Written evidence submitted by the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University (CPS0092)

About the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University

1. The Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP) is an independent research centre based in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. Over the past 40 years, it has built a national and international reputation for high quality applied policy research.
    
2. The Centre’s biggest role at present is the researching and analysis of A Minimum Income Standard (MIS) for the United Kingdom. Since 2008, MIS has set out what the public agree is needed for a minimum, dignified, socially acceptable standard of living, meeting essential material needs, but also enabling participation in society. Funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, this is the leading standard of its kind in the UK, where it is being used to set the living wage, and is being replicated in other countries seeking to establish benchmarks for acceptable household income levels rooted in social consensus.

3. For a number of years CRSP researchers have produced annual estimates of the number and proportion of children living in poverty after housing costs in local areas, funded by the End Child Poverty Coalition. The Centre also regularly works with Child Poverty Action Group to produce the charity’s Cost of a Child in the UK and Scotland, and Cost of Education reports. Beyond this, CRSP undertakes a wide range of research focused on poverty, living standards and income adequacy, and the experiences of those living in low-income households.
    

For further information about this submission, please contact Dr Juliet Stone (J.Stone5@lboro.ac.uk) or Professor Matt Padley (M.J.Padley@lboro.ac.uk).

Summary

4. The Centre’s annual MIS calculation, which sets out the weekly budget needed by households to maintain a socially acceptable standard of living in the UK, contributes to this submission. It makes use of the annually updated analysis of Households living below a Minimum Income Standard, alongside comparisons of MIS income requirements and the disposable income provided by the State Pension. The submission also draws on CRSP research that quantifies the cost of education, and local indicators of child poverty.

5. The MIS income benchmark is not a poverty indicator. Rather it provides a publicly established living standards threshold which can be used to track how shared conceptions of minimum living standards have changed over time, as well as charting the adequacy of incomes relative to this threshold. Critically, MIS does not just establish an income threshold for analytical purposes, but also provides rich and detailed descriptions of what shared conceptions of a minimum living standard include in 2025 and why these goods, services and activities are necessary to live with dignity.

6. It is crucial that the Child Poverty Strategy focuses efforts on lifting all children out of poverty. However, MIS research raises questions about the kind of society we want, and the acceptability of focusing on lifting people above a relative income threshold, rather than focusing on, for example, what Social Security and earnings should provide and enable people to do. As it stands, the Strategy relies heavily on policy developments related to employment, and lacks a clearly articulated vision that directly addresses the direct impact of policy on the living standards and life experiences of children themselves.

1. Terms of Reference

Is the Child Poverty Strategy sufficiently ambitious?

7. It is estimated that Strategy could result in 550,000 fewer children in poverty in FYE 2031 than if no measures were implemented. Any decrease in child poverty is welcome, but this reduction would still potentially leave more than 4 million children below the poverty line.

8. The majority of the estimated reduction in child poverty relates to removing the two-child limit in April 2026, projected to lift 450,000 children out of poverty within the current parliament. More ambitious policies and interventions with a similar or even greater scale of impact are needed to ensure that the rate of child poverty continues to fall. 

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

9. We believe that broadly, the drivers of poverty identified as part of the strategy are the right ones; but the ways in which these drivers are related to outcomes requires further development. In particular, the outcome related to boosting family incomes relies heavily on employment as a driver, and this is apparent throughout the strategy, while placing insufficient emphasis on other ways in which incomes can be improved for those who cannot do this via earnings from paid work.

10. While increasing the National Living Wage (NLW) is helpful, we know that even working full time at this does not give households enough to live a decent life. Our annual Minimum Income Standard (MIS) report indicates that in 2025, couple parents with two children aged two and four, living in urban UK outside London, would only have 82% of the income needed for a socially acceptable standard of living if both working full-time at the NLW.[1]

11. Changes announced as part of the Employment Rights Bill are also welcome, but do very little to directly address rates of child poverty.

Are there any policies and initiatives not included in the Child Poverty Strategy that could strengthen the outcomes in:

(i) boosting families' incomes

12. While there is some reference to welfare and Social Security in the Strategy, there is an absence of discussion of policies that could directly increase the incomes of households with children and thereby reduce the risk of child poverty. The increase in the Universal Credit (UC) Standard Allowance is a positive step, but there is no direct link between this and increasing incomes relative to the needs of children and reducing their risk of hardship. More broadly, it remains unclear what UC and the rest of the welfare state is meant to provide, and how it links to living standards or needs.

13. The Strategy makes no mention of other policy changes that could have indirect but potentially substantial effects on child poverty rates, most notably the Benefit Cap and the Local Housing Allowance (LHA).

(ii) saving families' money

14. The strategy outlines a continued commitment to reduce the costs of school uniform by limiting the number of ‘logoed’ items that parents are expected to buy. Our research for Child Poverty Action Group highlights that the other two biggest costs associated with children’s education are food and transport.[2] While the changes in eligibility for free school meals and the cap on bus fares will help with this, they could go much further. In particular, making free school meals universally available for all primary-aged children in the first instance, would ensure that all children who need it would be getting a school lunch, but also reducing the cost of a school day for parents.

2. Monitoring and evaluating progress

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

15. Targets for reducing child poverty need to be ambitious if there is to be any substantial positive change in the experiences of children in lower-income households. Although relative poverty after housing costs and deep material deprivation together provide a picture of the prevalence and nature of financial hardship affecting children, a wider range of metrics should also be considered. Our annual Households Below a Minimum Income Standard report shows the proportion of individuals and households who fall below MIS in a given financial year. For the first time, in 2024/25 more than half of children are living in households with an income that does not provide them with a socially acceptable standard of living.[3] While it is not designed to be an indicator of poverty, MIS provides a benchmark for living standards that is based on need rather than on an arbitrary income threshold, and considers the importance of social participation as a fundamental element of this. It therefore provides a way to increase our understanding of how living in a low-income household materially affects children’s lives, as well as providing a means through which progress towards improved living standards for all children can be tracked.

What is your view of the Government's proposed 'Monitoring and Evaluation Framework' for the Child Poverty Strategy? How could it be improved?

16. The framework currently lacks detail on how the driver-level evaluation and the policy-level evaluation will be applied and implemented.

How should the Government support the monitoring and evaluation of actions to reduce child poverty at the local level? And what data is either available or necessary to achieve this?

17. The introduction of new Children in Low Income Families after housing costs estimates of child poverty at local level is a welcome development from DWP, and builds on work carried out at CRSP.[4] However, it is important to recognise that certain sub-groups will be systematically excluded from this dataset. In particular, households with no recourse to public funds will not be included, as the data are based on households that have records in the tax and benefit system. It is therefore important to continue to identify ways in which these types of household (who are likely to have very low incomes) can be integrated into child poverty statistics.

18. There is a need to ensure that there is cross-departmental communication and collaboration to implement the Child Poverty Strategy effectively, with the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions at its core, but drawing on administrative data from other departments such as HRMC.

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

19. Legislation and policy changes need to be central to ensure that that efforts to reduce Child Poverty do not reverse because of changes in Government. This can be supported by working to maximise public buy-in relating to relevant policies and their implementation. This necessitates a clearly articulated vision of what we want living standards in the UK to look like for children and their families, avoiding vague statements of intent.

March 2026