Written evidence submitted by the National Children’s Bureau (CPS0049)
Summary
The National Children’s Bureau (NCB) welcomed the publication of ‘Our Children, Our Future’ as an important turning point. The lifting of the two-child limit, alongside measures to reduce essential costs and the introduction of deep poverty as a headline measure, represents meaningful progress that will improve the lives of many children and families.
However, as we set out in our response to the Strategy, we also believe there is further opportunity to strengthen this progress by articulating a more ambitious long-term plan to end child poverty once and for all, primarily by setting legally binding targets to cut poverty, and committing to further strengthening of the social safety net over time.
NCB sits on the steering group for the End Child Poverty Coalition (ECP)- a coalition of 130 organisations including child welfare groups, social justice groups, faith groups, trade unions and others. Together, with a group of Youth Ambassadors, we believe that no child growing up in the UK should live in poverty.
Prior to its publication, we worked to develop the ‘8 tests’ for the child poverty strategy with ECP. Alongside our coalition partners, we are currently finalising our analysis of the extent to which the Strategy meets these tests. Our response to this inquiry is therefore similarly structured to assess the extent to which the child poverty strategy meets each of the 8 tests we have developed.
Terms of reference
We recognise the strategy as a significant step in reducing the pressures facing many children and families in the UK today. Actions such as reducing learning loss among children living in temporary accommodation, lowering the cost of infant formula and introducing deep poverty as a new headline measure are warmly welcomed too. Taken together with previously announced commitments, such as the expansion of free school meals, these steps will meaningfully improve the lives of many children across the UK.
Whilst the strategy constitutes a significant turning point, we believe the government has missed an opportunity to show real ambition in setting out a long-term plan to end child poverty once and for all, including setting legally binding targets to cut poverty and committing to further strengthening of the social safety net over time.
By the Government’s own modelling, 4.3 million children will still be living in poverty at the end of this Parliament. This does not amount to a credible pathway to halving child poverty within ten years as stated in the first of the eight tests for the strategy- ‘we must end child poverty.’
Implementation must now be guided by a stronger articulation of how government intends to significantly reduce and ultimately eradicate child poverty.
The Strategy identifies several appropriate high-level drivers of child poverty and includes welcome measures across three core areas: boosting family incomes, reducing the cost of essentials, and strengthening local support.
Boosting Family Incomes: Removing the two-child limit is the most cost-effective way to drive down child poverty rates – and we absolutely agree that it is the right thing to do. We also welcome the increased the National Living Wage, the strengthening of the Employment Rights Bill, the rollout of free breakfast clubs in England, and the proposed reforms to the Child Maintenance Service.
Driving Down the Cost of Essentials: We welcome free school meals in England for all children in households in receipt of Universal Credit, the limit of three branded school uniform items to cut costs for parents and the £600 million investment into the Holiday Activity and Food Programme in England over the next three years.
Strengthening Local Support: We look forward to the roll out Best Start Family Hubs in every local authority in England, welcome the announcement of a £1 billion package for a new Crisis and Resilience Fund in England, and the £2.4 billion that has been made available for the Families First Partnership programme in England.
The strategy also rightly recognises that three-quarters of children in poverty live in working households and that work is not always a reliable route out of poverty. This marks an important and welcome narrative shift that will go a long way in securing public support for future action on social security.
a) Boosting families' incomes:
Our sixth test for the strategy makes it clear that ‘Social security reform must be the bedrock of the strategy.’ Lifting the two-child limit marks a watershed moment and will play a significant role in reducing the number of children living in poverty in the UK. However, families in deepest poverty will not feel the full effects unless the benefit cap, which restricts how much a household can receive in social security support overall, is also removed. Single-parent families and families with younger children are most likely to be affected by the cap. In 2025, 82% of benefit capped households included children and approximately 43% of capped households had three or more children, meaning around 51,000 low-income households will not feel the full effects of this change.
Additionally, the strategy does not reference uprating the Local Housing Allowance for housing benefits, which continues not to cover even the cheapest third of properties. This means many families are left unable to afford rent and other costs, pushing children into homelessness or insecure housing.
