Poorer and shorter: How child poverty is blighting UK’s minors

Every time grey-haired politicians in the UK decide to further cut welfare spending in the name of balancing the budget books, children end up being the worst victims of their decisions.

Kids growing up in the UK today are worse off than those of yesteryear in more ways than one: they’re poorer, shorter in height and likely to die an early death.

“Increased poverty, more destitution and the effects of ongoing austerity are the clear culprits,” says Danny Dorling, professor of geography at the University of Oxford.

Child poverty, which refers to kids from families with an income below 60 percent of the national average, is particularly acute in the UK.

UN data shows the rise in child poverty in the UK during recent years has been the steepest among the 43 member-nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The increase in child poverty during a seven-year period—from 2012-2014 to 2019-2021—was about 20 per cent. As a result, “many more” British children lived in poor households in 2021 than a decade earlier.

Analysts say Britain needs to significantly increase its expenditure on child and family benefits relative to the size of its economy if it wants to catch up with the rest of the developed world.

More than 69 million children live in poverty in the 40 richest countries of the world. These children in poor households have “much reduced chances” of completing a good education and are likely to live eight to nine fewer years than a person born to a well-off family.

Dorling says child poverty has fallen in large parts of Eastern Europe—by as much as one-third—in a short span of seven years.

This is despite the fact that economic indicators for Eastern European countries have traditionally been worse than those for Western Europe, which registered rapid development after World War II.

However, poverty has risen so sharply in the UK that its poorest 20 percent of households are currently worse off than the families belonging to the comparable income bracket in “most of Eastern Europe”.

“For many people in the UK, this will come as a surprise. Some will refuse to believe it can be this bad,” he says.

In particular, child poverty rates among minority ethnic groups—Bangladeshi, Black, Chinese and Pakistani—are twice as high as for children defined as White British.

Shorter in height

Children in the UK are getting shorter in height because of poor nutrition and rising poverty.

The average height of children aged five declined from 2013 to 2020, with experts saying that the cost-of-living crisis in the UK beginning in 2021 has made the situation even worse.

Quoting data from the Office for National Statistics, a report in The Independent said that babies born in 2022 will enjoy a year less of good health than babies born a decade ago.

A YouGov survey by the Food Foundation, a food poverty charity, found that in June and July of 2024, 13.6 percent of UK households were “food insecure”, meaning they either ate less or went a day without eating because they couldn’t access or afford food.

“The UK in 2024 demonstrates to the world what living with high inequality means in a once affluent country. It means a few are using up far more resources than the vast majority of other children, such as having access to many more school teachers… better food, better shelter, more warmth, more toys, better material everything,” says Dorling.