Written evidence submitted by the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Wales Office (CPW0020)
Call for evidence
Summary
Tackling child poverty is at the heart of this Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and ensure all children have the best start in life. Poverty scars the lives and life chances of our children. Children growing up in poverty are at greater risk of worse physical and mental health, worse educational attainment, worse employment outcomes with higher risk of unemployment and lower earnings in work, and, ultimately, worse life outcomes including lower life expectancy[1].
Relevant data on rates of poverty are published by the Department for Work and Pensions and can be found at GOV.UK.
The Child Poverty Taskforce was created by the Prime Minister in July 2024 to oversee the development and delivery of an ambitious UK-wide Child Poverty Strategy. The Taskforce worked across government to drive action on child poverty and undertook an extensive engagement programme to listen to experts and campaigners and engage with families, charities, campaigners and leading organisations across the UK to shape and inform policymaking.
In December 2025, the UK Government’s Child Poverty Strategy was published, with the Prime Minister launching the strategy at Ely & Caerau Children’s Centre, alongside the Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens and former First Minister Eluned Morgan.
Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty sets out how the Government will deliver a reduction in child poverty over the next 10 years, improving children’s lives and life chances now and tackling the root causes of child poverty in the long term. The measures announced in the strategy will lift 550,000 UK children out of relative low income in the final year of this Parliament, compared to our estimates without those measures, with 7.1 million children seeing household incomes rise, including 1.4 million in deep material poverty. Taken together, the measures in the strategy will see the largest expected reduction in child poverty by any Government in a single parliament since comparable records began.
The Child Poverty Strategy focusses around three main pillars: boosting families’ incomes; driving down the costs of essentials; and strengthening local support for families.
The strategy has two headline metrics:
• Relative low income (after housing costs). This is a widely used and internationally recognised income measure of poverty and reflects changing living standards over time. This metric is based on how much income each household has after deducting taxes paid and their housing costs, adjusting for the number and ages of people in the household (to account for different levels of need across households). Anyone living in a household with less than 60% of the income of a household in the middle (median) of the income distribution is defined as being in relative low income after housing costs.
• Deep material poverty is new measure developed for the strategy, based on existing material deprivation questions, which reflects our commitment to addressing deeper child poverty. Families are asked whether they can afford 13 items identified by the public as the most essential, covering basic needs such as food, heating and housing. If a family is lacking 4 or more of those items for financial reasons, they are judged to be in deep material poverty. The items and threshold will not change over the course of the 10-year strategy, so this metric is fixed.
The strategy respects the devolution settlements and complements work that is already underway in nations and regions. Each nation has its own distinct devolution settlement which sets out powers to tackle child poverty, and each section within the strategy indicates which polices are devolved or reserved and which nations are specifically affected. Whilst education policy is fully devolved, the Department for Education works closely with the Welsh Government on policy issues through a range of established mechanisms at both official and ministerial level. Engagement between governments allows us to share our collective knowledge and experience to deliver better outcomes for people across the UK.
The UK Government has already delivered several policies that will support the goals of the child poverty strategy including:
• Removing the two-child limit on Universal Credit, benefitting 69,000 children in Wales.
• Increasing the maximum amount of childcare costs that can be claimed in Universal Credit.
• Uprating the Universal Credit Standard Allowance by over 6%, the first ever sustained real terms increase in the Standard Allowance, directly benefiting 320,000 households in Wales.
• Taking £117 off energy bills, on top of the £150 off energy bills for around 6 million families under the Warm Home Discount.
• Committing to take money off energy bills to tackle the cost of living at the Autumn Budget. These changes we made at the Budget are a significant alteration to how energy is priced, and have ensured that from April until the end of June, the price cap has fallen by 7% (£117) to £1,641 per year.
• From April 2026, a full-time worker on the National Living Wage will see their annual pay increase by £900.
• From April 2026, the 16-17 and Apprentice National Minimum Wage has increased by 6.0% to £8.00 per hour.
• From 1 April 2026, the 18-20 National Minimum Wage increased continuing to close the gap with the National Living Wage. This represents an increase of £1,500 to a full-time worker on the National Minimum Wage.
1. What are the foremost barriers that could prevent Wales from realising the ambitions set out in the UK Government’s 2025 child poverty strategy?