One of the most significant challenges people encounter when moving onto Universal Credit is the minimum 5-week wait for their first payment. This wait can often extend beyond 5 weeks due to errors or complications with claims. Making the necessary adjustments to Universal Credit is vital to ensure that people are not further plunged into hardship when they are at their most vulnerable.
Our third test demands that ‘the strategy must include specific support for children most likely to experience poverty.’ Around half a million children living in the UK will have No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) as a condition of their visa. Although not all these children will live in poverty, many do, and families have no safety net if their circumstances change for the worse. The strategy mentions NRPF and includes questions on this policy in the Family Resources survey, which is an important step in better understanding its impacts. However, given recently proposed asylum and immigration plans will potentially mean more children have NRPF, and for longer, and will be penalised with even longer routes to settlement if their families access welfare support, the strategy falls short.
Addressing these areas would significantly enhance the overall effectiveness of the strategy and ensure that progress on child poverty is not undermined elsewhere.
C) Securing families' finances:
The acknowledgment in the strategy that work can no longer be assumed a route out of poverty is a move in the right direction in how social security is seen in relation to child poverty. Though this will require follow through from government to ensure rhetoric is followed by adequate investment and action.
Further, financial support for families remains complex, consists of multiple sources and often requires separate applications, such is the case for Free School Meals, Healthy Start and WaterSure. The strategy does not, but perhaps cannot, fully address the inadequacies of the wider social security system, including the need for broader uprating of benefits or debt caused by the five-week wait for Universal Credit.
D) Strengthening local support
Our eighth test for the strategy makes it clear that ‘high quality public services must play their full part in combatting poverty.’ The strategy must therefore acknowledge that properly resourced, high quality public services are the foundation without which many families will not be able to escape poverty. This includes childcare, education, social housing, transport, employment support, health and care services including mental health, family help services, and advice and legal services. The strategy must therefore set out how the government will resource and reform public services to address child poverty. There must be a strong financial settlement for local authorities that allows them to prioritise the right help for families.
Effective approaches to reducing child poverty require tailoring and targeting to operate in tandem. Support must be both proportionate to need and responsive to the specific circumstances of families. Holistic provision is essential, recognising that financial hardship is rarely experienced in isolation but intersects with housing, health, employment, and childcare challenges.
Engaging parent voice at an early stage in the design of local services or outreach activity strengthens relevance and accessibility, helping to ensure that provision reflects lived experience rather than institutional assumptions. Embedding services within communities and delivering in partnership with trusted voluntary and community sector organisations, rather than relying solely on statutory delivery route, can improve reach, build trust, and enhance sustained engagement among families who may otherwise be reluctant to access formal support.
Further, whilst empowering regional leaders to tackle child poverty via the Devolution and Community Empowerment bill is welcome, this could cause a ‘postcode lottery’ for children living in poverty, with some areas prioritising this issue, and others choosing not to.
The third of the ECP’s eight tests states that the child poverty strategy must ‘include specific support for children most likely to experience poverty.’ The strategy must take an equalities approach, recognising that existing structural inequalities for marginalised groups means certain children are more likely to live in poverty.
However, it remains that:
Regionally, while devolution is acknowledged, the absence of a strong national framework risks a ‘postcode lottery.’ Without consistent targets and accountability mechanisms, these regional disparities could widen.
As mentioned above, The third of the ECP’s eight tests states that the child poverty strategy must ‘include specific support for children most likely to experience poverty.’
Targeted action must be taken to combat child poverty for certain groups most at risk, including disabled children, children from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, children in single parent families and larger families, and refugee and migrant children.
The strategy must take an intersectional perspective, acknowledging the clear link between child poverty and women’s poverty and the evidence that children are more likely to experience poverty if they experience systemic inequalities such as racism.
