Reducing child poverty – what success would look like

Over 1 in 4 children in the UK live in poverty. This impacts the food they eat, the homes they live in and their health and educational outcomes. This figure masks huge inequalities in who experiences poverty (Figure 1). More than half of children in workless families are in poverty. Children from large families (those with three or more children) are also more likely to experience poverty, and as are children from ethnic minority families.

The government has responded to this challenge with a child poverty strategy to help improve children's lives, increase opportunities and reduce inequalities. To achieve these goals, the strategy will need to boost family incomes and use policy to address the structural drivers of poverty, such as insecure work and high housing costs. For example, the removal of the two-child limit on Universal Credit this year may, over time, reduce the disproportionate number of large families experiencing poverty. The child poverty strategy cannot rely on short-term income top-ups alone – income is the means, not the end. 

The government has set out how it will measure if child poverty is decreasing. But if the aim is to improve children's lives, the success of the strategy should be judged not only on a reduction in poverty measures but also on whether children's health, education and future opportunities improve. The new Labour government presents an important opportunity to reaffirm a commitment to reducing child poverty and the positive impacts this can have on health.

Child poverty has consequences for children's health and future opportunities 

The direct impacts of poverty can leave children hungry and living in cold and damp homes or unsuitable and insecure accommodation. This can affect both their physical and mental health. Poverty is also associated with poorer education and employment outcomes, which can indirectly impact health. Better education often leads to higher-quality jobs and higher incomes, which enable a good standard of living and greater ability to afford essential goods and services that support good health. Education can also improve our ability to understand and use health-related information. Good health literacy supports healthier choices, such as eating a balanced diet or exercising.

Poverty is linked to higher prevalence of childhood obesity, tooth decay and asthma. The impacts of health inequalities and economic disadvantage can also accumulate over a person’s lifetime. People in more deprived areas have a shorter life expectancy, with less years lived in good health, than those in less deprived areas.

Monitoring child poverty

In July 2026, the government published a baseline monitoring and evaluation report to accompany their child poverty strategy. This is a relatively comprehensive monitoring framework that includes a clear logic model, headline and contextual indicators, annual reporting and embedded evaluation from the outset. However, the strategy lacks clear targets for child poverty reduction. Clear targets drive accountability and would allow for early understanding of whether the strategy is reducing poverty as intended. It is important that the strategy is supported by both targets and evidence-based policy to really drive change.

The strategy’s progress will be assessed against two headline indicators: relative low income after housing costs (the standard definition of poverty), and deep material poverty (where children lack at least four out of 13 essential items, such as food and heating). In 2024/25, there were 4 million (27%) children in poverty and 1.9 million (13%) children in deep material poverty. Income tells us whether families have enough resources, and material deprivation tells us whether those resources translate into living standards. 

The monitoring and evaluation report rightly focuses on reducing poverty and understanding its drivers by monitoring contextual indicators that look at income, employment and housing. This is an important foundation to understand where reductions in child poverty are coming from. But these indicators won’t tell us what is happening to children’s health or education outcomes. How will we know if children’s lives have actually improved?

An opportunity to track improvements in children's life chances 

The simplest way to determine whether children’s lives have improved would be to add a small number of routinely collected outcome indicators. These indicators could capture both immediate changes in children’s living standards and longer term changes in health and life chances such as food insecurity and school readiness, data on which are already routinely collected. Across these indicators, there are currently large differences in children’s outcomes. Monitoring outcomes by household income could help us understand whether reductions in child poverty are translating into improved outcomes for children in the lowest-income households. Where income data are not available, differences in outcomes for children in the most and least deprived areas can provide insights on the scale of inequalities (Figure 2). Additional outcome indicators would provide a more complete picture of whether the strategy is achieving its long-term ambition to tackle the drivers and outcomes of poverty. Subsequent annual reports could be expanded to measure whether children's health is improving as the strategy intends.

Improving health outcomes through reducing child poverty

The current gap in outcomes for children is stark. In 2024/25, of households with children, 24.6% with the lowest incomes experienced food insecurity, compared with 1.1% of those with the highest incomes (Figure 2). In the most deprived areas, the percentage of children with visually obvious tooth decay was almost three times greater than in the least deprived areas (35.1% vs 12.8%). Similar inequalities are seen in overweight and obesity and whether children are school ready at the end of reception.

The strategy already highlights action on some of these areas, for example noting that programmes such as Supervised Toothbrushing should help to tackle health inequalities. Monitoring dental decay as an outcome will reinforce the need to make progress on this issue. A successful strategy should lead to gaps narrowing across all these indicators over time.

Improved outcomes related to children’s health could provide an important complementary test of the success of the government’s child poverty strategy. This isn't about expanding the strategy into a health strategy. Rather, if one of the ultimate aims of reducing child poverty is to improve children's health and life chances, then these additional health indicators should help demonstrate whether those wider ambitions are being achieved. The true test of success will not be simply reducing child poverty but whether fewer children experience poor health and unequal life chances.