The foremost barriers which could prevent Wales from realising the ambitions set out in the UK Government’s 2025 Child Poverty Strategy include:
• Low employment rates – Children living in households where no adults work are around 4 times more likely to be in poverty than those in households where all adults are in work. Children also benefit in wider ways, such as educational attainment and mental health, from living in a working household. The UK Government wants every parent who can work to feel the benefits of good, secure work that enables them to get on in life and support their families.
• Geographically dispersed communities – Many Welsh communities, particularly in rural and post-industrial areas are geographically dispersed. This increases transport costs and travel time to access to employment, childcare, education, healthcare and wider services.
Addressing low employment rates
The UK Government wants every parent who can work to feel the benefits of rewarding, secure jobs that enable them to get on in life and support their families. The UK Government is driving forward labour market interventions that will deliver a step-change in support and help parents to get into and get on at work. Ensuring parents can access the right training and support is key to ensuring they can progress in their careers and help ensure children feel there are no limits to their ambitions. The UK Government has:
• Agreed how it will deliver its manifesto commitment to devolve employment support funding to the Welsh Government over the course of the current UK Parliament. That devolution has already begun with the agreement to transfer up to £20 million for the Economic Inactivity Trailblazer Pilots across two years, 2025-26 to 2026-2027. Further funding from agreed new employment programmes being delivered by DWP will be transferred to Welsh Government to design and deliver employment support schemes closer to the communities they affect using the Welsh Government’s Employability Support Programme.
• Fulfilled its Manifesto commitment to bring forward legislation within 100 days of entering office by introducing the Employment Rights Act 2025. The Act is the first phase of delivering the UK Government’s plan to Make Work Pay, supporting employers, workers, and unions to get Britain moving forward. Alongside the new Industrial Strategy, the Act will support the Government’s mission to increase productivity and create the right conditions for long-term sustainable, inclusive, and secure economic growth. The Employment Rights Act will provide a new baseline of security for workers including increasing protection from sexual harassment, strengthening Statutory Sick Pay, introducing the right to guaranteed hours, and tackling fire and rehire.
• Published the “Get Britain Working” White Paper, setting out the Government’s strategy to address rising economic inactivity and boost employment across the UK. The strategy is backed by £240 million to deliver these interventions, including sixteen trailblazers across England and Wales. The trailblazers in Wales are specifically dedicated to reducing economic inactivity due to long-term sickness, with a total package of support of roughly £20 million. The locations chosen were Blaenau Gwent, Neath Port Talbot and Denbighshire.
• Launched the Department for Work and Pensions first “Connect to Work” services in Wales in March 2026. Connect to Work is a £1 billion specialist, voluntary, supported employment programme for anyone who is disabled, has a health condition or complex non-health related barriers to work. The programme will support around 300,000 people across England and Wales by March 2030. It provides specialist, intensive support to people who are economically inactive but keen to work as well as people in work but at risk of falling out of employment because of their barriers. Connect to Work services, delivered through Welsh councils, are now open across Wales.
• Demonstrated our commitment to boosting economic growth and creating high quality jobs across Wales by announcing £2.5 billion investment in new nuclear, £64 million to build the first floating offshore wind hub in the Celtic Sea, £10m for two AI growth zones in Wales, a £50 million Defence Growth Deal, £320 million for Investment Zones and £50m for Freeports in Wales.
• Removing the two-child limit on Universal Credit, benefitting 69,000 children in Wales. In addition, increasing the maximum amount of childcare costs that can be claimed in Universal Credit; and uprating the Universal Credit Standard Allowance by over 6%, the first ever sustained real terms increase in the Standard Allowance, directly benefiting 320,000 households in Wales.
• We increased the national and living wages in April, which will boost the incomes of up to 170,000 workers in Wales. From April 2026, a full-time worker on the National Living Wage will see their annual pay increase by £900. Furthermore, the Apprenticeship National Minimum Wage has increased by 6.0% to £8.00 per hour and we have raised wages for 18-20 year olds working full time on the minimum wage by over £4000 per year.
• Also unleashing talent and opportunity with a Youth Guarantee package. The Jobs Guarantee is a central element of the Youth Guarantee. The Jobs Guarantee will provide every eligible 18–24-year-old who has been claiming Universal Credit and looking for work for 18 months a guaranteed, fully subsidised six-month paid job. Once fully rolled out, the scheme is expected to support more than 90,000 young people across GB over the next three years.