For example, there is strong and consistent evidence showing that race and/or ethnicity intersects with poverty in ways that mean people from Black and Global Majority communities are more likely to experience poverty, deeper poverty, and the material harms associated with it than people in white households. Evidence from The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown the highest rates are among people in Bangladeshi (53%) and Pakistani (48%) households, followed by those in households headed by someone from Other ethnic backgrounds (44%), Black or Black British backgrounds (39%), Asian or Asian British backgrounds (38%), and Mixed or Multiple ethnic backgrounds (28%). This compares with a poverty rate of 18% among people in white-headed households. [1]
Unfortunately, the strategy does not sufficiently address groups of children and young people with an increased risk of living in poverty. There is limited structural analysis of systemic inequalities affecting disabled children, or the interaction between immigration policy and child poverty. Implementation of the Child Poverty Strategy must include explicit recognition of these inequalities, with specific actions to address them and monitoring of progress.
The strategy lacks a clear equality-led framework to address the increased risk some children and families face. Except for larger families, who will benefit from the welcomed scrapping of the two-child limit, there was little action on reducing factors behind entrenched inequalities facing some of the UK’s children.
It remains that without a stronger cross-government accountability mechanism, children experiencing overlapping disadvantage may fall between departmental remits.
Monitoring and evaluating progress
The first of ECP’s eight tests, ‘we must end child poverty,’ states that the strategy must put in place legally binding, independently evaluated, targets that build clear milestones to ultimately eradicate child poverty in 20 years. The specific measures in the strategy must collectively form a credible plan to halving child poverty over the next 10 years.
We are deeply concerned that the strategy does not include statutory child poverty reduction targets. It is vital that measurable targets are embedded within the framework to ensure that reductions in child poverty continue beyond the removal of the two-child limit on benefits in April 2026. Targets are essential for sustaining ambition, driving coordinated cross-government action, and ensuring robust parliamentary and public accountability.
Legally binding targets are fundamental to delivering meaningful change. They demonstrate the scale of the Government’s ambition and convert broad policy commitments into concrete, measurable objectives for departments to pursue. This approach underpins most major government strategies, where headline targets set direction and focus effort across Whitehall. Child poverty should be placed on an equivalent footing with other priorities within a mission-led government that relies on clearly defined outcomes to drive delivery.
Greater public and parliamentary scrutiny in this context would help maintain momentum, ensuring that ministers remain accountable for the commitments they make. Publicly stated targets concentrate political will and reinforce delivery discipline. In practice, progress on complex social challenges is often constrained by limited resources. Once a government attaches political capital to a visible, binding target, there is a stronger imperative to deliver, and departments are more likely to secure the funding necessary to implement effective action through spending processes.
There is no effective substitute for dedicated child poverty targets. While economic growth and increased employment are important policy objectives, neither can be relied upon in isolation to deliver the sustained and significant reductions in child poverty that children and families require.
We recommend that the Government set targets covering both deep material poverty and relative poverty. These should include ambitious long-term goals aimed at achieving substantial and sustainable reductions, alongside interim targets to be met by the end of the current parliamentary session to ensure that immediate progress is made in improving outcomes for children.
The fifth of our eight tests calls for the strategy to ‘work with all levels of government across the four UK nations.’
The strategy must be able to operate both regionally and locally as well as across the four nations to ensure specific local needs can be met. This means genuine consultation about the design of the strategy and working with them to deliver it across local and regional structures, as well as in the devolved nations. Delivery must also work in conjunction with, and be informed by, any existing child poverty strategies in the devolved nations.
Scrapping of the two-child limit is a welcome recognition of the role that central government can play in reducing child poverty across the nations and regions of the UK. It is an important first step to address child poverty, and it is right that the Strategy has these wide policy levers at the centre. It is also important to note that the Strategy made clear references throughout to what does apply and what does not apply in each nation, although it is not always clear how this interacts with devolved policy. But this now needs to be built on to reduce child poverty further across the nations and regions.
As the Strategy develops more detailed thinking is needed by devolved governments and central government to work together to understand how devolved and UK levers can function. It would also be beneficial for central, devolved and local government to use the strategy as an opportunity to further explore together how data sharing across governments can be used.
