More than a fifth of British children born after 2013 spent at least half their childhood in poverty – a direct consequence of the welfare cuts imposed by Conservative governments that stripped tens of billions of pounds a year from the incomes of low-income families, a major new study by the University of Oxford has found.
The research, which tracks cohorts of children born in England, Wales and Scotland between 1991 and 2017 using data up to 2024, provides the first evidence that changes in benefits policy can be directly shown to influence how long children spend in poverty. Its conclusions are stark: Government choices pushed hundreds of thousands of children into sustained hardship, and the damage will be felt in their health, education and life chances for decades.
What the study found
The proportion of children born after 2013 who spent at least six of their first 11 years in hardship surged following a series of welfare cuts introduced by the Conservative governments of David Cameron and Theresa May. Long-term poverty – defined as experiencing poverty for more than half of their formative years – is now a defining feature of childhood for approximately 23% of British youngsters.
Study co-author Selcuk Beduk said the findings demonstrated that politics and policy choices, rather than economic inevitability, drove the increase in child poverty. “Our study shows that policy matters; when support for families on low incomes is stronger, long-term childhood poverty falls. When that support is reduced, more children are pushed into long-term poverty,” he said.
The University of Oxford researchers described the post-2013 austerity-era growth in children exposed to poverty for most of their formative years as a “significant social problem” that would cause long-term harm to their health, education and life chances.
The cuts that caused it
The welfare policies responsible for the surge in long-term child poverty are well documented. Masterminded primarily by former Chancellor George Osborne and former welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith, they included the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the two-child benefit limit, cuts to the generosity of universal credit, and years of benefit rate freezes.
By 2021, these policies had stripped approximately £37 billion a year from welfare spending – taking thousands of pounds a year out of the budgets of families at the bottom of the income distribution. The impact on children in those families was cumulative and severe.
Although the Conservative government did increase the minimum wage during this period, working on the assumption that employment was the primary route out of poverty, the Oxford study found the overall impact of higher wages was effectively outweighed by the scale of benefit cuts. Minimum wage increases had little effect on relative poverty rates among families with children.
The contrast with Labour’s record
The study places the austerity era in stark historical context by comparing it with the anti-poverty reforms introduced by Gordon Brown as Chancellor and then Prime Minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Under Brown’s drive to reduce child hardship, spending on child benefits and tax credits increased by approximately 60% over a seven-year period. The impact was dramatic and measurable: long-term childhood poverty levels that stood at 25% for children born in 1991 fell to 13% for children born in 1998-99 – the lowest point across the entire three-decade period covered by the research.
That progress was then reversed. The Conservative austerity cuts pushed child poverty back toward the levels from which Labour had lifted a generation of children, undoing years of sustained improvement in a much shorter period.
The study’s conclusion – that poverty at this scale and duration is not an economic inevitability but the result of deliberate policy choices – represents one of the most comprehensive pieces of evidence yet assembled for the argument that the austerity experiment had a deeply damaging and entirely foreseeable impact on Britain’s children.
What the current government is doing
The Labour government has taken some steps to begin reversing the austerity inheritance. Earlier this month, it abolished the two-child benefit limit – the policy that restricted families to universal credit support for only their first two children – as part of its long-term plan to tackle child poverty. The government estimates this will lift approximately 450,000 children out of poverty by the end of the decade.
Ministers have also raised the minimum wage, expanded eligibility for free school meals to all families on universal credit, and introduced free breakfast clubs. However, the benefit cap and the bedroom tax – two of the other major austerity-era policies identified in the study – remain in place.
Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “One of the finest achievements of the last Labour government was lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty and improving their life chances. The policies pursued by the Conservative party in their time in power saw too many children and families suffer. We can’t turn back the clock on that period, but this Labour government is turning the tide on these Tory decisions.”
He pointed to free breakfast clubs, extended free school meals and the end of the two-child cap as evidence of action, adding: “There’s lots done, but far more to do as we make sure poverty does not hold children back from achieving their full potential.”
Why this matters
The Oxford study matters beyond the statistics it generates. One of the persistent defences of austerity has been that its effects were diffuse, hard to isolate from other economic factors, and not directly attributable to specific policy choices. This research challenges that defence directly. By tracking individual cohorts of children across three decades and linking poverty exposure to specific policy changes, it provides an unusually clear line of causation from government decision to child outcome.
The children who grew up in poverty during the austerity years are still young. The consequences of growing up in sustained poverty – lower educational attainment, worse health outcomes, reduced earnings in adult life, higher rates of mental health problems – are not hypothetical future risks. They are processes already underway. The Oxford study documents the cause; the consequences are still unfolding.
What is clear is that Britain made a choice in 2013 and the years that followed, and the children who grew up in that era are still living with the consequences.
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