What Jane* wants most is to be able to give her daughter a treat.
“My daughter is five and it could be something as simple as her asking to go to the shop and get an ice cream, and I feel like a bad parent because I have to say ‘No, mummy’s got no pennies’.”
Even the pennies have been spent on meeting her family’s basic needs, scraping together 2p and 5p coins to buy a bag of potatoes. The £1400 a month she gets through Universal Credit is just not enough.
There’s no way to explain what poverty means to a little girl who only knows that her mum doesn’t get her the same things other children do. Who thinks her mum isn’t eating dinner because she had something to eat earlier. Who has a mum determined not to burden her with the reality of their struggle.
Jane also wants one day when she isn’t stressed and worried about how to provide for her daughter, lying awake at night crying, having to choose between heating and eating – but that thought came second to wanting to give her child the small things that a lot of people take for granted.
Poverty can be a loaded term, that comes with a lot of stigma. It’s also not easily definable as any one thing, or capable of being reduced to a single figure. Relative income level gives a good indication, and its major flaw is that sometimes children in households above whatever threshold is defined as ‘low’ still experience poverty.
Leading anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation defines poverty as “when a person’s resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet their minimum needs (including social participation)”.
As the cost of living increases but benefit caps and other factors keep Universal Credit from rising in line with this, even basic needs become harder for people to meet – none more so than families.
Children living in poverty isn’t a new problem, but over the past decade it has definitely got worse. Across the UK between 2015 and 2024 numbers of children under the age of 16 in relative low-income households rose by 5.3% to 21.8% total.
That’s over 2.7 million children now living in poverty.
In Greater Manchester the story is worse. Over the past ten years to 2024 the number of children in poverty across the local authorities that make up the GMCA has risen from 22.0% to 30.4%. In total 188,540 children were estimated to live in poverty in the city-region in 2024 – and that’s the low estimate.
The figures used throughout this article are even more conservative than the reality, as they are based on household income before housing costs. When rent or mortgage payments are subtracted, the number of children who live in poverty becomes much higher.
According to the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), when just £20 per week was added to social security benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021, it was enough to reduce the number of children in low-income households. When this was removed, the number of children in poverty started climbing again.
When you compare all the regions in the UK, the difference even small amounts can make is apparent.
Between 2023 and 2024 the only UK region where child poverty fell was Scotland, where 1.5% less children were in low-income households. This fall is attributed to the Scottish Child Payment, which while introduced in 2021, in 2022 was increased to £25 per week per child and extended to all children under 16 living in low-income families.
Scotland also had the second lowest child poverty rate in the whole of the UK in 2024, 16.3%; only the South East was lower with 14.5%. In contrast the North West had the fourth highest proportion of children in poverty, 27.8%, which also significantly higher than the national proportion of 21.8%.
For many people that feeling of living in crisis during the pandemic becomes more distant every day, for parents reliant on social security losing everything is a constant and immediate concern.
Take Sandra*, a single mother. She has three children aged 8, 13, and 16 and her two youngest have additional needs. She has no other family to fall back on, and when one of her children outgrows their shoes it can derail the food budget for months.
One of her children is autistic and relies on a toy ball for comfort: “It could be something as simple as his ball popping, and I can’t be like ‘I’ll go and get you one tomorrow’ I have to tell him to wait.”
And Claire*, who says when she gets winter coats she has to size up: “It might look like a bin bag on them at first, but they eventually grow into it.”
She hopes they will last at last as long as possible, because even on the coldest days she will still have to walk to get anywhere with her children as the £2 bus fare cap is still too high when she only gets £800 a month.
But she also worries that other children will bully hers for not having the same things or having less, or that she’ll get dirty looks for using a calculator to figure out down to the penny what her shopping costs in the supermarket.
There are children living like this in every Greater Manchester ward, but the rate can vary wildly. In 2024 Coldhurst, in Oldham, had the highest proportion at 65.7% of children. Timperley, in Trafford, had the lowest proportion, only 3.4%.
Oldham also has the highest level of difference when you compare the ward in the borough with the least children in poverty to the one with the most. In Saddleworth South an estimated 9.2% of children live in poverty, which is a difference of 56.5% compared to Coldhurst. It’s a stark inequality.
When I talk to Jane, Sandra and Claire, what is clear is that being reliant on council housing and universal credit is not an easy way out – and they don’t want anyone to think that it is. They desperately want to work and give their families more, and all have the skills to do so.
But their biggest barrier to providing for their children is the fact that they have them. Employers have no obligation to facilitate the hours and flexibility that allow parents to meet their caring responsibilities.
Sandra says even if she got offered a job right now at £500 a week, it wouldn’t work because of childcare costs, which would be over £300 a week.
It’s not surprising then that when CPAG list the solutions to child poverty, policies to ensure parents can choose the right balance of work and care for their families comes second only to providing enough financial support in the first place.
However, these kinds of solutions are not coming soon enough to deal with the immediate crises children and families face, and they have been fighting an uphill battle.
The 2010 Child Poverty Act passed under a Labour government required them to reduce the number of children in relative low-income families to below 10% by 2020/21. But after the Conservatives came to power that same year, it was reduced to an ‘aspiration not a pledge’. In 2016 the Welfare Reform and Work Act scrapped the legally binding targets on child poverty reduction and even removed the term ‘child poverty’ from legislation.
The newest Labour government are currently working on a child poverty strategy to be released imminently, and CPAG says the two most important elements for its effectiveness will be setting binding targets for the short, medium and long term; and eliminating the two-child limit and the benefit cap.
But what national policy might become has little relevance to the immediate lived reality of children and families in poverty.
All the women I interviewed said that receiving support from a local charity, SPARK Oldham, has helped with some things, but that overall financially things are only getting worse. Food prices are going up and benefits aren’t, and it only takes one unexpected gas bill to leave their children at risk of going hungry.
But SPARK has paid for Jane’s daughter to see the Christmas pantomime with the other little girls; bought Sandra what she needs to give her children the classic summer BBQ experience; and given Claire, a self-professed “loner”, something as simple as friends who don’t judge her for how she has to live.
It’s also given the three women’s children free activities during half terms, so that when they go back to school they can join in conversations about what everyone did on their holidays and not feel even more isolated from their peers.
The women all tell me that a small thing like being able to drop in, have a cup of tea, and briefly leave their worries on the doorstep can be what gets them through the day and keep them able to care for their children.
Kim Rogers, founder of SPARK, says: “I think the difficulty is with the system, it’s not based on needs, it’s one shoe fits all – I feel that’s what needs to be looked at.
“Funding is a massive issue.
“We have an amazing community who do give, but we want to try and do more because more people are struggling than ever.”
She highlights that their approach is about bringing people together to help provide what different families actually need, from cooking classes to just enough clothes for their child.
Kim also stressed that: “There is definitely hope.
“We’re trying to create a future not only for the people in front of us, but the community as well.”
*The three mothers I interviewed about their lived experience of poverty wished to remain anonymous.
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