Children living in poverty - the UK map makes for grim reading
MORE THAN HALF OF CHILDREN NOW LIVING IN POVERTY IN SOME PARTS OF THE UK*
The End Child Poverty coalition has today published figures providing a new Child Poverty map of the UK.
The new figures reveal that there are now constituencies within the UK where more than half of children are growing up in poverty - compared to one in ten, in the areas with the lowest child poverty rates.
The figures also show that some of the most deprived areas of the UK have seen the biggest increases in child poverty since the coalition's last local child poverty figures for December 2015 and demonstrate the growing crisis of child poverty in the UK.
As price rises risk pushing ever larger numbers of children below the poverty line, the coalition is calling on the Chancellor to end the freeze on children's benefits - currently in place until the end of the decade - so that families no longer see living standards squeezed as prices rise.
Since the introduction of the benefit freeze, the coalition of charities, has warned that as prices rise, low income families would find it increasingly hard to pay for the same basic essentials.
'It is scandalous that a child born in some parts of the UK now has a greater chance of growing up in poverty, than being in a family above the breadline', said Sam Royston, Chair of End Child Poverty and Director of Policy and Research at the Children's Society. 'There can be little doubt that the Government's policy of maintaining the benefits freeze despite rising prices is a major contributor to the emerging child poverty crisis.'
Whilst significantly less than the London, Birmingham and Manchester constituencies, the figures for the East Suffolk and Ipswich constituencies still make for distressing reading and register little change or slight increase since 2015.
Waveney - 5887 children in poverty (27.9%), Suffolk Coastal 3873 children (22.1%) Ipswich 7022 children (27.8%)
Lib Dem Education spokesperson Layla Moran MP said:
This is an appalling indictment of a Tory Party that are failing to protect the most vulnerable in society.
The gulf between children born in the richest and poorest families is widening, but Theresa May is more preoccupied with the gulf in her cabinet over Brexit. When we fail our children like this we fail as a society
Conservative spokeperson added: " our ( Lib Dem) £2.5bn pupil premium programme is supporting two million disadvantaged schoolchildren across the country."
*Compilation of child poverty local indicators, update to September 2017 (Households are living in poverty if their household income (adjusted to account for household size) is less than 60% of the average. All poverty rates are calculated on or after household costs basis.
Report authors: Laura Valadez-Martinez and Donald Hirsch, Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University