Child poverty is racialised – we won't end the crisis until this is acknowledged
At the National Energy Action conference, fuel poverty’s human cost was clear. Those shaping policy must confront who is being hit hardest.
Arriving in Newcastle for the National Energy Action Conference, February’s cold cut through coats and scarves, with icy rain driven sideways by the wind. It was the kind of cold that embeds itself in your bones. A fitting reminder that for millions of families across the UK, discomfort like this isn’t just a fleeting encounter with the elements – it’s constant and inescapable.
At the charity’s annual fuel poverty conference, the profound inequalities at the heart of the child poverty crisis were laid bare. During the session where I was speaking, families and frontline workers shared first-hand accounts of living through the energy crisis: The little boy sleeping in his coat and trying to believe doing homework by candlelight is a game; the mother whose autistic teenage son is driven to self-harm because of the stress.
Shaliyah, a Black single mother of two boys with asthma, told of the shame and fear that plagued her every time the heating and electricity cut out in her house: “At winter time I never, ever, switched my heating on, simply because the bills are way too high.”
“They did get ill quite a lot during the winter time,” she said of her two children, both under five-years-old, “and they’d have to rely on their asthma pumps.”
These stories are horrific, emotional, and all too familiar, driven by long-term, unresolved structural failures. And, as I made clear in my conference speech, they are also deeply stratified along racial lines.
Last year, I wrote about a crisis within a crisis – the disproportionate impact of poverty on Black and brown children in the UK. In 2026, that unequal picture remains largely unchanged. According to new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, around 18 per cent of people in white-headed households live in poverty, but for Bangladeshi households, the figure is over 50 per cent. For Pakistani households, close to half. For many Black and Asian families, poverty rates are more than double those of white households.
When we look at deep and persistent poverty – the kind that lasts year after year, not just through temporary shocks – the disparities widen further. Children in Bangladeshi and Pakistani households are around five times more likely than white children to be living in very deep poverty. These are not marginal gaps, they are vast inequalities produced by systems that consistently fail the same communities.
There are signs of progress. The decision to scrap the two-child benefit cap from April 2026 will lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, benefiting larger families from ethnic minority backgrounds. Labour’s Warm Homes Plan also presents a critical opportunity to properly insulate homes, and lift a million households out of fuel poverty.
But without explicit focus on race and inequality, policies risk reproducing the very gaps they aim to close. Current child poverty strategies still assume universal solutions will benefit everyone equally, when the evidence tells us they don’t.
Racialised families are navigating an entirely different terrain. They are more likely to face discrimination in the labour market, to be stuck in low-paid or insecure work, and to live in overcrowded or poorly insulated housing. They are also more exposed to a social security system that no longer covers the cost of essentials. And work does not protect families equally – full-time employment does not guarantee security for Black and brown families in the same way it does for many white families.
What’s needed are policies designed with the communities most affected. We must also work to close the stark data gaps – monitoring child poverty reduction by ethnicity, and acting on what the numbers tell us. We still don’t know for certain how many children from families with no recourse to public funds [NRPF] are living in poverty.
At breakfast the morning after the conference, people who have been working in the sector for 25 years approached me to say they had never considered these disparities. Child poverty is not inevitable, but it won’t be fixed unless these problems are made visible to the people who can actually effect change.
If this Labour government is serious about ending child poverty, it must be brave enough to be specific about who is being left behind, and build solutions that can actually reach them.■
About the author: Natalie Morris is our National Editor here at The Lead. Elsewhere, she is a freelance writer, author, and host covering social justice, inequality, health and community.
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