Written evidence submitted by Heather Ellis, David Hitchcock, and Michael Lambert (CPS0042)

Strategies to End Child Poverty: Historical Perspectives

This evidence submission focuses on five inquiry questions. It uses research on free school meals both historically and today, on poor children and poor families enmeshed in the state care system in the 20th century, and on longer durée assessments of the ambition to end child poverty in previous UK welfare systems. It makes recommendations in its concluding remarks, and advocates for clear, national, and regional, child poverty reduction targets, and for a holistic approach to child poverty which considers inclusivity, participation, community, and structural barriers in addition to traditional measures like income thresholds. As historians whose work focuses on questions of poverty in both the modern and premodern periods of British history, we thought the inquiry’s sessions might benefit from historical perspectives on questions of ambition, target-setting, and around specific amelioration polices such as free school meals.

i.                     Is the child poverty strategy sufficiently ambitious?

The ambition of the Child Poverty Strategy (2025) can be measured against historical attempts to define, quantify and ameliorate child poverty both before and after 1945. Today, over one in five of all children are poor, according to international standards.[1] Given the contested political basis of these historical attempts, its ambition should also be measured against previous Labour Government strategies.

Historically the UK can be described ‘world-leading’ in its ambitions around overcoming child poverty. England was the first country in world history to operate a ‘nationwide, publicly funded welfare system’, often referred to as ‘the old Poor Law’. Although a national system, it was administered almost entirely locally, through over 9,000 parishes across England alone, spending approximately £4 million a year by 1800 (today approximately a £33.5 billion per annum economic contribution), on direct cash or in-kind payments to the poor, subsidised housing, medical care, and part-time work.[2]

This locally administered but nationally mandated system was funded through parish poor rates paid by the better-off, and those who administered it did so on a voluntary basis, or with minimal salaries. This meant that the bulk of resources allocated went into direct redistribution transfers, even into the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries when institutional or ‘indoor’ solutions gained political popularity, culminating in ‘the new Poor Law’. Today’s total UK welfare bill comes to a much higher sum of around £325 billion. However, it is important to understand this figure includes defined modern welfare programmes such as the state old age pension, based on a different contributory principle and forms part of a separate, specialised system of entitlements and benefits. On the question of direct payments to poor families, and thus to poor children, the system as it was up to 1800 should certainly be seen as ambitious by the social and political standards of its day, and the political discourse and political philosophy which focused on the system was profoundly ambitious in its scope and aims, serving as the origin of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) goal number one today, the goal of ending poverty.

The present strategy rightly understands that child poverty is a multifaceted, complex, and deeply moral issue which affects the life chances of children and young people. The strategy’s authors and the associated task force are right to listen to those with lived experience, particularly given the wider emphasis on quantifying the social scale and economic costs of child poverty. Historically, lived experiences of the welfare systems have been the best means by which to understand the efficacy, flaws, and effects of those systems and historians of poverty have made heavy use of ‘experience’ across many decades of scholarship to better understand poverty.  Strategic ambition today, however, requires understanding of the enormous scale of the challenge. Therefore, one omission of note in the Strategy was the UN Special Rapporteur report on poverty authored by Philip Alston in 2019, which used similar testimonial and experiential methods and arrived at alarming conclusions about UK poverty just before the pandemic, only for his report and visit to receive short shrift in political discourse at the time.[3]

When considering ambition, it is also important to examine how child poverty policy operates within everyday institutional settings. Research on the UK School Meals Service demonstrates that the design of delivery mechanisms, particularly means-testing versus universal provision, profoundly shapes children’s lived experience of poverty. Oral histories and contemporary ethnographic research reveal persistent experiences of stigma under targeted systems, alongside administrative fragmentation and ‘churn’ which followed from decentralisation and marketisation.[4] Where policy is framed narrowly as income transfer rather than as social infrastructure, its ambition is constrained not only fiscally but conceptually. Ambition therefore requires attention to institutional design, dignity, and universality as well as headline poverty figures.

