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The threat of homelessness is an extremely visceral fear. The lack of a safe place to sleep, eat, shelter from poor weather and gather with those closest to us should be a basic right that every individual sees realised. However, for thousands of children their home is just a hope. In the meantime, they might sleep in mouldy, cold rooms, while sometimes sharing a hotel bed with several siblings with nowhere to play or do homework.  

At the end of February this year, the government released new statistics for July to September 2024 showing that 70,450 households in London are in Temporary Accommodation. Focusing exclusively on all households with children across the country in TA, 58% are in London alone. As Shelter, recently highlighted, 164,040 children are currently in TA and 92,850 or nearly 3 in 5 children in TA are in London. These children are not well captured in HBAI data, which is used to create child poverty statistics for the country. That could mean that nearly tens of thousands of children are missing from the estimated 700,000 children believed to be in poverty across the capital. We also know that children are being moved outside of their local borough or even outside of the city entirely, but we don’t know how many.  

With the equivalent of one child in every classroom in London currently living in temporary accommodation, and 14,885 young people presenting as homeless to their local council across the city in 2023-24 figures, it is clear that all levels of government across London must take the intersection of the housing crisis and child poverty very seriously. 

Gathered evidence shows that child poverty can be a predictor for adult homelessness and is almost always a co-existing reality for families facing the threat of homelessness.  

Trust for London’s 2022/23 data on child poverty rates after housing costs show significant jumps when housing costs are accounted for as the chart below shows. The affordable housing crisis in London and the hundreds of thousands of children experiencing poverty must be viewed in tandem. If we want to seriously prevent child poverty from causing long-term harm to children, we need to build appropriate, truly affordable homes fit for families who live in our community urgently.  

The challenge though to quickly improve the lives of families is to provide the services they need when the threat of homelessness first looms. There are particular groups who face specific barriers when navigating personal crisis. For a parent who is threatened with domestic violence or a single parent with threats from debt collectors or joblessness due to unpaid caring responsibilities, holistic support is needed to help prevent and reduce the likelihood that they are unable to stay or move into a permanent home quickly. Other families are essentially forced into homelessness after their application for asylum is approved and they’re granted refugee status. These families often have little to no social and financial capital. Those still in a visa application process also face costly fees and limited social security support should they need it. And if a person has grown up in poverty and either loses their home or must leave their current place as a young person, their age may limit both their eligibility for support and prioritisation for what little help they can request.  

Effective interventions must tackle both the broad supply challenges as well as the specific individual circumstances of Londoners. If change isn’t built on understanding of individual needs, it will fail to create systemic change.  

Certainly, the evidence is clear that building more truly affordable social housing is the cure. At the same time, we also need to inoculate ourselves against the disease of child homelessness in London urgently. This is a public health crisis and a moral indictment.  

We are currently leading a project focusing on the key moments when homelessness should and could be prevented. We believe that some crucial conversations need to be had about protecting families from homelessness and providing appropriate support to shorten or prevent experiences of homelessness. The issues are complex, but inaction is costly. Children have significant health, academic and social risks if we do not act quickly. We’re privileged to be working with Cardinal Hume Centre and New Horizon Youth on this project. Together we’re gaining insight from three particular groups to understand what policies need to be put in place while the houses are still being built.  

We’re currently interviewing young people with experience of homelessness as a minor or young adult, migrant families and single parent, women led families. We are holding these interviews across March and April. If you know of someone who might like to take part, please do get in touch.  

We aim to share our findings in summer 2025 and invite political leaders and civil servants to engage in important conversations about how we can support families to reduce the backlog of cases where families are living in unacceptable circumstances and children are growing up without a home.  

Early education and childcare has not been at the forefront of the last few elections but notably this time around it is a hot topic. All the main political parties seem to recognise, albeit from differing perspectives perhaps, that there is much to be gained from better supporting and investing in children in their earliest years. The Conservatives have re-emphasised their commitment to rolling out 30 hours of childcare a week to working parents with children from nine months old to when they start school by September 2025. The Labour Party have also pledged to deliver this same commitment and plan to open an additional 3,000 nurseries through upgrading space in primary schools to help them do so. The Liberal Democrats for their part say they would close the attainment gap by giving disadvantaged children aged 3 and 4 an extra five hours free a week and tripling the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000 a year.

The question we, as London’s Child Poverty Network are asking of all these offerings is whether they will benefit children and families experiencing poverty who at the moment are benefiting less from the system than their wealthier peers. Back in March we published a research report ‘Make Childcare Make Sense for families on low incomes in London’. In it we looked through the eyes of parents of young children living on low incomes in London and found that the current childcare system makes little sense to them. The funding entitlements were often not accessible as they couldn’t be used without having to pay ‘top ups’; they were not flexible enough to meet their individual circumstances; and were not inclusive for their children, those with special educational needs and disabilities and those whose families have no recourse to public funds being especially likely to be excluded. One single mum of a three-year-old told us:

‘You know, you’re kind of making lots and lots of sacrifices to afford what essentially is a basic need to help our economy keep moving. Yeah, [the childcare system] just shuts people out of work.’