• On education specifically, there is engagement via the UK Education Ministers Council (UKEMC), most recently hosted by Wales in November 2025. Chaired by the former Welsh Cabinet Secretary for Education, Lynne Neagle and attended by Baroness Smith, the UKEMC provides a forum for coordination across the UK with devolved governments.
Support for geographically dispersed communities
In rural areas, parents are more likely to rely on transport to reach work. Limited or infrequent public transport can restrict access to jobs, particularly jobs with irregular working patterns. High transport costs reduce the money available for essentials such as food, clothing heating and school activities. To address this, the UK Government has:
• Committed to improving connectivity through a long-term plan for Welsh rail (agreed by the UK and the previous Welsh Government), committing to a pipeline of 43 projects worth up to £14 billion in North, South, Mid and West Wales.
• Allocated £3.8m to support those in rural areas who use heating oil. In addition, the Government intends to introduce new consumer protections for heating oil customers and is rapidly exploring new ways to step in and ensure households are better protected.
• Announced the Warm Homes Plan which will deliver £15 billion of public investment, roll out upgrades to up to 5 million homes that could save them hundreds on energy bills and help lift a million families out of fuel poverty by 2030. Additionally, the continuation of the Warm Home Discount scheme until 2030/31 will also benefit around 6 million eligible households.
The UK Government recognises that families and businesses across the country will see the recent global events and once again be concerned about the impact on their energy costs, and the impact on fuel poverty. The UK Government is looking at available levers to support all those affected by the rise in prices. The Prime Minister has been clear his number one domestic priority is helping families with the cost of living, and the Chancellor recently confirmed the Government’s approach to rising energy prices will be to target help to those who need it most. To that end, the Government has announced £53 million for low-income families who heat their homes with oil, to help tackle surging prices. In Wales, the UK Government has provided £3.8m to the Welsh Government to support those in rural areas who use heating oil.
2. How effectively do the UK and Welsh governments work together towards ending child poverty in Wales?
This Government is acting to turn the tide on child poverty, but this change requires consensus, partnership and shared action. While the UK Government has a fundamental role to play in tackling child poverty, it cannot do it by itself, and it will require action across reserved, devolved and local levers. In developing the Child Poverty Strategy, the UK Government committed to the following principles to inform our meaningful engagement with devolved governments:
• Recognising the distinct differences in the political and delivery landscapes across the devolved governments;
• Complementing existing and developing strategies and anti-poverty activities in the nations;
• Understanding and respecting devolution settlements;
• Using UK-wide data and evidence, where possible and appropriate; and
• Learning from the positive work and different approaches already underway in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Effective cooperation between the UK and Welsh governments is integral for addressing child poverty in Wales. To deliver meaningful progress and change, officials from the Welsh Government, and the UK Government maintain a constructive and collaborative working relationship on matters relating to child poverty. Through regular engagement, officials share policy insights, and exchange best practice on targeted interventions that support children, families, and communities. This ongoing cooperation ensures that both governments can draw on the latest evidence and expertise form across the UK to strengthen their respective approaches.
The Four Nations Ministerial Group on Child Poverty provided the UK Government, Welsh Government, Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Executive with a dedicated forum to contribute to the development of the UK-wide strategy and ensure that it complemented their own initiatives. The group convened ministers with responsibility for child poverty from each of the four nations. In May 2025, the Ministerial Taskforce on Child Poverty held a session with Ministers from the devolved governments to discuss the developing child poverty strategy and to agree priority areas for further collaboration, beyond publication. A post-publication meeting of the Four Nations Ministerial Group on Child Poverty took place in March 2026 to agree developing plans for monitoring and evaluating the UK Child Poverty Strategy. This engagement will continue.
Close collaboration between UK Government and the previous Welsh Government was also demonstrated by the joint launch of the UK Child Poverty Strategy in Cardiff in December 2025. The Prime Minister attended the launch at Ely & Caerau Children’s Centre, with the Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens, former Welsh Government First Minister Eluned Morgan, and Jane Hutt, former Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Trefnydd and Chief Whip. They met families and children who were set to benefit from the interventions contained in the strategy.
The strategy acknowledges Welsh Government’s 2024 Child Poverty Strategy and the Trailblazer programme. This government is committed to continued collaboration with the Welsh Government to tackle child poverty across the UK, particularly through the implementation that will now follow.