The present strategy does not set out a single poverty reduction target, or set of targets, by which to measure its success, instead the strategy estimates poverty reduction by policy initiative such as in Table 1, which projects a decline of children in relative low income (AHC) by 2031 of 550,000, of which an estimated 450,000 children would experience uplift due solely to the removal of the two-child benefit cap.[5]

As historians of poverty, we encourage the inquiry committees and the implementation teams to understand that stable goals and clear targets, alive to changing economic circumstances and based on robust datasets, are crucial to giving political objectives legitimacy, for monitoring performance over time, and for holding governments both now and in future to account. Without these mechanisms, child poverty can easily be seen to be no one’s responsibility. For example, poverty was originally believed to have been overcome during the post-war decades (1950s and 60s) owing to sustained political commitments to full employment, universal welfare including health, education and social security, and due to improvements in living standards and housing.[6] Research from academics using publicly available statistics and survey data then led to the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty as a political issue and the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in 1965.[7] Whilst officials were aware of the scope and scale of poverty in unpublished reports and internal documents, it was seen as an administrative problem rather than a political issue, and responsibility was abnegated.[8] From this point to the 1999 generational commitment to eradicate child poverty made by the Labour Government, the lack of tangible targets and measures meant that despite political visibility and an increase of the number of children in poverty, the issue was not seriously addressed across government or within the purview of a single department.

ii.                   Are the drivers and outcomes that the Government has set out in the Strategy the right ones?

Child poverty is fundamentally family poverty. This is true both historically and today. Contemporaries as far distant as the seventeenth century understood this overlap and devised policies to address it (including a system of fostering and family separation through pauper child apprenticeships, envisioned as both a route to social mobility and a material intervention in the poorest households). Poverty is more than just an economic category, as many historians, welfare economists, sociologists and other scholars have demonstrated. Townsend famously describes individuals or families in poverty as only ever a relative description of deprivation, seen most clearly when ‘their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities.’[9] Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen famously described poverty as about human capability and the context of human flourishing, not merely about income or economic growth. ‘Human lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways’, he wrote, and crucially in relation to state economic aims, these harms must be understood as overlapping and reinforcing.[10] Hitchcock and McClure define historical poverty as layered: there is a poverty of wants or needs, of rights, and of opportunities.[11]

Together, these authors agree and recognise that beyond being an economic category, poverty excludes the poor socially, politically and economically from wider forms of participation. This has more far-reaching consequences as they are unable to fully participate as enfranchised citizens on an equitable basis. This was the conclusion of Vincent’s study of poverty in twentieth century Britain which found more continuities than changes in terms of the impact of relative deprivation and its amelioration by the developing welfare state.[12]

Solving one aspect of child poverty, even if it seems to be the single largest contributor, may not sufficiently ameliorate poverty’s harms over that child’s life as they grow into adulthood. Historical and contemporary research into school meals provision reinforces this layered understanding, showing that hunger, stigma, and social exclusion operate simultaneously within schools. Children’s accounts highlight not only material deprivation but also shame, embarrassment, and exclusion from ordinary social participation under means-tested systems. This supports a capability-based understanding of poverty, in which policy drivers must extend beyond income metrics to include dignity, participation, and belonging within core public institutions such as schools.[13] Adding resources to the pool of those available to poor individuals often seems (and often is) the most straightforward ‘solution’ to immediate harms. However, ‘relative deprivation’, particularly for children, takes on far broader and more complex dimensions.

iii.                 What will the distributional impacts of the Strategy be, including across the regions and nations of the UK and among different groups of children and families with protected characteristics?

Child poverty in the present-day UK is subject to significant variation by region and location. Evidence regarding School Meals demonstrates clear patterns of widening regional disparity following the devolution and localisation of provision after 1980 which match other areas of welfare provision including health, social care, and housing. Across the four nations of the UK this includes school meal pricing structures, eligibility criteria, and quality of provision, with uneven impacts on children’s access to nutritious meals. These findings suggest that without careful coordination across devolved administrations, child poverty interventions may unintentionally reproduce territorial inequalities through differential implementation, funding capacity, and local political priorities.[14]

Historically welfare receipts paint a recognisable picture of regional inequalities and of acute concentrations of child poverty in early industrialising cities and during periods of significant population growth, trade depression, or inflation. Child poverty is also often produced by industries reliant on precarious labour forces, or in industries subject to rapid technological change, where firms might be incentivised to refrain from hiring until developments are clearer.

