Child Poverty

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all the organisations that provided briefings on this crucial subject. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Lister on securing this debate and pay tribute to her for the considerable and tireless work she has done in this area over, frankly, years. The impacts of child and family poverty are many. Tackling it is the morally and politically right thing to do for children and their families now and in the future, as well as for our public services and the wider economy. Why is that? Poverty not only blights the lives of children; it can determine their future in a wholly negative way. They do less well at school, they are likely to have much poorer health—as we have heard in detail—and, of course, they often die at a younger age than their better-off peers. Frankly, that is a disgrace in what is, after all, still a rich country.

On education, we know that the figure of 4.5 million children is the equivalent of something like eight to 10 in every class of 30, although child poverty is not equally in evidence in all schools or, indeed, in all areas nationally. Shamefully, as I think we have already heard, seven in 10 children who live in poverty come from a family where at least one person is working—I am sure we will hear more of that later. We know that, even in their early years, children who live in poverty are over 4.5 months behind their better-off peers, and this grows to approaching two years by the time they reach GCSEs, as recorded by the Sutton Trust and Teach First. It is no surprise, then, that four in five teachers report seeing children who are too fatigued and hungry to learn. Four in five teachers have bought food for hungry pupils, paying for this out of their own pockets.

Of course, breakfast clubs are very welcome. The rollout of free school meals to families on universal credit from September 2026 is also very welcome, although I believe that universal free school meals would do even more for us as a society. Particularly welcome is the raising of the two-child limit from April this year. However, even if these elements are in place, over 4 million children will still be living in poverty, even according to government figures.

So the challenge remains enormous. The Government are right to be ambitious about facing and rising to this challenge. Some steps that the Government could and should take include creating a child poverty unit to hold everyone across government to legally binding poverty reduction targets, and—as others have referenced—removing the benefit cap, which the National Education Union calculates would lift 300,000 children out of deep poverty, with minimal effects on work incentives.

In this country we pride ourselves on the fact that state school education is free. However, there is a cost for every child at school. Even with the changes in relation to the cost of school uniforms in England, families still face bills of over £300 a year for a primary school child’s uniform and over £400 a year for a secondary school pupil’s uniform. With other school-related costs—trips; curriculum resources in some subjects often leading to exclusion of the less well-off child; instrumental tuition, again, not being available to poorer children; and materials needed for home study and homework—families can find themselves paying over £1,000 a year per primary school child and approximately £2,300 for a secondary school pupil.

This has been ongoing for a very long time. I know that when I was at the National Union of Teachers, we worked with the Child Poverty Action Group on exactly this. Education is not free. These are not insignificant costs. While schools will seek to adopt a human rights- and poverty-sensitive approach, we all know that there is no spare cash in school budgets to provide any actual help. Many of us applaud the ambition to reduce child poverty—

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

The noble Baroness is making an interesting point, but of course the pupil premium is a source of funding. I wonder whether, based on what she has just been saying, that schools should think more about taking an element of the pupil premium, so that those young children are not excluded.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for the intervention. I am sure that the pupil premium is being used as best as it possibly can be in every school. Often schools are having to top up their pupil premium because, frankly, there is not enough money in it, but I welcome the intervention.

Many of us applaud the ambition to reduce child poverty and clearly will do as much as we possibly can to monitor what I hope will be the Government’s success in this.