have social security reform at its bedrock
• Outline a new system of employment support for families
• Set out how the government will resource and reform public services to address child poverty.

Lifting children out of poverty is the key that can unlock many of the Government’s wider goals, including its mission to break down barriers to opportunity and ambition for the healthiest generation of children ever. But the overriding test for the strategy must be the number of children it lifts out of poverty and whether it truly puts us on a path to eradicate child poverty for good.

Michael, a Youth Ambassador for the Coalition aged 19 explains what meeting these ‘Tests’ for mean for him: “Having grown up in a single-parent family, I have experienced the harsh reality that poverty is more likely to affect young people like me. If the Government ensured targeted action for children who are most at risk of poverty, it would make a big difference to children growing up in single-parent families.”

Click here to read the full briefing, ‘Eight Tests for the Child Poverty Strategy’.