Initiatives implemented by Welsh Government include breakfast clubs offering free, healthy breakfasts to children in primary schools as well as providing Baby Bundles to new parents with essential items such as clothing and blankets. In addition, more than 50 million meals have been served since the introduction of Universal Primary Free School Meals. Welsh Government are also the first to provide an expanded childcare offer; free prescriptions and hospital parking to helps with family finances.
As set out in the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, published alongside the strategy, the UK Government will continue to work closely with the Devolved Governments to complement existing monitoring and evaluation activity, and consider how best to feed in their own findings to track progress at both the local and national level, particularly where powers are devolved.
Devolved Governments and Offices for the Nations will continue to be involved throughout strategy implementation.
It is for the Welsh Government to determine how to deliver devolved policies, but the decisions UK Government has made will increase the funding available to the Welsh Government. The UK Government is providing the Welsh Government with nearly £6.5bn in additional spending power over the SR as a result of changes to the fiscal framework, additional funding through Barnett and the largest settlement in the history of devolution.
3. How well do devolved and reserved agencies co-ordinate their work towards ending child poverty in Wales?
Poverty is a complex issue, requiring focus across all levels of government, and involving both reserved and devolved policies. Each nation has its own distinct devolution settlement which sets out powers to tackle child poverty. These powers vary across nations with some levers being devolved to the governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, while others remain reserved to the UK Government.
The right employment support can help parents who are economically inactive into sustained employment which increases household income, improves long term prospects for children, and helps break cycles of intergenerational poverty.
The importance of successful close collaboration between both Governments and local authorities can be seen with the Trailblazer programme. UK Government has agreed how it will deliver its manifesto commitment to devolve employment support funding to the Welsh Government over the course of the current UK Parliament. That devolution has already begun with the agreement to transfer up to £20 million for the Economic Inactivity Trailblazer Pilots across two years, 2025-26 to 2026-2027. Further funding from agreed new employment programmes being delivered by DWP will be transferred to Welsh Government to design and deliver employment support schemes closer to the communities they affect using the Welsh Government’s Employability Support Programme.
In Wales, DWP has invested £20 million in Economic Inactivity Trailblazers, operating in Blaenau Gwent, Neath Port Talbot and Denbighshire, to test new, innovative approaches to supporting people who are economically inactive into work. These trailblazers are delivered in partnership with Welsh local authorities and local organisations, allowing interventions to reflect local labour markets and community needs. The focus includes parents, people with health conditions, and those with caring responsibilities – groups that are likely to have children at risk of poverty. By addressing complex and entrenched barriers to work, these interventions aim to support more parents into sustainable employment, thereby increasing household income and reducing child poverty. Learning from the Welsh trailblazers is being used to inform how future employment support is designed and delivered.
Another example of successful collaboration is Jobcentre Plus (JCP). JCP routinely collaborates with devolved Welsh Government services, including Working Wales, to ensure claimants, particularly parents and young people, can access skills, employability and in work support alongside benefit provision. This joined up approach recognises that tackling child poverty requires both income support and sustained access to good quality employment, skills and local services.
At local level, JCP and Welsh Government teams regularly engage through local partnership arrangements, co-location and referral pathways, enabling support to be tailored to local labour markets and community need. This partnership working supports Welsh Government priorities such as the Young Person’s Guarantee and wider economic inclusion goals, while ensuring UK wide benefits and employment support are delivered in a way that complements devolved services. The Jobs Guarantee is a central element of the Youth Guarantee. The Jobs Guarantee will provide every eligible 18–24-year-old who has been claiming Universal Credit and looking for work for 18 months a guaranteed, fully subsidised six-month paid job. Once fully rolled out, the scheme is expected to support more than 90,000 young people across GB over the next three years. This will deliver an estimated 3,500 paid work placements across Wales between 2026 and 2029.
These arrangements help parents move closer to employment or to increase earnings, which remains one of the most effective routes out of child poverty.
