Child poverty costs local authorities hundreds of millions of pounds a year

Produced by Donald Hirsch of Loughborough University on behalf of the charity, it shows the impact of welfare reforms, such as changes to child tax credit and the introduction of the Universal Credit, on child poverty levels locally.

The report, ‘Local authorities and child poverty: balancing threats with opportunities’, launched today at a CPAG conference, estimates the total amount of money that is ‘lost’ in local authorities due to child poverty.

Each child living below the poverty line is estimated to cost around £10,861.42 annually.

According to the data, Birmingham, where 84,114 children live in poverty, spends £914m annually, while child poverty costs Manchester £446m and Glasgow City £395m a year.

In contrast, Rutland, the smallest county in England, spends just £4m annually.

The report also suggests what local authorities can do to reduce the effects of child poverty, such as running food banks, extending free school meals, offering financial advice and joining up with children’s centres and schools.

It concludes by making a number of recommendations to Government, including:

• understanding the impact of reforms on children;

• committing to an independent review of welfare reforms, to ensure the programme works as intended and the impact on families is not more extensive than predicted;

• meet frontline staff supporting affected families;

• develop a mechanism for collating and using foodbank statistics to help inform more useful policy.

Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said, 'We always put our children first in family life, and it’s right that we should do so in our local communities too. Every council is required by law to have a local child poverty strategy, and the good news is that reducing child poverty benefits everyone by cutting the costs to local authority services and boosting the local economy through improved skills and qualifications for school leavers.

'Our new report will help guide authorities on the challenges they face and the actions they can take to protect families in their area against poverty, and many residents will be shocked to hear that so many local children are living in poverty. We hope that local campaigners will be able to use our report to encourage their local councillors to do more to end child poverty in their area and support those families facing the greatest hardship.'