Child Poverty in Tory Britain Skyrockets to 33.4 Percent

Damning new research carried out by an independent poverty think tank has found that the policies enacted by successive Conservative governments since 2010 have resulted in child poverty rising to almost their highest levels since records began–with 1 in every 3 children in Tory Britain now estimated to live below the poverty line.

Research from the Resolution Foundation’s ‘nowcast’ series—a statistical extrapolation and adjustment method that regularly predicts forthcoming figures—has revealed that child poverty in Britain has risen by a staggering 3.1% in the last year alone, from 30.3% of all children in the country living below the poverty line, up to 33.4% living below it now, Evolvepolitics reported.

The startling figures have exposed the fact that Conservative policies since 2010 have now led to the almost entire reversal of gains made by the last Labor government in drastically cutting the levels of child poverty in Britain. From 1997 until 2010 when Labor were in charge, the Resolution Foundation research shows that the rate of child poverty dropped by around 8%–from almost 35% when John Major was defeated by Labor in 1997, to around 27% when the coalition government came to power in 2010.

However, since the Tories got their hands on the levers of power 2010, the level of child poverty has skyrocketed back up, and it shows no signs of abating:

This damning figure is estimated to have risen in part due to the incomes of the poorest third of people having plummeting during 2017-18, as well as a result of Tory cuts to benefits such as tax credits.

The Resolution Foundation’s Living Standards Audit also estimates that the last Labor government did in fact hit their pledge to ‘cut child poverty in half’, despite official figures showing they fell short by 600,000.

Child poverty during the 2000s is estimated to have fallen far more quickly than previously thought, dropping from around 3 million children to around 1.6 million during Labor’s reign. More than a quarter of children in Manchester are living in extreme poverty. And in an even more damning indictment of this current Tory government’s policies, the think tank’s latest research suggests that child poverty has now actually been rising at double the rate that official Tory figures show since 2011.