Child poverty is also potentially created or maintained by government policy incentives and government would do well to be aware of the borderlands, arbitrage, and precarity created by extended processes like settlement visas, asylum and refugee status (and the inability to work full-time while seeking it), and so on. Without opportunities to work and without wider networks of informal support, such children and their families are particularly vulnerable to poverty. It was therefore notable that the Strategy did not mention the conditions of families seeking asylum, and children in migrant families are discussed in a section (pp. 96-7) which is primarily about ‘seeking to understand’ impacts (such as the impact of no recourse to public funds) when a comparable lack of resources, stability, or opportunity is clearly understood elsewhere in the same strategy document as acutely detrimental to children’s welfare.

Poverty’s effects can fall unevenly within the family unit, and it has long been recognised that poverty is often a feminised experience. This is primarily because the gendered structures of our modern state welfare programmes are still based on historical assumptions of male breadwinning and associated insurance entitlements, and of female caregiving. The strategy’s attention on daycare systems and lowering the costs of wrap-around provision, are therefore very welcome, but could be further strengthened by additional funding, particularly for the poorest quartile of UK households with children. Policies have been, and remain, conditional on placing many of the costs of this burden onto private families rather than on the public purse, with the result being that children are placed in poverty or forced to remain there to uphold this public/private principle. Expansion of care provision is crucial to growing and sustaining labour market participation by women, who often still carry a ‘double burden’ of work and care despite legislative improvements in terms of equal and maternity pay and workplace rights.[15] This gendered dynamic also makes mothers within families living in poverty, or single parent households, more vulnerable to child protection interventions with their living circumstances being interpreted as child neglect rather than as material deprivation.[16] Accordingly, ‘Poverty is the wallpaper of [social work] practice: too big to tackle and too familiar to notice’.[17]

Moreover, without adequate kinship and wider family support networks available, female-headed households often become more reliant upon forms of public welfare and state support to make ends meet, given the caring demands placed upon them by other policy processes.[18] Recognition of this problem underpinned the expansion of child care and nursery places in the expanded second phase Labour’s Sure Start programme from 2006, alongside an educational focus on the early years.[19] Modern commitments to fund early years places in a range of providers remain insufficiently targeted and often do not meet the running costs for providers to remain viable, further limiting comparable impacts on child poverty and life course outcomes.[20] This means single-parent families, usually but not always headed by women, remain more likely to experience child poverty because of enduring gendered assumptions of primary responsibility for their care in political and social terms.

iv.                Should the Child Poverty Strategy include measurable targets and interim targets? If so, what should they be?

Yes. Historically, UK governments began to measure affluence and deprivation in general terms from the late 17th century onwards, as part of developing movements in the ‘science of government’ often termed political economy. These measurements were refined during the 19th and 20th centuries using household panel and census data, routine economic statistical collection through the Central Statistics Office, and social data from the General Register Office. However, whilst such quantitative measures are useful to understand broad trends and provide a sense of scale, they fail to grasp the dynamics of lived experience which more recent ethnographic and localised research in social sciences has undertaken.[21] Quantitative benchmarks and targets which give child poverty political legitimacy should always be accompanied by qualitative assessment and description and should prioritise the representation of groups with lived experiences. Specific targets always entail risks, in this case the first will be a question as to why any child poverty target reduction is not simply ‘zero’, i.e. no children at all in the UK in extreme or serious poverty. It is our view that the benefits of setting this ambitious target far outweigh the risks of failing to meet it.

