The colour of poverty: Black and brown children are at the sharp end of the crisis
Policies to tackle child poverty that don’t acknowledge the impact of race are simply not going to cut it.
We are in the grip of a shameful crisis that has been allowed to impact society’s most vulnerable for far too long. In the year to April 2024, 4.5 million children were in poverty, an increase of 100,000 from the previous year. That’s 31 per cent of UK children. Inexcusable figures, no matter how you slice them. But even peering just slightly closer at those numbers tells you this emergency is not being felt equally.
Child poverty remains deeply stratified along racial lines. While nearly one in three UK children now live in poverty, the burden falls much more heavily on Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Black, and Asian families. A raft of policy commitments from the government – from expanding family support hubs with the new Best Start programme, to the (delayed) creation of a Child Poverty Taskforce – has the potential to bring meaningful change, but only if policymakers are willing to confront how race influences a child’s start in life, and do so unflinchingly.
When we talk about child poverty – kids going to school hungry, living in mouldy, overcrowded homes, cancelled Christmas’s and birthdays, desperate parents choosing between heating and eating – we are overwhelmingly talking about Black and brown children, and yet that part of the conversation is frequently brushed aside. But ignoring the specifics of exactly who is feeling the full, brutal force of poverty in this country is further failing the children in most desperate need.
The more explicit we are in defining the problem, the better our chance at devising efficient solutions that are genuinely effective in the communities that need them the most. This is also a view held by Yasmin Ibison, senior policy advisor at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [JRF].
“There is a real gap when it comes to an intersectional view of poverty, and who is experiencing that poverty,” she tells The Lead.
“In our analysis, when we look at factors that usually protect families from poverty – things like moving into full-time work, or more secure work – these things aren’t protecting Bangladeshi, Black African, and Pakistani families to the same extent. Why are the things that protect white households not translating to these minority ethnic households? It makes us ask, for example, what is the role of racism? What is the role of discrimination in the labour market?”
“Black and brown children in the UK are poorer because their families are facing a brutal obstacle course of entrenched barriers to success.”
According to the latest JRF report – the first published under the new Labour government – around half of children in Bangladeshi and Black African households experience very deep poverty in at least one year out of four. More than one in eight children in Bangladeshi households (13 per cent) live in “persistent very deep poverty”, making them more than four times more likely to be in deep poverty than white children. Rates of deep poverty are also very high among children in Black African (10 per cent) and Pakistani households (9 per cent).
The report also found minority ethnic groups with higher rates of poverty tended to also have higher rates of very deep and of persistent poverty. The report authors define “destitution” as the “deepest and most damaging form of poverty” where people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022, including around one million children. These figures have more than doubled since 2017.
Stats can only tell us so much
Reading reports like this, the words can begin to lose meaning. It’s easy to become desensitised by stats and numbers that tidy the unpalatable realities of poverty into neat little graphs. But these figures should leave us all horrified and furious. They are not just numbers. They represent entire childhoods derailed by systemic inequalities that are continually going unaddressed.
“We are one of the richest countries in the world, it’s absolutely abhorrent that we have such high poverty levels and deep poverty levels as well,” Ibison tells The Lead.
For Ibison, the stats can only tell us so much. She points to the flawed system of ethnic categorisation, and how much analysis can be missed when we insist on flattening multifaceted groups of people.
“‘Black African’ – How many countries are there in Africa? There’s a wealth of deep and rich experiences within ethnic groups that are categorised the same,” she says. “That can make it hard to know what’s really going on because we’re not taking into consideration things like migration histories, previous experiences in your home country, the economic conditions when you arrived.
“How are we bringing together all of these different lenses to begin to understand the true picture of poverty? We need to take a more considered, layered approach to build a picture that is going to be more complicated than a singular stat can tell us.”
Racial disparities are central to the UK’s child poverty crisis – you could go as far as to say they define it. But when the government unveiled its Child Poverty Taskforce earlier this year, there was no mention of racial inequality in its core brief. In fact, most national policies are not specifically tailored to address the challenges that are unique to ethnically minoritised children.
The free school meals expansion and the implementation of family hubs, both focus on income or location, but don’t explicitly address the higher poverty rates that exist in different ethnic groups.
“Some of what we are seeing is being driven by policy,” explains Yasmin. She’s referring to the two-child benefit cap which is disproportionately impacting ethnic minority families who tend to live in households with higher numbers of children. The government’s delay in committing to ending the policy has driven these families further into poverty. There are, Ibison says, other policy reforms or reversals that the government could undertake with relative ease that would make an instant difference to children and families living in poverty today: “It is things like ensuring the basic rate of Universal Credit is covering the essentials – heating, food, shelter, transport. It is linking housing allowance to local rent rates so people can afford to pay their rent.
“It’s also reforming No Recourse to Public Funds [NRPF], which impacts Black and brown families disproportionately as, while the data isn’t great, our assumption is that many of these families have NRPF on their visa restrictions, which blocks them from getting various forms of support.”
What is needed, for starters, is a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the bigger picture. Systemic racism – experienced across education, housing, immigration policy, and healthcare – compounds and intensifies economic hardship. Black and brown children in the UK are poorer because their families are facing a brutal obstacle course of entrenched barriers to success. Any policies to tackle poverty must start with this perspective, and build solutions that aim to actively address racial disparity, rather than treating it like an inconvenient or anomalous footnote.
“It’s vital to understand who we are talking about and humanising these stories,” says Ibison. “We have to make it clear who is disproportionately going without, and why.
“When people think of poverty, they often think of countries in the world, not the UK. But this is happening here on our home soil, to people who we live near, in our own communities. It’s important to emphasise the immediacy. This is happening to children right now.”■
About the author: Natalie Morris is our Senior Editor here at The Lead. Elsewhere, she is a freelance writer, journalist and host covering social justice, inequality, health and community, writing in the Guardian, the Independent, Metro, Grazia, Stylist, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and more. She’s the author of Mixed/Other and co-author of Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s memoir about race in the pop industry – Believe.
The Lead is campaigning to end child poverty. Last week, our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald wrote about child poverty and Westminster’s shameful failure to tackle the crisis. We cannot allow our most vulnerable members of society to be treated with such disdain – the government must take decisive action, now. Subscribe to join our campaign, and you can expect more nuanced journalism that gets to the heart of the crisis, and keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming petition to put your name to the cause.
Sorry but I hate to tell you this. We white true english, scots, irish and welsh are now the minority in our own country. We have allowed foreigners to enforce "No whites " areas in our country. So, don´t talk to me about racism. We are the ones being reacially discriminate against.