The UK government recently unveiled its child poverty strategy, with the removal of the two-child limit on benefits payments as the centrepiece.

What’s sobering is how desperately the UK needs a strategy to address child poverty. At the end of 2024, four and a half million children – 31% of all UK children – were in relative poverty, meaning that they live in households earning less than 60% of the UK’s median income.

And 18% of all children were growing up in food-insecure households, without consistent access to nutritious food.

Ladywell, in Birmingham, has the highest levels, with 62% of children living in relative poverty. In some areas of Leeds, London, Bradford, Manchester and Liverpool over half of children live in poverty. Nearly half of Asian British and Black British children are in poverty, as are 43% of children in single-parent families.

This problem isn’t limited to the UK. Research by........

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