We advocate for a pluralistic approach to reduction targets. Measurement should ideally extend beyond income thresholds to institutional outcomes. For example, changes in school meals over time demonstrates that policy shifts such as marketisation and competitive tendering can be tracked through indicators of quality, workforce professionalisation, uptake rates, and stigma reduction as well as fiscal measures.[22] Targets relating to universality, uptake, and equity of access within schools could therefore complement income-based measures, ensuring that child poverty strategy engages with the environments in which children live and learn.

v.                  What will be necessary to secure the longevity of the Child Poverty Strategy?

First and foremost, without a cross-party consensus that the amelioration of child poverty must be a major priority of modern welfare states, the Strategy’s efforts in the short term will potentially be undone, perhaps even reversed entirely, in the medium term. Financially, socially, and culturally, there are no short-cuts and no short-term efforts that will sufficiently reduce child poverty in any meaningful way in the longer term. Aside from policy reversals like the two-child cap, there are few ‘quick fixes’ in this policy arena. Reducing child poverty must end up in the same discursive space as funding the National Health Service, or the state pension, where broad and sustained public outcry would result if measures were not maintained. One lasting and virtuous contribution of a Labour Government could be to place funded child poverty reduction programmes into that political space, using legislation and statutorily mandated aims and targets: a mission-driven priority given legal force, akin to UK climate targets.

The long history of child poverty in Britain shows that enduring political accountability must match initial political will and boldness of ambition to meaningfully improve the futures of children living in poverty. Embedding commitments both within and across government is fundamental, and targets and measures must reflect both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of poverty and should seek to capture lived experience and material aspects. Ending child poverty must be a Parliamentary, not partisan, ambition, to prevent its future re-politicisation.

Historical analysis of the School Meals Service suggests that durability depends on embedding child poverty interventions within core public institutions rather than treating them as discretionary welfare add-ons. The period 1944–1980 treated school meals as part of national educational infrastructure, whereas post-1980 fragmentation and marketisation rendered provision more vulnerable to fiscal retrenchment and political reframing. Longevity may therefore require reframing child poverty interventions as foundational social infrastructure, comparable in status to health or pensions, rather than as targeted expenditure subject to short-term political cycles.[23]

Concluding Recommendations:

On the gendering of care systems: Child poverty is family poverty. Accounting for the prominent social roles and expectations of women in caring for their families, and how this has become embedded in policy and welfare structures, should be recognised in any child poverty strategy. Removing the two-child benefit cap is a widely recognised and straightforward means of reducing child poverty which recognises this gendered dynamic. Increasing daycare and early years support for children living in poverty in a financially sustainable way is similar, enabling mothers to undertake meaningful work at a reduced cost in time or take-home pay, while supporting their children’s education. Embedding this understanding into both the development of the strategy and its monitoring is integral to avoid women and mothers carrying the burden of their family – and by extension child – poverty.

On school meals: Taken together, historical evidence and recent research on school meals provision suggest that effective child poverty strategy must address three interlocking dimensions: income adequacy, institutional design, and lived experience. Policies that neglect institutional environments risk perpetuating stigma, fragmentation, and uneven territorial outcomes. A historically informed strategy would therefore integrate universal design principles, regional equity mechanisms, and measurable institutional indicators alongside income-based targets, rather than focusing on household income alone.

On owning ambition and future-proofing improvements: The ‘triple lock’ on state pension rates in the UK has, broadly speaking, placed the pension beyond the reach of transformation by subsequent governments without significant and public debate. The creation and legal edifice of the national health service did something similar for healthcare. To truly reflect ambition arising out of the current Child Poverty Strategy (2025), Parliament might consider, debate, amend and pass primary legislation which enforces reduction targets for itself and for civil service, against which success and failure can be measured.

To conclude, as historians we urge the committees to consider that there is no better time to start being ambitious, when it comes to child poverty, than now.

Selected Further Reading:

Lucinda Platt, Discovering child poverty: the creation of a policy agenda from 1800 to the present (Bristol: Policy Press, 2005).

Pat Thane, The Rise and Fall of the British Welfare State: From Poverty in 1900 to Poverty in 2023 (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)

The British Academy, Policy Histories Seminar: The History of the UK School Meals Service, 22 January 2026 (London: British Academy, 2026).

March 2026