Sadly, the Government’s expansion of funding entitlements which began to be rolled out shortly after our report was published in April this year, will do little to improve the situation for these families. Just 1 in 5 (or 20%) of families earning less than £20,000 a year will have access to the planned expansion of funded places for one- and two-year-olds in some working families, compared to 80% of those with household incomes over £45,000.^[1] This matters to us because access to affordable, high-quality childcare and tackling child poverty are inextricably linked.

Sky high childcare costs in London are one driver of our high child poverty rate; including childcare costs in the Social Metric Commission’s measure of poverty increases the poverty rate among families with children by 0.4 percentage points.[2]  So, at the most straightforward level, bringing down childcare costs, for those that already incur them, has the potential to reduce levels of child poverty. Beyond this, affordable and accessible childcare can contribute to poverty alleviation by supporting parents and carers to access paid work if they do not already or to increase their hours, and so increase their household income.  Lastly but certainly not least, we know that high quality early education is critical to a child’s development and later educational achievement.[3]

For all these reasons, it is imperative that whoever forms the next Government deliver an early education and childcare system that benefits all children. We believe that the best way to make sure this happens is for childcare reform to be at the heart of a strategy to address child poverty. The Labour Party has made a very welcome commitment in its manifesto to putting in place a Child Poverty Strategy, it must make sure that its policy on childcare in a key plank of this.  If it doesn’t and this synergy isn’t realised is a very real risk that childcare policy rather than reducing inequality, could increase it.

[1] Drayton, E. et al. (2023). Childcare reforms create a new branch of the welfare state – but also huge risks to the market. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/ news/childcare-reforms-createnew-branch-welfare-state-alsohuge-risks-market

[2] Poverty Strategy Commission (September 2023) Interim Report: A new strategy for tackling poverty

[3] Melhuish, E. and Gardiner, J. (2023). Equal hours? Sutton Trust

By Layla, aged 19 from London (name changed to protect her identity)

I respond to this news not just as a young person, but as someone who has personally experienced the harsh realities of poverty. The recent findings from Loughborough University for the End Child Poverty Coalition resonate deeply with me, and seeing that over 30% of children across the UK are living in poverty, with two-thirds of new constituencies having at least a quarter of children facing this struggle, brings back vivid memories of my own childhood and the beginning of my own adulthood.

Growing up in poverty meant constant uncertainty and anxiety, and meant watching my care giver struggle to make ends meet, sometimes having to choose between paying bills or buying food. It meant missing out on school trips, new clothes, and being pointed out as the free school meals kid. What I’m trying to say is that these are not just statistics; they represent real lives, real struggles, and real futures at risk.

Hearing the call from the End Child Poverty Coalition for political parties to prioritise this issue fills me with a sense of urgency as it would not just be a policy change, but a lifeline for many families.

The disparities highlighted, especially in areas like the North East, London, and the North West, show that this issue is widespread and deeply rooted. It isn’t enough to just acknowledge the problem; we must act.

As someone who has walked this path, I urge our leaders to listen and to act. the upcoming election is a chance to commit to real, meaningful change, and ensuring that no child has to grow up feeling the weight of poverty, and having the opportunity to thrive is something every party should aim to include in their campaign.

Well, just as we were drawing breath after the London elections, we find ourselves back in election mode once more. And once again we will be straining every sinew to ensure that child poverty is a central issue of the campaign and one that all the political parties are held to account on. In particular we will be making the case for all parties to pledge to a child poverty strategy that not only makes firm and time-bound commitments about reducing and ultimately eradicating child poverty but also recognises that achieving this aim will require different approaches in different parts of the country.

Of course, some of the key policies that we, along with over 100 other members of the End Child Poverty Coalition, want to see front and centre in a child poverty strategy such as abolition of the two-child limit and benefit cap, are ones that an incoming Government in Westminster alone can implement. But we also need a child poverty strategy that operates regionally and locally so that it can respond to the different contexts that children live in across the country. For example, in the North East child poverty is driven in large part by low pay, insecure work and out-of-work poverty (North East Child Poverty Commission, 2024), whereas in London it is exorbitantly high housing costs along with costs such as childcare that are the major issue. Important new analysis from our colleagues at Trust for London and WPI Economics exploring the possible reasons behind the apparent fall in overall poverty numbers in London in the past few years, suggests that costs are now so high that for many people the only way to escape poverty in our city is to leave it.