Whilst the Strategy refers to differences in rates of child poverty across nations, there is little analysis of why this is the case, and what level of intervention is needed to redress this imbalance. And whilst empowering regional leaders to tackle child poverty via the Devolution and Community Empowerment bill is welcome, this could cause a postcode lottery for children living in poverty. With some areas prioritising this issue, and others choosing not to. Which could possibly widen the gap within and between regions for child poverty. The government have missed the opportunity to set out in detail their expectations of regional and public bodies on this agenda.
The framework makes important commitments to establishing a baseline set of measures around child poverty from 2026 and reporting against this in future years. Importantly, this framework will include a new measure of deep poverty, as well as the standard relative poverty measure generally accepted as the main poverty rate in the UK. This is very welcome and can drive an important focus on those children who are experiencing the most acute material deprivation.
However, the monitoring and evaluation framework does not represent an adequate substitute for targets. By its own admission the framework is an analytical tool for measuring progress, and as currently designed, the Framework is insufficient to guarantee accountability or sustained progress.
The Framework does not currently appear to be placed on a statutory footing, nor is there provision for independent scrutiny. Reporting commitments are welcome, but there is limited clarity on who is responsible for reporting, whether reports will be laid before Parliament, how frequently progress will be assessed or what happens if progress stalls.
Further, the strategy does not address how, through the framework, outcomes will be assessed across protected characteristics, how intersectional disadvantage will be analysed and how disparities between regions and nations will be addressed. Without a strong equalities’ lens, overall poverty reductions could mask widening inequalities.
The Strategy commits to hearing directly from children and families as part of monitoring and evaluation, which is welcome. However, it remains unclear what mechanisms will allow this ongoing engagement. A robust framework should formalise the participation of children and families in evaluation.
The Framework outlines how progress will be measured but does not clearly explain how findings will inform policy adjustment. Effective monitoring requires a feedback loop: if indicators worsen or stagnate, there must be a defined process for review and policy recalibration.
The Monitoring and Evaluation Framework is a promising foundation. With stronger accountability mechanisms, clearer equalities analysis, and measurable ambition, it could become a powerful tool to drive sustained reductions in child poverty rather than simply track them.
Whilst a monitoring framework without measurable targets risks becoming descriptive rather than directive, the framework provides the infrastructure necessary for targets, including a new deep poverty measure.
Therefore, framework strengthens, rather than replaces, the case for statutory, independently evaluated targets.
The second of the eight tests makes it clear that the views of babies, children, young people and their families must be central to both development and implementation. It is essential that the government hears directly from children and families as part of strategy monitoring and evaluation. Whilst the strategy commits to doing so, there is currently insufficient clarity about how participation will operate in practice.
We believe implementation should include structured, transparent mechanisms to ensure children and families are meaningfully involved in shaping delivery and assessing progress. This should include clarity on how lived experience will inform evaluative judgments, and how families’ perceptions of material improvement will be considered alongside quantitative indicators.
The best example of these arguments can be seen in the Scottish approach to child poverty targets. The Child Poverty Scotland Act was passed in 2017, establishing legally binding targets to reduce relative child poverty to less than 10% by 2030, with an interim target of 18% by 2023. By 2023/24, relative child poverty was at 22% and expected to go down, whereas child poverty in the UK is at 31%. This difference between the two nations is largely attributed to the Scottish Child Payment, which provides £26.70 per week per eligible child. Here, we see evidence of how a public commitment has pushed forward the development of a policy solution and secured the necessary funding.
We believe that the Government should establish a Child Poverty Strategy Implementation Board (or similar) that ensures the longevity of the strategy by using the specific commitments as a springboard for a wider movement in society towards ending child poverty.
The Board should include:
The Board could oversee the Monitoring and Evaluation framework for the strategy itself, but also crucially regularly discuss further action (including from stakeholders outside of central Government) to maximise the benefit of the important commitments in the Strategy itself.
To give two examples where further action could maximise impact:
March 2026