Child Poverty

There are various ways of defining poverty and no single definition is universally accepted. In the UK, the headline measures are based on household income although since 2010 Ministers have criticised these as failing to capture the reality of poverty and leading to skewed policy responses (discussed further in section 2).

This section provides statistics on the number of children in poverty defined in terms of low household income. It also provides statistics on the ‘life chances’ indicators in the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016: children in workless households and educational attainment at age 16.

More detailed discussion of the statistics is provided in Library briefing paper, Poverty in the UK: statistics