4. Are children’s voices in Wales heard loudly enough by policymakers in the UK Government?
The Child Poverty Taskforce committed to a collaborative approach which put the voices of children and families experiencing poverty at the heart of this work. They heard directly from families across the UK, including those with specific barriers or who are less represented, to gather insight on their experiences, and what would have the greatest impact on their lives. This engagement through our lived experience strand included a forum of parents and carers designed to capture a broad range of experiences, work with Changing Realities and their network of over 200 parents from all four nations of the UK and Youth Ambassadors. Additionally, the Child Poverty Unit spoke directly to children and learned from partners with extensive expertise in child poverty, including Child Poverty Action Group, Barnardo’s, Save the Children, National Children’s Bureau, Citizen’s Advice, TGP Cymru and Children in Wales. These perspectives were used to inform strategy development and shared across Government to support officials developing wider policy.
The Ministerial Taskforce on Child Poverty listened carefully to families, experts, and campaigners, and acted on what they heard. The strongest and most consistent message was that removing the two-child limit is the single biggest step the Government can take to tackle child poverty, and the Government has done exactly that.
Officials in the Child Poverty Unit also engaged with the Offices of the Children’s Commissioners of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, highlighting the importance of children’s rights and children’s voices. In March, the Child Poverty Unit published a Children’s Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA), which concludes that the Child Poverty Strategy is expected to have an overall positive impact on children’s rights, particularly in relation to Articles 6 (right to life, survival and development), 26 (social security) and 27 (adequate standard of living).
Publishing the Child Poverty Strategy is only the beginning. This Government will continue to put an emphasis on hearing directly from children and families to inform the ongoing delivery, monitoring and evaluation of the strategy.
5. How can data collection be improved to better understand and map the extent of child poverty in Wales?
6. How could better data be harnessed to design and deliver measures that more effectively address child poverty in Wales?
Understanding the experience across different parts of the UK and of different groups was central to the development of the UK Child Poverty Strategy. The Child Poverty Taskforce and officials in the Child Poverty Unit worked with Devolved Governments, regions and local areas to ensure the Strategy complements anti-poverty initiatives already underway.
The Strategy evidence pack sets out the picture across geographies and for different groups of children and families. Where possible, the UK Government has published UK wide data and at national and sub-national levels. For example, the poverty impacts published at Autumn Budget 2025 included statistics on the number of Universal Credit households who could potentially gain from the removal of the two-child limit in Great Britain, by country, parliamentary constituency and local authority.
The Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring and Evaluation Framework sets out how the UK Government will hold itself to account on delivering the impact promised in the Strategy through this parliament and beyond, as part of the Strategy’s ongoing commitment to transparency, accountability, and continued learning to inform future intervention[2].
This monitoring and evaluation is being designed in collaboration with officials from the Devolved Governments, including the Welsh Government, and will build on the successful collaborative approach used for strategy development. Officials in the Child Poverty Unit will work with a wide range of stakeholders and continue to bring in the direct perspectives of families and children with experience of poverty to ensure the UK Government understands how the impacts of the Strategy have varied across different groups and across the UK.
The Monitoring and Evaluation Framework also committed to working with Devolved Governments to support and complement existing monitoring and evaluation plans, including the Welsh Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring Framework. This will include understanding the impact of specific policies on child poverty alongside any wider benefits and collating relevant findings to inform the Strategy UK wide reporting. Officials in the Child Poverty Unit will carefully consider how to reflect national and sub-national variations in the drivers of child poverty, where measures are specific or powers are devolved.
Further details on the analytical programme will be outlined in the monitoring and evaluation baseline report in the Summer. This will include reporting against the two-headline metrics via the annual Households Below Average Income publication. It will also report at a local level using the new after housing costs measure included in Children in low-income families: local area statistics, and reference forthcoming new Universal Credit Low Income Estimates Statistics, currently in development. Together, these data developments allow for granular geographical breakdowns of relative low income after housing costs.
The UK Government is keen to build on learning from across the UK, including from the Welsh Government’s work in this area through its Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring Framework and wider evaluation activity. The UK Government noted the recent findings from initiatives by the previous Welsh Government and authorities in Wales on the use of data to better tackle poverty, including child poverty. This includes work by the Streamlining Welsh Benefits Steering Group demonstrating how better use of data can help local authorities simplify Welsh benefit eligibility processes and reduce barriers to financial support, and the potential of data-led approaches for promoting benefit take-up.
June 2026
[1]Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty - GOV.UK
[2]Child Poverty Strategy: Monitoring and Evaluation Framework - GOV.UK