Child poverty in the UK

This makes for stark reading. [Thanks to Antonia for the link]

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have conducted some research on child poverty in the UK. They’ve broken it down by ward and uses having one or more parent on workless benefits as a proxy for poverty.

Now, there are always going to be anomalies with this sort of approach. But I would guess that as a whole, this proxy, if anything, will underestimate the situation. (It is perfectly possible to be working and still poor.)

And the general picture the research gives is this: 21% of children in the UK are living in families on benefits. Put another way, about 1 in 5 children are living in poverty.

The research site lets you download the statistics for your area. Mine made for uncomfortable and depressing reading.

London, as I suppose you might expect, is on average twice as bad as the rest of the UK. But that’s no reason for those outside London to feel smug. Skuds has posted about the same issue where he lives in Crawley. And as he says.

“As a whole we should really be scandalised that nearly 1 in 5 children in the town are dependent on benefits and not satisfied just because that is better than the national average. The acceptable level should be zero.”

Totally. But how do we reach that level? As important for me, I think, is mitgating the effect of parental poverty on the child, and making sure that the children aren’t punished for their parents’ bad luck. But again, there’s a big how do we do that.

Update: I’ve put some people who might have more of a clue on the how below.

• Child Poverty Action Group
• Children’s Society
• End Child Poverty Coalition
• End Child Poverty Network Cymru
• Northern Ireland Anti Poverty Network
• Poverty Alliance
• Save the Children

• Nipping trouble in the womb
• How to read to Children
• At what age do you let your children go out on their own?
• Indian Boy wins World Peace Prize
• An idea for how to make your child behave

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.