Child Poverty

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this debate. It is very timely in recognising the ongoing challenges that families in this country face, including issues around inflation, the reduction in the number of jobs available and the increase in unemployment, as well as the need to tackle the strategic challenges around NEETs. While we are talking about children today, the increase in youth employment really worries me about the future of our country.

I agree with the noble Baroness on one issue, and that is childcare. I lost this argument with other Ministers when I was in government, but we need to look very carefully to try to increase significantly the number of child carers—not necessarily nurseries—to help people get into and stay in work, and to expand the number of hours they have. It is all well and good having 38 weeks a year when the schools are sitting, but that does not help when someone still has that job in the summer or over Christmas. They are the sort of strategic challenges that we need to face.

I am very proud of my three years at the DWP. Working with my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, we did a lot of good to try to help people get out of poverty. One of the battles I had was about the definition of poverty. The British Social Attitudes survey is very clear that people do not agree that getting 60% of the median income automatically means that someone is poor—as the noble Baroness said, they prefer the concept of deeper poverty. Lots of our big organisations will continue to try to use relative poverty as the only way to consider the definition. I was slightly bemused that, during Covid, relative poverty fell—it did so because it is a statistic—but it did not reflect how people felt.

As we learned in the message that today’s DWP Secretary of State exchanged with Lord Mandelson—I think that is still what he is called—too many MPs are asking what taxes can be put up to pay for more benefits for others. He said that they are asking the wrong questions, and he was right to do so. That is why I was somewhat concerned about the child poverty strategy, as it seemed to continue to focus on how more cash benefits or other benefits would address the statistical change but not the strategic change.

I think that 60% of the median income last year was £22,370. It is no surprise that a lot more single-parent homes are in relative poverty. We had a debate the other week about child maintenance; I do not want to rehearse all that, but I will continue to make one plea. For those parents—mainly men—who are not contributing to their children’s income, because they are either on benefits or just not paying anything, we need to make sure that they are a top priority in their local job centre when it comes to getting a job. I really need to stress that. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, only 29% of the population was happy to increase taxes in order to do that, yet that is exactly what has happened with removing the two-child benefit cap.

I am conscious that, for many Peers, this has been a long-term campaign, and I accept that they disagreed with what we did. But we did that with a purpose of reflecting that the welfare system is intended to be a hand-up and to support people desperately in need. Yet, we are now in a situation where, due to other factors, everybody on universal credit who has children gets free school meals. That is difficult when there are 220,000 households with children on universal credit are actually getting over £40,000 in household income. It is difficult when the warm home discount has been expanded to every recipient of universal credit. It actually means that the smaller cohort that used to get the money, using more energy and more with children, now get less discount in cash terms as a consequence.

There are all these little changes start to happen, and all these extra things mean that, as used to happen with tax credits, you would be almost insane to work a minute more than 16 hours per week, unless you work full-time, because you would lose money. Now, families are, very carefully and perfectly rationally, adjusting their hours and not moving to full-time work, because they will lose out. These are strategic problems that we need to face as a country.

Finally, debt is a real challenge. I give credit to John Glen in the last Government, who introduced the breathing space approach. It was a good initiative, and I hope that it gets extended even further. One thing that happened in the child poverty strategy is that debt advice will be included in neighbourhood health as an approach to helping people. In the recently published framework, there is no mention of debt advice services to be commissioned. I hope that the Minister can go back to health and think about that.

I think that this House is united that we desperately want fewer children in poverty—ideally, we want no child in poverty but, given those statistics, there almost certainly will be. But let us do our best to make sure that every child has the best opportunity going forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.