A national child poverty strategy that fails to recognise these regional differences and allow for differential responses is not going to have the impact it so urgently needs to. The incoming Government, must engage with and harness the data and knowledge that the Greater London Authority, combined and local authorities have about their regions and localities and establish mechanisms to ensure sustained focus and action on the issue at regional and local level.  Moreover, it needs to recognise the impact that the collapse of local government funding has had on children’s services which has undoubtedly affected the poorest children most. It is crucial that a child poverty strategy ensures that local authorities are sufficiently resourced to meet the needs of the children living in their communities.

So, in answer to the question, yes, a national child poverty can and must deliver for all the UK’s children, no child wherever they live should be experiencing poverty, but this will only be achieved if we acknowledge and respond to their different circumstances. From our perspective as the London Child Poverty Network, we will use the coming weeks to champion as loudly as we can the right of the 700,000 children living in poverty in London to live in a poverty free city, a goal that we firmly believe is achievable if the political will is there to achieve it.

Yesterday Londoners went to the polls to elect their Mayor and members of the London Assembly. As we await the results, it is a good moment to pause and consider what should be at the top of the Mayor’s agenda from day one of their new term of office. From our perspective at London’s Child Poverty Network we are crystal clear that tackling the high levels of child poverty that continue to mar our city must be up there.  

The first crucial step towards bringing about a child poverty free London must be to work with those children, families and those organisations who support them in their communities to develop a strategic response to tackling the problem over the next four years. As a network we have been very supportive of Sadiq Khan’s move to guarantee free school meals for all primary school children in the city, which demonstrates that he gets the severity of the situation and the need to take bold action to address it – but we know that on its own, it is not enough. Now is the time to bring everyone to the table to decide what other actions need to be prioritised to address the systemic causes of poverty. And we are not the only ones saying so, just before the election period began back in March a cross-party group of London Assembly Members supported our call and published a report recommending that ‘[t]he Mayor, working in conjunction with local authorities and the voluntary sector, should publish a child poverty strategy for London in 2024-25.’ 

So, what are the key policies the strategy ought to contain?  Well, it is a fact that many of the levers for reducing child poverty lie beyond the direct powers of the Mayor of London; our broken social security system for example, which exacerbates rather than ameliorates child poverty rates by setting benefit payments at levels which are not sufficient to provide families with essentials; discriminates against larger families through the two-child limit; and imposes sanctions that push families into debt rather providing them with the scaffolding they need to escape poverty. These are not policies the Mayor can directly change, although they can add their strong voice to the chorus of cries for reform.  

Where the Mayor can take direct action though, they must. Child poverty in London is driven in large measure by the exorbitantly high costs of living in the city, housing first among them. Without access to decent housing, 84,940 children in our city are living in temporary accommodation, often deprived of basics such as access to a hot nutritious meal, a warm comfortable bed and space to play and learn. Whoever emerges victorious from the election count will already be well aware that sorting the housing crisis is going to be one of the biggest challenges they face and indeed all the main candidates have pledged to do so, in various ways, during their election campaigns.  What we are calling for now is for these efforts to also be a central plank of a new child poverty strategy for the city. By looking afresh as the problem through this lens we can ensure that the housing that is built truly meets the needs of young families living on low incomes and enables them to live in and contribute to our city, as part of our communities rather displaced to other more affordable parts of the country.  

Addressing high childcare costs must be part of a London child poverty strategy too. In our recent report Make Childcare Make Sense we looked at how sky-high childcare fees disproportionately affect families living on low incomes making it next to impossible for them to stay and/or progress in work and how an inclusive, affordable childcare system could vastly improve their and the children’s lives and allow them to contribute to London’s economic well-being. Getting the national childcare and early education policy framework right is essential to achieving this goal but so too is leadership and intervention at the London-wide level and our report sets out a series of recommendations for the Mayor and GLA.  

Faced with these high housing and childcare costs, another reason many families in London struggle to make ends meet is a lack of high-quality, well-paid work; in London, almost half of those in poverty are in employment and in 2022, 17% of Londoners in work were paid below the London Living Wage (Trust for London). Many of these also face the issue of insecure work. Recent research from the Living Wage Foundation has found that there are over 800,000 insecure jobs in London. Addressing these twin issues of low pay and insecure work must be another strand of a child poverty strategy.  

Finally, is also crucial that a strategy recognises the interaction between poverty and discrimination and has addressing it at its core. We cannot for example, ignore the fact that systemic racism and disablism in the education system often combined with the impact of poverty, is responsible for holding back some of our young people and preventing them from flourishing in the way they should. A child poverty strategy rooted in a human rights-based approach is key to achieving deep and lasting change.  

So, once they have had a chance to catch their breath, we hope our newly elected Mayor will engage with us as a network, draw on our members’ rich and diverse experience and work with us to map out and deliver a plan for achieving a child poverty free London; an achievable goal if we all harness our collective determination and belief to make it happen.