Let’s start with the unquestionably good news before we get to the ‘buts’.  Our Children, Our Future represents the first UK wide child poverty strategy since the last Labour government. At last, there will be a child poverty strategy for England. In drawing up the strategy, the Child Poverty Taskforce engaged closely with parents and children with experience of poverty. Four of those parents, involved in the Changing Realities project, said in a Foreword, ‘we have experienced genuine listening and collaboration, and it has been encouraging to feel that our lived experience can and should influence policy solutions’. This engagement will continue as part of the strategy’s evaluation and development.

Also very positive is the document’s language and tone. It makes a very strong case for action on child poverty, starting with the Prime Minister’s foreword: both the moral case and its importance as an economic and social investment in our future.  Moreover, it recognises the key role played by social security and indeed uses the term rather than what has become the pejorative language of ‘welfare’. The tone is a far cry from the dominant false narrative of a ‘ballooning welfare’ budget which unfortunately some ministers perpetuate. A companion Evidence Pack spells out how Tory cuts mean that basic benefit levels are worth ‘significantly less’ than in 2010/11 and how this has contributed to the worsening of child poverty.  

This lays the ground for the most important and welcome policy shift, announced previously in the Budget: the total abolition of the two-child limit, campaigned for by civil society, politicians, Compass, and Mainstream Labour. Although this should have happened as soon as Labour came to power, it represents the single most effective means of reducing child poverty at a stroke, supported by modest real increases in the universal credit (UC) standard allowance for the rest of this parliament. It is officially estimated that abolition of the two-child limit will reduce the number of children in poverty by 550,000 or four per cent by 2030 and that as many as 7.1 million children will be in gaining households, of whom 1.4 million are in deep material poverty.  Welcome as this is, reversing the most heinous of the Tory cuts, as the Resolution Foundation warns, the strategy is still working against economic forces and other policy choices that could weaken its impact. This is where the ‘buts’ start to creep in.   

The effectiveness of the removal of the two-child limit will be blunted by the refusal to abolish the overall benefit cap or even to uprate the threshold limits annually in line with increases in UC (as it is they have been uprated only once since 2016 when they were actually cut). As a consequence, an estimated one in twelve children escaping the frying pan of the two-child limit will be no better off because they’ll be caught in the fire of the cap. Although the numbers caught in the benefit cap are relatively low, it is a key driver of deep poverty, which has increased in significance since Labour was last in power and the government are committed to addressing.  

The other main social security omission is the failure to end the freeze of local housing allowance, which aggravates poverty among families living in the rented private sector. More generally there is no hint of the further investment in social security that is needed if it’s to provide for a decent life; and some families will be affected by the cuts in the health element of UC. Nor is there mention of the need for strengthened independent welfare rights advice. Yet analysis suggests that, as the record of the last Labour government showed, ‘we can only get significant and lasting reductions in child poverty by investing in our social security system’.

Of course, a comprehensive strategy embraces much more than social security. Other important elements include action on homelessness and the use of bed and breakfast accommodation; reduction in some of the costs of education (including the extension of free school meals); improvements in child care (of particular value to mothers whose poverty is still inextricably linked with that of their children) and in employment and skills support; and strengthened local services, especially those prioritising prevention. They are summarised in a Theory of Change outlined in the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.  These are aimed as much at reducing the impact of child poverty as its incidence but are nevertheless welcome. 

As well as the absence of further action on social security, the strategy disappoints in a number of ways. Despite informal assurances, it lacks the children’s rights perspective that marks the Welsh strategy’s objectives and narrative. I’m told by Dr. Rhian Croke of Swansea University that it has meant its objectives go beyond traditional anti-poverty policy by incorporating rights-linked outcomes like non-discrimination and dignity. This includes dignity and respect in service delivery and challenging stigma, which, as recent research, supported by Turn2Us shows, continues to hurt those in poverty and which would have been better addressed by a wider human rights approach to poverty. The UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights argues that ‘rights-based social protection should be championed as a bulwark against the rise of authoritarian populism’.  

The lack of a children’s rights perspective has also weakened the strategy’s stance on migrant children in families with no recourse to public funds (NRPF). While its explicit recognition of this group of children and broad commitment to improving support for them are very welcome, it has ignored calls for easing the application of the NRPF rule. Moreover, proposed reforms to the asylum and settlement rules are likely to worsen poverty among migrant children, already at disproportionate risk of poverty.. 

With regard to implementation and monitoring, it’s regrettable that the central Child Poverty Unit will be replaced by a team based in the Department for Work and Pensions. Although the document promises ‘regular cross-government ministerial oversight’ of implementation, the fear is that this will diminish its clout across government. And the absence of targets, in contrast to those in the National Plan to End Homelessness has been widely condemned as weakening accountability. Lord (John) Bird will attempt to insert them, including a target on deep poverty, in the Lords. 

To end back on a more positive note: the monitoring and evaluation document does suggest that serious thought is being given to delivery, with a further baseline report promised for Summer 2026. And the main strategy document describes it as just ‘the first step on our road to ending child poverty’, emphasised by the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson who presented it to parliament as ‘a strong start’ (8 December, col 61).  Given the commitment to continued collaboration, there is still plenty of scope for further pressure on the government to go further than this ‘first step’.  And it’s crucial that the Labour leadership leads from the front on what Keir Starmer has described as his ‘moral mission’.

Ruth Lister is a Labour peer, vice-chair of the Compass Board, author of The Good Society Starts Small (Compass) and Poverty (Polity) and hon. president of the Child Poverty Action Group.