BRITAIN'S SHAME

With 4.5 million children in the UK now living in poverty, Terri White speaks to those in the teeth of a crisis and argues that Labour is taulinigt to live up to its promise of change’

- Terri White

It's been a fairly average few weeks for child poverty headlines in the UK, in that there have been many, and they've been brutal. A national crisis rolling on through 2025, the bodies of our poorest children falling beneath its wheels.

This week, findings from a research laboratory set up by Sarah and Gordon Brown confirmed that deprivation impacts a baby’s brain development. Last week, it was announced that 30,000 British children have been pushed into poverty since the election by the two-child limit. The week before: a new record was set, with 4.5 million children now living in poverty in the UK.

It's not quite what we were promised. Not in the Labour manifesto – where there was a specific pledge to reduce child poverty – or on the campaign posters the party shared online that pitched their future for our country. The most emotive of which depicted a family flanked by tall wheatgrass, one child on the dad’s shoulders, a second backlit by the sinking, lateafternoon sun, and the words: “Change will only happen if you vote for it.”

Nine months on, that promised powder-blue-sky future has dissolved into fantasy land, with a Labour government now predicted to deliver an even bigger record: 4.8 million children living in poverty by the end of their first parliamentary term (which led Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group to comment, “Record levels of kids living in poverty isn’t the change people voted for.”)

It would certainly represent an extraordinary failure of this government, one that to date, hasn’t impressed with their work on the crisis. “Disappointingly, the UK government has not yet shown the level of political ambition and commitment needed to match the scale of the challenge,” Joanna Barrett, associate head of policy at the NSPCC, tells The Independent.